VO BOSS

When Danielle Famble traded the bright lights of musical theater for the voiceover booth, she didn't just change careers—she embodied the essence of a true entrepreneur. Grab your headphones and join the BOSS, Anne Ganguzza, as we navigate through Danielle's remarkable journey, discussing how her roots in musical theater have equipped her with a unique resilience and CEO mindset for her flourishing voiceover career. From emotional trials to asserting her worth in the industry, her story is a masterclass in transforming her performing arts discipline into a voiceover triumph. We discuss the intricacies of a successful business mindset, emphasizing the need for mentorship, community, and the wisdom of collective experience. We uncover the secrets behind tracking progress, efficiency, and how a transparent approach to finances can empower artists, especially women and women of color, helping them to assert their worth and command the rates they deserve. 00:01 - Intro (Announcement) It's time to take your business to the next level, the boss level. These are the premier business owner strategies and successes being utilized by the industry's top talent today. Rock your business like a boss a VO boss. Now let's welcome your host, Anne Ganguzza. 00:19 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Hey, hey everyone, welcome to the VO Boss Podcast. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzza, and today I am really excited to bring on a very special guest and Boss Danielle Famble. Danielle is a full-time voice actor with a performing background in musical theater and on TV, and transitioned from the stage to the booth in 2019. And since that time, she has voiced for amazing brands like Google, pepsi, etsy, prudential Hertz, the US Army and more, and she recently presented this almost viral breakout presentation at VO Atlanta, which I heard nothing but amazing things about, about how to build your business like a CEO With a CEO mindset. It was very, very well received and I am so excited to talk to her today about that CEO mindset. Danielle, thanks so much for joining us. 01:12 - Danielle Famble (Host) Hey, thanks for having me, anne, this is fun. 01:14 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yeah. So let's talk a little bit first about your career, because I feel like anybody that transitions into the career voiceover has to have an entrepreneurial mindset to begin with. Transitions into the career of voiceover has to have an entrepreneurial mindset to begin with, and so that really works well with being a boss. So tell us a little bit about your career and how you went from musical theater and are you still singing, I hope into voiceover. 01:37 - Danielle Famble (Host) Well, I grew up actually, I'm from Texas originally and my family, my parents, my grandparents they were entrepreneurial. My mom and dad had a water store. They sold water in the 90s Crazy. 01:50 Everybody needs it, right, everybody needs it. So they were good and my grandparents had like an afterschool snack truck. So I grew up around businesses and seeing my family, my parents, running businesses, and I'm also a middle child, so I love attention, I guess is the polite way to say it. So I always grew up, you know, singing in church or performing in school. So it was sort of a natural progression for me to go to school for musical theater, majoring in classical music and minoring in theater, and I knew, based on a trip coming to New York City in high school, that I wanted to do musical theater and move here. 02:31 So for me, I just I don't know I had this entrepreneurial background with my parents and my family and loving to perform, and realizing it took a while, but realizing, especially moving to New York, that this is a business and you have to market yourself and learn and do all the things that you need to do to run a business. 02:51 So my transition really was from doing musical theater, I performed on cruise ships and performed, you know, all over the country at theme parks and regional theaters, and then in 2020, the pandemic happened and I had this background of acting and performing, but I really wanted to figure out how I could make that background work with voiceover. So that's when I transitioned from like 2019 up to 2020, made that transition to voiceover and realized that my entrepreneurial background really helped because, unlike being on the stage for me anyway, I was able to look at what I could do with and without the help of agents and managers and realize that I could carve my own way myself with the help of reps, agents, managers, things like that. So it kind of just all dawned on me that my past and my upbringing really was helpful in creating this CEO mindset. 03:54 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Now, do you do anything outside of voiceover? Are you still in music or in theater as well? Or is it just something that you just fell in love with? Voiceover and that's it? You're just full force. 04:06 - Danielle Famble (Host) I kind of fell in love with voiceover and I'm full force. I will say I miss singing, I miss being on stage, I miss people. And so to fill my soul, I think what I'm now doing is I live in the New York City area, so going to the symphony or going to a Broadway show, I'm going to go tomorrow night to see my friend who's made his Broadway debut. So filling my soul in that way and maybe even getting back into singing lessons. 04:33 This is a new development. Yeah, that's, I think, what I'm going to be doing. But there was a lot of, I guess, trauma from growing up and it can be a hard business on your emotional state, and that part of it I don't really miss, and so I think it was a good voiceover Well, yes, that's true, that's true. I think I've learned how to navigate it better. 04:52 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Well, I think maybe that prepared you Probably Right, because I think that well, maybe people who are not familiar with stage and music and that is hardcore, facing like rejection or that type of thing, and so you have to really develop a thick skin and I think by the time you get to voiceover, maybe that helped prepare you in some way for that. But also, I think your experience from growing up with your parents and your grandparents who are entrepreneurs I mean I love that that was a great showcase. It was a great example for you as a young child to see that you could do anything. My parents were kind of the same way and I really attribute it to my entrepreneurial mindset, where there was a belief that if I wanted to pursue that and it was something that brought me great joy I could do that for a living and I could pursue that and be able to pay the bills by doing that. 05:45 So let me ask you, what would you say would be the biggest challenge that you faced in that transition, in creating a business for voiceover, because it sounds to me like you had a good idea of okay, I know that it's more than just performing right, I think a lot of people want to just go into their studios and do voiceover all day, but I think there's so much more to it, because you could be the best voice artist, the best singer, the best actor in the world, but if nobody knows about it, you can't get hired Right, and that's where I think your entrepreneurial business mindset has to come into play. So what was your biggest challenge when you transitioned from one career into the next? 06:24 - Danielle Famble (Host) I would say my biggest challenge was honestly recognizing that it was a business, because I wanted to jump in. The actor and the performer in me just wanted to get really good at how to perform in front of the mic and do the perfect read and the perfect conversational read, or at that time it was the we're all in this together read right. 06:44 So that was a hard transition for me to realize that there was more to this job than just talking into a microphone. Once I realized that I think it was mostly just needing to send out invoices and collecting the payment on time and answering questions that I just didn't know the answer to, and there were a lot of I don't knows and then learning as I went. That I think, was the hardest part, because at that time you don't know what you don't know, and part of running a business is realizing all the things that you don't know and having to figure out the answer to it or at least come up with this next answer, and then iterate as you get better? 07:22 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Sure, yeah, absolutely. So then what would you say was your most successful path into really making this more of a business mindset? Did you read a great book? Did you do a lot of research? Did you talk to your parents? What was it that helped you to really create that CEO mindset? 07:40 - Danielle Famble (Host) I would say getting help and finding a mentor. I coached with a lot of different people. I coached Facebook group Voice Actors of NYC to be invaluable because there are so many people who will offer help or resources or ideas. But not going it alone, I think, would be the best resources. Find your tribe, find a mentor, find someone who can help you, because it's so much faster for you to progress when you have other people to bounce those ideas off of. 08:28 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yeah, absolutely. Now you talked a little bit about the importance of being able to scale your business and to be able to track your progress in terms of how to mark your success and how to move forward in your business. Can you talk a little bit about that? 08:44 - Danielle Famble (Host) Yeah, I noticed and I learned and I knew this from even my parents and grandparents the data is the most important thing that you can have to know where you are and where you want to go. So tracking my numbers was incredibly important to me, and I don't just mean income. I wanted to get better at how quickly I could do auditions, and so I was tracking how many auditions I was doing a day and I could tell by looking at the numbers if I was getting faster or more efficient. I care a lot about money and numbers and love to talk about money actually. 09:18 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Wait, can you repeat that? Because I love a woman who can— oh, I care a lot about numbers and money. 09:23 - Danielle Famble (Host) It is not a bad word. 09:24 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) It is not a bad word. Thank you, Danielle. 09:26 I didn't mean to interrupt you, but I was so excited that you could say that I was maybe I was the only other person that said look, I love to make money and I love the challenge in how can I make more money? And so I think having a healthy mindset with money is very important. Let's talk a little bit more about that, danielle. I think a lot of it stems too from different mindset or different ideals that you have as you grow up Like. Is money a bad word or is money a good thing? And especially being female, can a female make a lot of money and is that a good thing? Let's talk about that. 09:58 - Danielle Famble (Host) Yeah, absolutely. I think there needs to be a healthy conversation about money with women, specifically For me I preach it women of color because sometimes, as women, we feel uncomfortable asking for what it is that we want, yeah, and what you're worth and what you're worth, and being able to say it with confidence and say this is my rate or can we negotiate on a rate? Can you do better with the rate that you've proposed? Having these conversations is important because me, as a business, I'm running a business and having business conversations with other businesses when they're asking me to license the use of my voice for their project. So I don't feel weird talking about business with a business. 10:43 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Sure, because that's what I'm doing, and money is the language of business. 10:48 - Danielle Famble (Host) So finding that level of comfort and being able to feel comfortable in talking about money, sure, and knowing that you are worth the amount that you've stated, or more, it's baseline, I think. 11:03 From there, that's when you can grow and feel more comfortable. 11:07 Another thing for me was getting over that starving artist mentality. 11:12 I feel like it's kind of glorified, especially when I was coming from a musical theater background. 11:17 I mean, I remember standing in line for hours on end waiting to sing my 16 bar cut so that I could maybe book a job that was going to pay me $300 a week at some regional theater and I was grateful and while that is fine and it happened and I needed it at the time, it's not where I'm at anymore. I couldn't do that anymore and that's one of the reasons why it was important to me to sort of figure out what else I could do outside of theater, because it was no longer aligning with how I wanted to live my life, because my life cost a certain amount of money and I needed to find other ways to live the life that I wanted and be able to pay for it. And that's not a bad thing knowing that it's going to cost you money, and I'm okay with asking for what I want and also saying no if it doesn't work out. No is a full sentence and if a number doesn't work for you. 12:13 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) That's great. No is a full sentence. I love that. It's a full sentence. 12:15 - Danielle Famble (Host) And if it doesn't work for you, be okay with saying no and holding by your no. 12:20 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Well, let's talk a little bit more about that, because I and holding by your no. Well, let's talk a little bit more about that, because I think that for a lot of people starting out in the industry, they're just afraid to ask for what they're worth, or they're afraid to negotiate. And so if a potential client comes to you and they don't have a budget to pay you what you feel you're worth, like what does it take? Like in terms of how do you get up the confidence to say no? And for me it's always been well, you only have to do it once, because once it works out in your favor, then it gives you all the confidence in the world. But tell me about your experience. Did you have an experience where you were scared to say no? Or you thought, oh my gosh, maybe I should do this job for this low pay? 12:57 - Danielle Famble (Host) Let's talk about that no-transcript, still want to do it, even at a lower rate? And if the answer is no, can I tell them no and have that uncomfortable conversation like you're saying just once, saying something like unfortunately, this number does not work for me or align with what I would normally quote. I wish you all the best, finding the right voice talent for this project. And then that's it. And I've noticed that when I do that, I've left my day open, my time open. Another job could come my way that pays me the rate that I'm looking for and that I need, or I can do something else, and maybe that something else is getting out of the booth, getting out of the house, going and seeing some friends or doing something that enriches my life, and there's no monetary value that I can put on that. 14:19 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Well, I think when you can enrich your life, it enriches your product, it enriches your business, because I think it all feeds. 14:28 It's just a wonderful, wonderful cycle and I love that you mentioned that you're going to go see your friend on Broadway and I feel like for me it's like I need to watch a great movie, because it really stirs up the creative juices and it really helps me to be even better at my job, at my business, and to be more creative, because that's what really we do for a living is we need to have that creativity, we need to bring that to life, and I feel like anything that you can do externally, even outside of voiceover, to enhance that is absolutely a good thing for your business. So, yeah, go out and enjoy life, because that's going to help your business. I like to think of that. Let's talk about your business and growing your business, because I think there's a lot of people that they get to a certain level where they're happy and then sometimes they don't advance or progress or they stagnate and then they're like but I don't know how to get more work. Or talk to me about growing your business. 15:26 - Danielle Famble (Host) Often looked at growing my business from a financial perspective. Again, I have no problem talking about money, and so for me growth looks like a monetary jump or incremental growth even. So I'm tracking how many jobs I've done in a month or per year. I'm tracking how much revenue I brought in. I need to know how much I need to pay in taxes, so I'm staying on top of that. 15:51 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Speaking of which, it's like almost April. 15:56 - Danielle Famble (Host) Can we talk about it? 15:58 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) This happened quickly, my goodness, yeah, yeah, now are you working? Just thinking of numbers, because you don't have a problem talking numbers. Are you doing your own accounting? Oh no I am not. 16:07 - Danielle Famble (Host) Oh, that's another thing, I think, outsourcing, outsource what you are either not good at or not passionate about. I agree, those are the things that I have outsourced, and one of the things I talked in my talk about was finding your different departments in your team. So I have a financial team and I have a bookkeeper. I have a CPA. 16:25 I have a financial advisor. It's an S-corp, my company and so there are so many different moving parts that I don't know and I need help with people who know better so that they can help educate me and I can make the right decisions, because we are working together and they are working with me so that we can move my agenda forward for where I want to be with my business and my life. So I'm not just doing as they're telling me to do. I want to know and I want to learn and I want to be with my business and my life. So I'm not just doing as they're telling me to do. I want to know and I want to learn and I want to understand. So finding people who have the heart of a teacher to be able to help me understand why I need to pay this much money in taxes or whatever has been really very helpful. 17:06 But in terms of growing my business, I look at it from a place of numbers and the finances, but I also have certain goals when it comes to I want to maybe have the non-broadcast side of my business be a certain amount of money, so that can be a specific goal, but typically I just look at the end of the year, going to the next year and see where I was and create goals typically financial goals in my business, and that's how I mark growth. Lately, though, it's been for me wanting to be a better business owner and entrepreneur and pushing myself personally. You talked about me speaking at VO Atlanta. That was my very first time speaking at a conference at all, and while I absolutely love talking about business and everything with my friends, I've never really said it in a room full of people, so I think that is a way that I'm hoping to grow as a person and as a business owner to feel more confident, sharing what I know and what I'm passionate about, and letting people know that that can be part of the growth as well. 18:08 It may not be something monetary, but it's something that I can mark as my own personal growth and that will help me be a better voice actor. 18:15 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Well, you know, what's so interesting is that because you have no problem talking about money, I think inadvertently, without you maybe even realizing it. What I love is that because you kept really accurate, probably track right of finances in and out and you goals and you actually wrote them down with numbers. I'm a big believer in writing things down and writing goals down and that helps you to manifest. I mean, yes, of course there's hard cold numbers, right, but also, I think, writing down goals and writing down an actual number, because so many people are afraid of the numbers I mean I'll talk about before I owned my own business. It would be maybe my spending right, you've got that credit card right, and I might be like here, have my credit card, and I wouldn't really look at the money that was going out. And the more you kind of are in denial of it right, the more right you're unaware, and I think that you need to be aware of the numbers, probably more so than most people. You seem to be really comfortable with numbers and I think that's something to aspire to for a lot of voice actors, because a lot of voice actors are not necessarily an accountant or like numbers or like doing the finances. 19:21 I don't like doing the finances either, but I also outsource. I have an accountant that I have on retainer and I am forced to look at those numbers consistently, in and out, and it helps me to set goals and it helps me to make those goals too. I think that's so important and I love that. That just seemed to be second nature for you, and now I think what you're doing is you're pushing yourself to let's do more, maybe more ethereal goals, personal goals, growth goals, like I want to speak at a conference, and that's a really lovely way for all of us to like, push ourselves to think outside the box in something that maybe doesn't come comfortably to us. And now, what else can we do? Because if we grow personally, we're also going to grow in our business. 20:03 - Danielle Famble (Host) Absolutely, and I really like your point about how your personal finances correlate to how your finances are going in your business, because that was, for me, as well, the same thing. I had to get good with my personal finances and once I was able to look at the numbers, look at my bank account every day. 20:24 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Look at the hard cold facts. 20:25 - Danielle Famble (Host) The hard cold facts of it and deal with that. Then that practice went into how I run the numbers for my business, because if I was a hot mess with my personal finances, how could I expect to be running a business that pays their taxes on time and doesn't have debt, and all that? 20:46 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) stuff, and just because you hire right or you outsource for your finances doesn't mean that you are not educated about it. Right, you have to be educated in order to manage anybody that you're outsourcing right, you need to be able to manage people, and you need to be educated so that you can manage it properly and make educated decisions, and so I love that. While I don't love to do financial I don't like to balance the checkbook on a day-to-day basis I certainly don't have a problem outsourcing to my accountant, and then we meet once a week, once a month, and we talk about, okay, inflows and outflows, and where did I spend my money? Where can I save my money? Where should I invest my money next? And I think that that is really. 21:23 I think taking the cold hard look at numbers financially is what is missing, with a lot of voice actors that just start out that especially think that, well, it's just talking behind the mic and so therefore, I don't need to invest. Let's talk for a moment about investment in your business, right, and outsourcing is one part of it. How important do you think investing is in order to have, maintain a successful business and grow your business? 21:48 - Danielle Famble (Host) It is vital to invest in your business and ways that you can invest in your business, be it the equipment, so your booth, or your microphone or anything like that the hard products and it doesn't need to be that you are investing a ton of money. I really, truly believe in grow as you go. So if you can afford a certain amount of money for a microphone or an interface or what have, you get that because you can always upgrade as time goes on. For me, it's very important to not have a lot of debt with my business, so I will buy what I can afford at the time and then I will upgrade. So that's very important. 22:26 And then also investing in yourself, because you are the product, so investing in classes or going to conferences or coaching or reading business books, taking business classes, getting outside of the world of voiceover for your education Not saying that there's anything wrong with the education in the voiceover community but we are also running businesses. So what kind of business education are you getting? Do you need to take a course on how to use QuickBooks or something like that? There are so many different ways to invest in the hard product and the soft skills that you need to run a business. Also, we said it already, but investing in help, because the help can be the education. So my CPA is helping inform me about certain things. I have a virtual assistant who I'm outsourcing some of the day-to-day work in my business and she's helping me and we're coming up with systems and processes to be a little bit more efficient every single day. So those kind of investments, when you're pouring into yourself and you're pouring into your business, that's how you can start to see your business grow quickly. 23:33 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Absolutely. I think investment is also something that scares a lot of people when they first get into this industry, and it is something that I think is absolutely essential. It's essential to be prepared to invest in your business and in yourself, and so that means, because I'm a coach and I work with students, and I have been doing it for quite some time I will encounter new students that will be like yeah, but can I just get my demo because I need to start making money in the industry, but yet they haven't really fully prepared themselves for investments that they might make, and that includes investing in themselves, investing in the possibility of outsourcing. I've had so many people say but I can't afford that right now. First of all, I always say don't quit your day job before you get into voiceover full time. Now let me ask you a question. I know that you are in musical theater, but do you also have an additional job at some point to help support your business or to be able to have money to invest in your business? 24:27 - Danielle Famble (Host) I was working at. So picture this I was working at, so picture this 2020. Yes, right, I was working a day job at the Apple Store, okay, and I was waiting tables at night at a comedy club, wow. So I was working two jobs and then auditioning and wanting to sort of move into voiceover around my two jobs. And the good thing was working at the Apple store. I had access to Logic Pro and I had access to buying certain equipment with a discount, so that job was very, very helpful for me to start acquiring what I needed the computers that I'm using, like all of those things. It was really helpful and I did not want to quit my job until I knew for a fact that I could be self-sustaining. 25:18 And even then I was 16 years old, with two jobs in high school. Like I have always worked a lot, so I do think that making sure that your job is not a hindrance your job can be one of the best assets that you have while you're growing your business, and even while you're in your business. Your job is an asset, so make sure that you treat it as such and you think about it as such Changing that mindset will be so helpful really. 25:45 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Absolutely. I think there's a lot of people who they're either they feel like they're stuck in a corporate job or they feel like that they can't do a job in another sector if they want to call themselves a voice actor. I'm always like, look, side hustles are what helped me to be able to invest and to grow my business, and it was a wonderful way to be able to have the money to invest in, let's say, outsourcing or invest in coaching or invest in a new demo, so that I could grow my business. And I did multiple jobs and I still like to think of my business like I'm not just full time voice actor. Anybody that knows me knows I have this podcast, I have the VO Peeps group, I love coaching and so I'm a voice actor. So I have multiple divisions of my business, just like anybody else would have in their business. So I feel like that there's no shame in having multiple passions and multiple divisions of your business if it can help you to grow. 26:43 - Danielle Famble (Host) Yeah, and it helps you stay well-rounded as well, like that job can be the thing that keeps you afloat so that you can say no, and that's bolstering you to maintain your standards and your rates that you need I love that it's an asset that can help you say no I'm just going to reiterate that to the bosses. 27:02 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) That was so important, right, because when you're out there, desperate because maybe you just gave up everything so that you could do voiceover full timetime and then you're possibly like desperate for a job and you'll accept low pay I love what you just said that your job is an asset and it can help you to say no when it's necessary. Right, so that you can have that money and you're not dependent on it to pay the bills or anything, so yeah, Fantastic. 27:26 What would be your top tip or the best advice you could give somebody just starting out in the industry to be the best CEO, the best boss that they can be? 27:37 - Danielle Famble (Host) I would tell people to make sure that you are educating yourself Education, I think, would be the biggest tip yourself by finding a mentor or a coach or someone who you can work with. That will help you where you feel that you need help or support Educating yourself on how to be a voice actor and do the type of genres that you're wanting to do. Educating you on how to run your business, if that's what you need help with. But I would say the first thing I always will tell people if they ask me like, hey, I want to be a voice actor, get in a class, take a class. Maybe it's a performance class, maybe it is a business coaching something, but take a class, because being an entrepreneur is just learning every day as you know, You've got to learn something new every day and be open to the fact that maybe you don't know and you need to learn. 28:30 So keeping your brain moldable and learning. Being in a class is the best way and it's low-hanging fruit because you're learning. You're not quite doing it every day all the time, quite yet. It is vital to find out what you don't know and then write that down, write down your process and then iterate on that process. Love it. 28:50 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Oh my gosh, Danielle, I could talk to you all day and I really, really appreciate you sharing these little nuggets of wisdom, and I feel like we could maybe do five podcasts at least. So thank you so, so much for joining us. How can bosses get in touch with you, danielle, if they want to follow you or be the boss like? 29:10 - Danielle Famble (Host) you, danielle, if they want to follow you or be the boss like you. Yeah, you can follow me. I'm on at DanielleFambul on all socials, and then you can go to my website, daniellefambulcom. 29:18 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Awesome. Well, it was definitely a pleasure. Bosses out there, I'm going to give a big shout out to my sponsor, ipdtl. You too can network and connect like bosses like Danielle and myself. Find out more at IPDTLcom. Bosses have an amazing week. We'll see you next week and thanks so much, danielle. Bye, thanks, anne, bye. 29:38 - Intro (Announcement) Join us next week for another edition of VO Boss with your host, Anne Ganguzza, and take your business to the next level. Sign up for our mailing list at vobosscom and receive exclusive content, industry revolutionizing tips and strategies and new ways to rock your business like a boss. Redistribution with permission. Coast to coast connectivity via IPDTL.

Arm yourself against voiceover scams with insights from Anne Ganguzza and Lau Lapides. The BOSSES shine a light on the potential dangers of casting scams, providing you with the necessary tools and instincts to recognize when something simply doesn't look right. From notorious overpayment traps to false urgency ploys, we dissect the mechanics of these schemes, emphasizing the importance of due diligence and healthy skepticism. Navigating potential job offers can be intimidating, but this episode will help you confidently sidestep the dangers. The BOSSES unpack the nuances of vetting opportunities, the significance of physical company locations, and the red flags that warrant a second look. 00:01 - Intro (Host) It's time to take your business to the next level, the boss level. These are the premier business owner strategies and successes being utilized by the industry's top talent today. Rock your business like a boss a VO boss. Now let's welcome your host, Anne Ganguzza. 00:20 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Hey everyone, welcome to the VO Boss Podcast and the Boss Superpower Series. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzza, and I'm here with the lovely Lau Lapides. Yay, Nice to be back, Hi Law, as always. Hi Annie, Lau, you know I'm wearing my red today. 00:37 - Lau Lapides (Host) You're looking all red and crimson-y and like ready to rock and roll Like a red flag. 00:44 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Oh, I'm so punny sometimes. So now what are we going to talk about today? Let's talk about, maybe, red flags and or scams. I know that they are a popular topic, but I think it's something that we need to watch out for in the industry these scams that go around and ask us to submit our voices and then gosh only knows what happens after that. Typically, it has something to do with money, but, yeah, law. What are your thoughts about scams and how we can avoid them as bosses? 01:15 - Lau Lapides (Host) Well, totally prevalent. We get it. It's in every industry. And I have to tell you and I know you've been experiencing this too in the last few years tell you and I know you've been experiencing this too in the last few years there have been an onslaught of hackers and slackers and scammers and bammers and everything you call them. They're around and they are literally coming at you. So, as a business owner, you have to be ready for it. They're literally trying to get through your firewalls, whether it's your website, your software. I have, unfortunately, a resident new stalker who leaves me voicemails. You got to be ready for that. You got to take the personalization and emotion out of it and protect yourself, protect yourself and protect your business Absolutely. 02:02 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) So I know that there's some great first of all resources online that you can find out. I mean, the number one thing is is if you, let's say, get an email or a phone call and it's asking you to submit something personal, like your voice file or an audio file or give money, the first thing that I think you can do is to take action is to Google. Google is your friend and again Google here. Google is your friend and again Google here. Google is your friend because a lot of times, especially even if you get like a phone call right, you can put in the phone number and you can see if it's a phone scam, or you can put in the subject of the email and see if you can find anything out there that talks about it. 02:39 There might be discussions in Reddit. There might be discussions on Facebook that say, yes, this is a scam, don't believe it. But the thing of it is is to make sure. If something doesn't feel right or something is off, then definitely take the first step and research it, go to Google. That's what I would say would be your first step, and then there are lots of other tips and tricks that we have for you. Bosses out there Law. What would you say is your first and foremost line of defense if you feel you've been taken advantage of or are being scammed Right. 03:09 - Lau Lapides (Host) There's a bunch of stuff we can do and, by the way, I would take what Annie said even a step further and I would make sure you're talking to your inner circle of your coaches, your uppers in the industry, people who are in the know, Because I have found, Annie, that if I go to Google, or a lot of you may be now using DuckDuckGo only because Google has a lot of online drones that go after you now. So if you use DuckDuckGo and you're on there, you're going to find they do have websites oftentimes and they do look legitimate and they lift that information. It's very easy to make a landing page. So you have to really talk to people in the industry that really would know to really cross-check. I always say go with your gut instinct. Your gut instinct is telling you something. Listen to it. One of the big scams, Annie, that is out there is the overpayment scam. This is big in our industry. That's where the client sends you, right. 04:02 Well, let's describe what it is for people who don't know what it is. It's a client sends you money, right, and they say that they're expecting to ask you to send the overpayment to someone else. It's like this. We used to call them chain scams. Right, don't do anything of the sort. Never accept money, never send money. 04:21 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Well, never send money to somebody who claims to be your client number one. I mean Never, never. 04:26 - Lau Lapides (Host) I mean that's a red flag right there. Right, that's your red flag, right there. 04:30 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) So basically they've sent you money, but it's typically it's a check that is not legit. Yes, exactly. So when they ask you to, send money back, then you basically are just giving them money, the overpayment. You are giving them money for nothing because they've given you a fraudulent check. 04:47 - Lau Lapides (Host) Hello, and what about the urgency one? This plays on your emotions. This is the sense of urgency making you feel like you're under pressure. Right, the client pressures you to like, handle the payment processing really fast, because there's a reason to handle it really fast. And they want to scramble your brain, they want to get you confused and discombobulated. So you're not thinking straight and you're just acting because you may feel like, oh, I want that job, it sounds great. Or you're a little desperate, you haven't worked in a while, sounds like a great job, you don't want to miss out on it. So they'll put that urgency on it for you. So be very, very careful of that. 05:26 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) And that urgency can be to submit voice files of which they will not pay you for. That goes back to law. This is like a business practice For me for many, many years. When I negotiate a job with a client, I especially a new client that I'm not familiar with I will always ask for payment upfront. It is not a big thing to ask, as a matter of fact, the way that I'm not familiar with. 05:47 I will always ask for payment up front. It is not a big thing to ask as a matter of fact, the way that I word it in my email is payment is appreciated and preferred up front. Otherwise, other options are available upon request, and so for a new client, I will request that they pay me up front before I even send them an audio file, and I'll tell you what. 99.9% of the time, unless it's a large client that has to go through a process to pay, like through purchase orders or something like that I will get payment and I will request payment electronically, because that way I can guarantee that the money lands in my account first. Then I will send them files, and so, therefore, when it's requested up front after you've negotiated and then it's a statement that is right on my email that says payment in full appreciated made to my Venmo or my PayPal and then basically other options available upon request and I get it. 06:42 Guys, I get it. I've been doing this for years. It's amazing how people are like well, charge 50%. I'm like, no, just ask for the full thing up front. Now, if somebody doesn't want to give you the full thing up front, then get on the phone with them. Make sure there's a human being at the other end of the line. This is not all done through email. These are some tips that I've learned over the years. Right is make sure you've got a human at the other end of the line and check out the business Again. There is a way to research those things online. Is there a business? Is there a phone number At the end of the email? Is there a signature file that has a company name, a way to contact them via email, via phone? I don't care how old school I sound, bosses, I get on the phone and I call yeah, you need to contact them. 07:26 - Lau Lapides (Host) I make sure there's a real person at the other end of the line. What about you? Because here's the other thing too. There's a double reason why you should contact them, especially by phone. If they're going to give you a phone number and that is, if it's a scam they need to know about it. So they need to know their identity has been stolen, and then they can put a post out online that people are coming at you using our name and our identity and it's not us. Yes, yes, absolutely, and they will really appreciate it. So there's the double reason to protect yourself, but also to protect that company, because sometimes they're just not going to know about it right. 07:59 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Sometimes they're stealing the identity of the company. Absolutely Right Filling the identity of the company. 08:02 - Lau Lapides (Host) Absolutely. One of my clients fell into this one, unfortunately, and that was she was already knee-deep into a job and she had submitted a bunch like 10 pages, 15 pages on a long form, and there were no edits. That's a red flag right there. So, unfortunately, she had already submitted something and she already saw oh, there are no edits. There's something wrong with that job, there's something strange. Also, if you see in your breakdown you're going to get, say, a form letter online asking you to be a VO for AI or for this or for that it could be for anything, right, and the numbers they use are weird. Look at weird numbers. Like we're going to use this from three and a half to 11 and a half months. You know the numbers look strange, they look off. 08:50 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Oh, that's interesting. I would not have thought about that. 08:52 - Lau Lapides (Host) Yeah, strange numbers, like strange configurations of numbers. We used to look for grammar and lowercase, but now we can't do it anymore because they're going through chat, gpt, so everything is formatted fairly well. How about this one, you guys? How about this one? They're deeply, deeply focused and over-focused on the payment versus the job. 09:13 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yeah, I agree. 09:15 - Lau Lapides (Host) Yeah, payment, it's all about getting the money quick right. 09:18 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) So they can get in and get out right, Because they really don't care about your audio files or they care about the audio files, and then they just ghost you and won't pay you. And that's a different type of a scam. Typically, that kind of falls within. What kind of clients are you working with? And again, I always say educate yourself on the client that is contacting you as soon as you get an email. That's typically how we get inquiries right. We'll get an email or we'll get a direct message from somebody. Make sure that they have a legitimate domain on the end of their contact information. 09:51 - Lau Lapides (Host) And what if they have a whole bunch of domains that lead you in circles? 09:58 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Different emails, different domains that confuse you, or a domain that doesn't exist for a company. It could just be somebody at gmailcom or somebody at hotmailcom. I would always look at those people twice because if they're a legitimate company they should have a company domain. It should be yada yada yadacom, and if they don't have that then I would be very suspect. If they do not include a phone number, I would be suspect. If they don't have a real signature file, I would be very suspect. 10:23 - Intro (Host) And as the law said back in the day. 10:25 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) We used to look for grammatical errors, and now that's less common. Now you've got to look at more people that are stealing identities, and or maybe people who just don't put a valid domain at their email address or there's no way to contact them, even if they have a website. I can't stand when I go to a website and I can't find a phone number to contact someone. That to me— Well, that's unfortunately more common too. 10:49 - Lau Lapides (Host) That, to me, is a red flag. Yeah, and here's the problem with technology is it's getting so good that certain elements are cut out of our industry that used to be there. Like a lot of the bigger companies we work with do not provide you even customer service numbers anymore because they don't have staff to answer phones, so everything is a bot now. So you could be contacted by a bot. You don't know they're a bot. The bot is scheduled to get information, so never give your information out online. No account numbers, no bank numbers, no social security nothing. 11:22 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I'm going to say that any legitimate company will have a phone number, or at least any legitimate company will provide that they're harder to find, Annie, and I'll give you an example. 11:32 - Lau Lapides (Host) I'll give you a direct example. We're on the Calendly link. Whether you're using Acuity or Calendly, I dare you to find a phone number for them. And they are a legit global service, their calendars that we use all the time. You use them, we use them all the time. 11:49 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) But I'm going to say that's dedicated to maybe software, right? I'm just going to say if you've got a company with people that maybe you're doing a corporate or an e-learning right, yeah, go after it. Yeah, you should absolutely be able to find a way to contact them. I mean, even like I buy a lot of clothing online just saying, Is that a surprise and I have a customer service issue. I want to be able to talk to a human being, right and you're right. 12:14 It is getting more and more difficult to find. However, I'm going to say that your chances are better if you do have a phone number that you can contact a human being at the other end of the line. 12:24 - Lau Lapides (Host) Of course, of course. But remember, I still caution people because I ran into this myself. For the banking fraudsters, because identity theft is number one in the US. So for the banking, they'll send you something that looks exactly like Bank of America exactly like. Paypal and they'll say you owe us $500. 12:43 - Speaker 4 (Host) Here's our invoice yeah, click here to resolve. 12:46 - Lau Lapides (Host) Click here, don't click on anything. Never click on anything. And if you call them, just know you may be calling someone that they hired within their fraud service. So I suggest, if at all possible, go to a location. Go to the location. If it's a bank or financial or whatever, you should be able to find a location where you can talk to someone live, like Annie's talking about, to try to get some sort of vetting on it, because you don't know, they look exactly real, they totally look real. And how about the big game show host? Oh gosh, yes, the game show host. The assignment for the game show host right, everyone's getting excited about that because you've been assigned to be a game show host? Yep, absolutely no, you haven't. No, you haven't, no, you haven't. The next step is going to be asking you for account information. Yes, exactly. 13:35 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) And that's been going on for years and years. And so what they do is they appeal to our emotions, they appeal to our oh my. God, you've got a great job. You've been selected. I even at one point got contacted by Disney, who said that they researched me online and wanted me to audition and I'm like, I'm not so sure about this. 13:54 - Lau Lapides (Host) I don't think so. I mean as good as you all are and, I'm sure, even if you have excellent SEO. 14:01 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Well, that's an even bigger target. You're an even bigger target, that's a bigger target. 14:05 - Lau Lapides (Host) That's a bigger target Don't fall into. We found you online. I want you to audition. Well, go through my agent. Go through my agent. 14:15 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) But I will say that I am very much an online business and I do have a lot of people that contact me for legit jobs through my website and through my social media channels and through referrals, and again, those are the ones that I trust. If they're coming through referrals, right, Because then I basically, oh sure, I have the job, but I always have the ability to contact someone or speak to them. 14:35 - Lau Lapides (Host) Oh, that's totally different. I mean, very rarely do I and I think I have pretty good visibility online. Very rarely do I have I found you online. That would be specifically through, like Google Ads purchased SEO. They'll get information, they'll be like a wannabe client of a coaching service or something like that, and you can feel that out very, very quickly. But when it comes to giving you a job as a talent, beware, keep those flags up. How about the interview, annie? Have you seen the online? 15:05 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) interviews, the online interviews. 15:06 - Lau Lapides (Host) Yeah, I've heard of them vaguely they invite you on to like Signal or Telegram, zoom, skype, whatsapp. Be careful of WhatsApp, you guys. Now, I love WhatsApp because it's free. It's an international community that can get on there for free. Who cannot text you? So I love it. We have it for our Talent Inner Circle members. That being said, do not jump on WhatsApp for interviews with anyone until you have vetted them, because that's a very common scam platform. It's just known to be that, so just be careful. Be aware of that. The language you have to be careful of too. Like does it look weird, even if it's gone through chat GPT. Like does it look strange? The sentence Does it sound strange? 15:46 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) It's not formed well, right? Yes, If English is not the first language, right formed well, right. Yes, If English is not the first language, right. So be careful of that. Well, first of all, I'm just going to say that clients that are international and I have a lot of international clients Typically the international clients that I work with are very well-spoken, well-versed in English, because they've worked with clients in the United States before. So if they are not as well-versed, I'll investigate them more. Because number one I want to make sure I get paid. There are certain clients that are known to not pay a whole lot for voiceover and they will give you lots and lots of promises for lots of work. 16:20 A lot of e-learning companies and I'm going to mention a lot of e-learning companies that are not based in the United States that want to hire you for as little money as possible per word. I'm a big person on e-learning that I don't quote per word, but I know a lot of people do, and here's my philosophy is that if somebody's asking you for a particular number per word, then probably right, they're hiring you. Right, You're a company, a curriculum developers or an e-learning company that's hiring the voice talent, so you're not the first line of paying. I'm just going to say because they're hiring you and so they want to negotiate the cheapest price because they don't want to pay a lot. 17:00 When I deal with e-learning clients, I deal with companies directly and I'm able to negotiate a much higher rate. So I don't typically quote on per word. But if somebody starts asking me for my price per word, I will get a little more rigorous about my investigation, because I want to make sure that I'm not going to be haggling over five cents or a penny or a word. And then also I'm going to make sure that I have a point of contact that I am able to contact either via email and that they get back to me right away, or that I can text them and even text if it's a new client. I'm going to try to see if I can call them or have a Zoom call Sure, absolutely. 17:38 - Lau Lapides (Host) Or have a Zoom call Absolutely absolutely. I would also be careful of wiring. Oh yeah, wiring. Wiring is tough nowadays. My partner won't do it anymore. They won't do it anymore, they just won't. They won't do it anymore, they just won't. They don't trust it. So they don't want to do that anymore. They'll do PayPal, they'll do Venmo. 17:53 - Intro (Host) They'll do it any other way. 17:54 - Lau Lapides (Host) But they won't do that. And I mean, needless to say, don't ever send money out for any reason. Ever Don't send it out unless you're sending your commission cut to your particular agent. 18:13 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) That's different. Well, that is legit. If a company needs to pay you and wants to pay you ACH, and wants to pay you right into your bank account, you will need to supply your bank account information and, for what it's worth when I investigated it, god, many years ago there's nothing dangerous about providing your account number. The bank itself has security in place so you can provide a full account number to somebody if they request it, and a routing number. 18:39 - Lau Lapides (Host) So all right. So I have a question about that. So let's say you haven't worked with a company. They've reached out to you. You want to work with them. What kinds of practices, Annie, do you use to vet them? Do you ask them for references? Do you ask them for clients? I know most legitimate companies that I know of and have worked with have actually put their client lists out. They're on their website, so I could really reach out to them and say, hey, do you know of this company? Have you worked with them? Whether I reached the right person or not is another thing, but the point is what do you do to vet a company? 19:13 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Well, that's a great question. So the first thing I do is I research them online. I do I research them online. I go to their website. I make sure that they have contact information on their website. If they don't, I'll ask the person that emailed me or reached out to me for their contact information. And then I'll say but I can't find a website, or I can't find any contact information. Do you have a point of contact in case I have questions about the project? 19:39 Right, and it becomes very much about you know, I'm interested because I want to be able to get a hold of someone in case I have questions, so that I can service them better, right? So it doesn't appear that I'm paranoid or not trusting, but I am asking in order to serve them better. So I make sure they have a website. And if they don't have a website, then I'm suspicious, because who doesn't have a website these days? If they don't have a website, maybe they're very small, and if they're very small, they might have budget issues. And then I want to make sure that they're going to pay me in full prior to my job start, like I request, and that they will pay me electronically. There will be no checks, or if there is a check, I won't start or deliver the job until I've cashed the check, and that's very rarely the case. I don't know when's the last time you wrote a check. 20:21 Almost never, very rarely, people who can't pay via any sort of electronic method these days or through a credit card, you know that kind of a thing then you're protected by all of that. And so, yeah, definitely research, definitely point of contact. And my last point is like literally talking to someone, and there's a lot to be said for a company's brand and a company's longevity, right. So how long have they been in business? Am I familiar with them? As you mentioned? What other companies have they dealt with? Have they dealt with other people? 20:51 I don't necessarily ask for references right away, because if it's a corporate entity, I might ask around the groups to see if anybody's worked with the company before. And yes, there's an actual group before Nava became very involved called the Red Flags Group. It's a Facebook group started by Dave Kavosier and is still around, where when we all had questions or we're all like hey, have you heard of this? We would post in that group. It's a wonderful group. It's still there. And there are some other groups like, I think, Veopreneur, Mark Scott. Actually, people will ask in that group if there's been contact or if people have worked with that company. And again, it's something you can talk to your accountability buddies or colleagues in the industry to see if they yeah, and I would add on, too your coaches. 21:35 - Lau Lapides (Host) So if you have a coach or a coaching team or have coach, your coaches really should know about this stuff. If they don't know about this stuff, they should be willing to reach out and find out about it. If they're not, that would be a red flag on the coach. Yeah, absolutely, because the coach should really be in the know. Even if you haven't worked with them for a while, they should be in the know. 22:02 I'll give you an example this student that I had in class not too long ago. She wrote to me and she said hey, I want to go FICOR and here are my reasons and I need help. How do I do it? Well, if I said I don't know, I have no idea what it is and I don't know, go figure it out. I would have a red flag about her looking at me saying that and saying well, let me just find out for you, let me figure it out, because I need to know myself. I actually know exactly how to do it, but my point is is that that would take me aback, like who am I working? 22:26 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) with who's my teacher? 22:28 - Lau Lapides (Host) You know what I mean, because this is a very huge issue right now in the union, so it's very relevant and current. 22:34 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Right, and that's another great aspect to a scammer, right, how do you know you're working with a legitimate coach and or demo producer? And I'm going to say, any coach worth their weight is going to offer a consult, a free consult so that you can kind of get a feel. And again, that's something where you're meeting with them on Zoom or you're meeting with them on the phone or you can kind of have a back and forth with that coach so that you can get an idea of their style. You're open to ask any questions and also, again, I think that word of mouth is really valid there I think a coach should have previous student references and or work and or testimonials on there and you can get a lot of knowledge from that. So don't just spend thousands of dollars before you do your own investigation and research and talk to a potential coach and or demo producer. 23:23 - Lau Lapides (Host) And be reasonable about weighing it out. If you're asking your coach who's been in your coach base out of New York, well, what do you know about Mary Jane's out in fiscal Wisconsin? It's not reasonable that they're going to know the answer to that. But what do you know about joining the union these days? They should really know some of those answers to resource you. 23:44 So, anything that's of a national or international. Now, everything's international but national base. They should be in the know, even on the most basic level, or at least be able to resource you to the places you can go. 23:57 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yeah, they're not just voiceover, they should be business. They should also understand the business and the marketplace and the industry enough to be able to guide you. Yeah, right, right, right. 24:07 - Lau Lapides (Host) I always come back to your survival instinct. You have a gut instinct for a reason Like listen to your gut. What's the worst that happens? You lose a job, you miss out on a job, so what? Yeah, that's the worst that happens. You may have saved yourself from a lot of heartache and a lot of hell by jumping into it because you really wanted it or were desperate for it when you knew it was going against your gut instinct. So always go with your gut instinct. 24:33 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) And I get a lot of people who are like okay, so I did a job and I didn't get paid. I can tell you, I've been in this industry over 17 years. I have never not gotten paid, Never, never. 24:42 - Lau Lapides (Host) Wow, never not gotten paid. 24:43 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) That's lucky, wow, is it lucky or is it me vetting my clients Could be. I'm going to say yes, I vetted my clients. If I found somebody that I thought was a little bit, I don't know if I want to work with them. If I was hesitant, I chose not to work with them and I'm very fortunate. Again it comes down to I requested that money up front. 25:07 I'm going to say that I feel like that saved me in many, many ways is having that, just that simple statement on my quote that says payment in full is greatly appreciated and available via my PayPal account to annanganguzacom and basically that is it. I never have anybody really contest it and if they do contest it it's because they're a large company that I'm very familiar with and I'm able to get in contact with the people in purchasing who can give me a PO and who can give me the net terms of payment, which sometimes can be 90 days Now have you ever had a company sign that and say, yeah, we're going to give you whatever 50% upfront or 100% upfront and not come through and still do the job? 25:45 No, no, I've always gotten either paid upfront or I've gotten my payment. I've never, ever had that happen. Yes, I'm fortunate, but I also think it has a lot to do with me being savvy and not necessarily picking up clients that are questionable. Right, gotcha and I do have clients where I signed contracts. They went out of business you know what I mean After so many years but ultimately, because I had been working with them for so long, either transferred me to the new owners, right, and then I might've had issues with the new owners. 26:12 But again, I've never where I didn't get the job or I didn't get the offer. I'd say I worked with a company for a very long time and then my point of contact changed, right, that happens quite a bit when you work with clients over a period of many years, your point of contact changes and then maybe you don't have that job anymore because they've brought in somebody new and maybe they want somebody cheaper and it's time to change voices Either way. So that's happened to me, which I think has happened to anybody, but thankfully, I've always gotten paid and knock on wood. 26:42 I'm grateful. And again, just keep my eyes and ears peeled. Now, if you are working with an agent, right, that's what your agent does, right, your agent negotiates those contracts for you. Now, have you ever had at a point where one of your clients didn't come through and pay and then you weren't able to pay? The talent. 27:01 - Lau Lapides (Host) No, I've never witnessed that or seen that happen, not within our agency, but I've had it happen in my coaching business. I've had it happen under Lollapeda Studios a number of times through the years. 27:11 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Where you've had a student that didn't pay you. 27:13 - Lau Lapides (Host) Yeah, or whatever. Or someone came for a first time, they looked super legit, they took an hour this was in the days in person, right and then they just cut out, they just never paid for it, and then I learned okay, so I have to get it up front, that's okay. 27:27 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I mean for coaching services, learning lessons. 27:29 - Lau Lapides (Host) I call it learning money. I tried not to get angry and hold on to that because I said that's the nature of some people, so you have to just know your audience. 27:38 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I did have where, let's say offering services through VO Peeps, where I used to run events, and people will come to events and say I will pay you later, right, can I come? Is there a spot available? Can I come? And yes, being young in the business, sure you can come and then ghost and then not pay. That has happened not often, because after that I got very smart and it's gotten to the point where I host events that are non-refundable at this point. 28:06 - Lau Lapides (Host) Well, that's important actually because everyone would pull out. Everyone would pull out for some reason, even for sickness right. 28:13 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I try to be very like with coaching if somebody gets sick, I will be very understanding and lenient about that. But now with events, when I run events and I have to sell spots, even if somebody gets sick, I'm sorry. I have a no refund policy and that has developed over 15 years of doing events. 28:29 - Lau Lapides (Host) I do find, though, Annie, honestly, because I've been an event organizer for a long time, most, most, most people take no issue with that. Yeah, exactly, they know most most people take no issue with that. Yeah, exactly, they know. Hey, listen, I punked out, I didn't make it Well yeah, absolutely. 28:40 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) It's all right. 28:42 - Lau Lapides (Host) And they just forget about it. Very rarely do I have people fighting, because that would be like they would think that they're in the right. 28:48 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I have people that want credit. 28:49 - Lau Lapides (Host) They get sick and then they want credit and sometimes I'll do that Some big events do that, but I don't think it's a good policy because I think it gives people an out. 28:58 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yes, agreed, Guys, be educated, be smart and be savvy and try to avoid those being taken for granted and being scammed. Great episode, Law, Great episode. 29:09 - Lau Lapides (Host) Good stuff, great episode. 29:10 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) All right, I'm going to give a great big shout-out to somebody I have been with for years and years and years and that is IPDTL. I love IPDTL. Still continue to actually do all of my coaching sessions via IPDTL. So many advantages to that. It's a great quality, fantastic audio quality. My students can record their sessions. It's amazing. I have playback. It's super easy. Guys, you can find out more at IPDTLcom. Connect and network like bosses Law. Thank you so much. It's been amazing. Bosses, have a great week. 29:41 My pleasure We'll see you next week. Bye, see you next week. 29:46 - Intro (Host) Join us next week for another edition of VO Boss with your host, Ann Ganguzza, and take your business to the next level. Sign up for our mailing list at vobosscom and receive exclusive content, industry revolutionizing tips and strategies and new ways to rock your business like a boss. Redistribution with permission. 30:06 - Speaker 4 (Host) Coast-to-coast connectivity via IPDTL and corporate narration, and even just working with her on my e-learning reads has made me a better voice actor when it comes to the corporate narration work that I get in, and I can hear the difference from the first day I coached with her up until today when we had our session, and I'm really excited to see how much more I'm going to keep growing and keep outsmarting all the AI bots, because she'll give you tips on that as well of how not to sound like you're just reading or how not to sound like an AI voice but actually sound like a human. 30:51 I love that Anne cares about her students and their success, because she's such a good teacher and she's a teacher at heart, and so you know when you're gonna work with her, you're going to do your best and it might really push you sometimes, but when you can look back on your growth and see just how far you've come, you know all the tears, the blood, sweat and tears is gonna be worth it. So thank you, anne, for taking your time with me and helping me get past those moments of frustration to finally understand and grow as an actor. I really appreciate it.

We've all been there—faced with the decision to work with a business whose practices don't quite sit right. It's a crossroads that can define not just your career, but your character. The BOSSES tackle this head-on, discussing what it really means when corporations say "I'm sorry" and whether change follows their apologies. They also peel back the curtain on the pricing battles both in voiceover work and in the consumer world, questioning why we shouldn't always accept the status quo and, instead, fight for what's fair. This episode isn't just about the voiceover industry—it's a broader look at how we, as professionals and consumers, navigate the moral maze of modern business. 00:01 - Intro (Host) It's time to take your business to the next level, the boss level. These are the premier business owner strategies and successes being utilized by the industry's top talent today. Rock your business like a boss a VO boss. Now let's welcome your host, Anne Ganguzza. 00:20 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Hey, hey, everyone, welcome to the VO Boss Podcast and the Boss Superpower Series. Hey, hey, everyone, welcome to the VO Boss Podcast and the Boss Superpower Series. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzza, and I am back in the booth with the lovely, illustrious Lau Lapides. 00:31 - Lau Lapides (Host) Oh, hey Lau hey girl Nice to see you Love being back. 00:36 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I know I feel like it's been an age. I feel like we just haven't seen each other in a while, but yet we did just see each other at VO Atlanta and it was not enough time. The two of us were so insanely busy that I feel like I didn't get enough quality time with you or quality time with anybody oh goodness. 00:53 - Lau Lapides (Host) And that's really funny when you think about it, because when you go to a conference, especially those of us who are going in and we're speaking and we're facilitating, part of the reason why we go is not just to educate but also to meet people and talk and have conversations. And I'm telling you, between the sound, the noise factor, the lights, the running around, the coffee I don't know about you, but I'm taking many naps the coffee, I love it, I love it. The coffee, it's a lot, it's a lot on you at once in a very short amount of time. 01:27 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Right, but we did learn a lot, didn't we? 01:29 We did, we definitely did. 01:31 One of the panels that was brought up and I don't know if this discussion should be entirely about this that most of us are familiar with that in the very beginning of this voiceover industry emerged as a top player in the pay-to-play space who had some questionable business practices and ethics, and I think that that is a really wonderful topic to talk about your clients and business ethics and how you choose to work with your clients or not work with your clients depending on, let's say, their business practices or even your own. 02:07 Have you taken a look at your own business practices? Are they ethical? Where do you stand on that? And I think that here's the elephant in the room. So the CEO of Voicescom was present on a panel at VO Atlanta and the very first thing that Jay Michael asked him to do was to apologize to the community on behalf of his company on the way that he treated the community in terms of maybe double, triple dipping into the funds that voice talent pay to be on that platform, and I thought I'd ask what your thoughts are and what your knowledge is of Voicescom and their past business practices. 02:46 - Lau Lapides (Host) Right. Well, I think you know we're all in the know about that it's a large industry but it's a small industry. If you stay in this industry probably like many others, for your lifetime and you're in it, you really learn a lot and you know a lot and you know a lot of people. It's very in a facetious way. It's very incestuous in that it's a family-driven business where our friends are like our family and we treat our clients like our family and we really get to know one another quite closely. And one of the issues that we're talking about now, especially with Voicescom, is really just taking care of one another and being aware of best business practices that you want to have as your guiding light for your business. Right, and Voicescom really for a long time, has really gone down the path, the dark path, right. 03:33 The dark web or whatever they call that, a dark path, the deep path of nefarious business practices that have caught on very early and now I think most people know about it, unless they're just coming into the business. And you and I feel the same way. We're just not for it. We're not for working hard and working ethically and working with integrity and working for clients, but not doing it under fair practices. 04:01 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Well, you know, back in the day, voicescom, when they emerged actually, I believe the very first platform to emerge was well outside of freelancer and those types of platforms was Voice123. And I remember I was an early adopter of Voice123. And then Voicescom came along not too long after that and the owner of that company, the Cicerellis, david and Stephanie, I believe it's- yeah. 04:22 C Cicerelli, were well-known in the community and used to show up to VO Atlanta and the conferences, and they really made a stake in the pay-to-play and became a popular pay-to-play in the industry. And along the way, somewhere I can't even say exactly when it happened, but along the way there became like a fee that was known as the pay-to-plays developed. You would pay a fee to belong to it and so that would give you the opportunities to audition. And then there was this thing that they introduced called escrow, and escrow was if you wanted to make sure that you got paid, then Voicescom would hold that payment for you and then when the job was completed, they would then release that payment, and so as a fee for that holding right the escrow, they would receive a fee. 05:05 And so I remember at that time people were kind of like I think after a year or so of that, people started to question that Isn't that double dipping? It's like you're charging the talent twice, they've already paid to belong to the platform and now you're charging an escrow fee on top of that in order to hold the money. But it was a guarantee that you would get paid. So consider them like a bank right. So first of all, let me ask you your opinion of that. Do you think that that is a fair and ethical practice for a business? Oh, okay. And do you think that is considered double? 05:36 - Lau Lapides (Host) dipping. I do, I do, I absolutely do. You know it's funny. This was me in my early naive mind. I always thought of those platforms as online agencies in a certain way, because what they're doing is they're matchmaking. They're presenting clients to you that you're not going to get on your own, most likely You're not going to meet on your own, and they're presenting it in a way where they do not want you to go private with those clients. In other words, they don't want you to acquire those clients offline. They want you to stay within the platform and use them as the agents. So I'll call them an agency. They don't call themselves an agency, but that's the same premise, right? But a legitimate agency does not charge you anything to be with them. They're going to take their commission off your booking. So it's a totally different business model and therefore they're not an agency. 06:28 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) So interesting. So I'm going to play devil's advocate here and I'm going to say not coming from the agency world, right, but coming from the business world, right, the escrow was an option. At that point, you did not have to decide to put money in escrow. But if you decided to put your faith in them and use the escrow model, they would then take a fee on top of that. So let's say it wasn't an agency, let's say it was a bank fee, right? Would you agree? 06:53 Then, if you thought of it that way and you weren't thinking of them as an agency, in order for you to belong to the platform, they provided you, maybe not matchmaking, but they provided opportunities for you. I mean, they were matchmaking through the algorithm, so to speak, but as a business, as strictly as a business, not thinking of it as an agency. As a business, they were providing you with opportunities. So you paid for that on a yearly basis or whatever, a monthly basis. And then if you wanted them to guarantee the money and hold on to the money because if the client didn't pay them, well, they still had to pay you then you would pay a fee no-transcript. 08:01 - Lau Lapides (Host) I don't want that service. I'm willing to take the incurred risk. 08:04 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) And they allowed that Right. They allowed that in the beginning. I do remember that. 08:07 - Lau Lapides (Host) That is okay. I'll go down that road with them because I'm paying for a service, I'm paying for a platform service and those are valued leads. I get that, it's legitimate, it's valued leads, I'm getting bookings, perfect. But still the control is in my hands when they took that away, when they take that option away, then the nature of it changes in the mind of the consumer. So to me it's not an easy yes or no. It's more like how much control do I have when I'm working with that partner? Sure, sure. What do you think, annie? 08:37 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Well, I think, because I remember seeing it evolve right and it evolved slowly over time. So I think in a lot of instances they thought that the evolution of those policies and practices would not be noticed by the community. Now, I believe once they decided to not allow people to take customers off the platform, right, that became more of how were they going to enforce it right? 09:01 So, in order to, enforce it, escrow became like non-negotiable. It was a thing that they did, and so they took control of that. Now, a few years down the road, right then, it turned out to be managed projects. Now, on top of that, right as a service, they would manage the entire project, in case it was a larger project and you needed to cast, let's say, multiple roles or it ended up being a long-term project. 09:27 They would manage the project and then there was a fee on top of that. It was no straightforward fee. At this point it was okay. It was a separate negotiation between Voicescom and the client for a particular amount of money which they did not then disclose to the member or the voice talent that got the job right. Then they became the company that managed the job and paid the voice talent and paid their own employees to manage that job, which there is a certain overhead in managing a job like that. I've been a project manager yeah, they're casting. 10:01 - Lau Lapides (Host) They're casting, they're doing project management. They're taking care of the money. They're doing reach out for the leads. Exactly, they're getting the leads in right. 10:08 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) So there's an additional fee. So now to some people in the industry not even thinking about that, it's triple dipping and your thoughts on that. 10:15 - Lau Lapides (Host) I agree. 10:16 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yes, yes, at that point, because there's no control left for the voice. Talent, right, yes, correct, I'm on that side At this point. When you don't offer the talent an option to opt out of escrow, now, theoretically you don't have to accept a managed job, right, you do? 10:31 - Lau Lapides (Host) not have to accept a managed job. 10:32 - Intro (Host) So, see how they played the edge. 10:35 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) They played the edge of, I would say, good business ethics and good business practices, but not unlike a lot of big companies out there who maybe you're not so privy. It's just because they're managing income that you are generating. Think about it right they took your choices away. That's what they did. Well, they really didn't take your choice away on a managed job. They did not. 11:00 - Lau Lapides (Host) Okay, but let me ask you this question I don't know how many tiers they have. I have a client that recently showed me something like six or seven tiers or eight tiers of options of different levels. Well, why aren't you doing that? On the other end, just give us the option of the tiers of involvement that we want to have you as a partner. So if I'm early, I don't know what I'm doing. I need all the help in the world. I might go for a higher tier because I'm going to want you to manage everything. I'm going to want you to bank the money. I'm going to want you to take care of me and hold my hand. But if I'm into it five or ten years, I don't need that because I know the practice, I understand how to take care of myself and take the calculated risk. But the option could easily be there. They're offering all these tiers for the membership itself. 11:46 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) So I think, when it comes down to it again, I'm playing devil's advocate, right? I don't want people to say, oh my God, shelovesvoicescom advocate, right? I don't want people to say, oh my God, she loves Voicescom. But honestly, from a business standpoint, right, I do believe if you've not given the talent an opportunity to opt out of things, then you are triple dipping. However, they kept it right on the edge there where at one point and I'm not exactly sure, forgive me for not knowing this I'm not exactly sure about the escrow anymore. I don't know if that's an option or not anymore, if it's just it grow anymore. 12:15 - Lau Lapides (Host) I don't know if that's an option or not anymore, if it's just it's now like standard that they will pay you. I don't know if that was that ever an option, oh it was. 12:19 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) It absolutely was an option. 12:20 - Lau Lapides (Host) That was a long time ago. It was a long time ago, that was early. 12:24 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Because I remember joining Voice123 back in 2004,. Maybe even earlier than that, I can't remember In the early 2000s, but it was an option. You did not have to choose escrow, and so I believe that if that's not an option anymore, they're definitely double dipping. And I think with the managed yeah, I mean absolutely with the managed. So there are people who say they should give up the yearly fee right for providing opportunities, or the membership fee, or they should give up the escrow or they should give up the managed fee. 12:56 - Intro (Host) Right Any one of those, and so. 12:58 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I do not know exactly what the new CEO at Voicescom said in the panel, because I had to go teach my own ex-session at the time, but he did indeed apologize on behalf of the company. So here's my question, laha what do you feel about an apology made? And of course, he was not CEO of the company back then? Here's my question, laha what do you feel about an apology made? And, of course, he was not CEO of the company back then? He had no prior knowledge of what was happening. He doesn't even come from a voiceover background. What is your thought about the apology? 13:24 - Lau Lapides (Host) Well, I treat it the same as any business and certainly as politics as well. I think he's a front man, I think he's probably a diplomat in certain ways, as a leader and someone who knows it is the right and ethical thing to do and what is expected of a community that he does not want to lose the partnership with. So is it honest? I don't know. Is it meant to be followed through? Who knows? And is there going to be a policy change? We will only know once we see it. It could be completely empty. It could be completely to satisfy the emotional feelings of talent which, quite frankly, at the end of the day doesn't mean very much if there's no policy change. So I say, wait and see. Does anything change after that? I think it was a good first move on his part. 14:13 It was a smart chess move. It was no skin off his nose. He probably doesn't even know what voiceover does for the most part. 14:20 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) And everybody's like, well, he took a beating. And I'm like, well, I mean gosh. Remember Rolf a few years back from Voice 123. Every time he came on stage he took a beating. And I remember seeing Rolf this year and saying well, rolf, at least you won't get the brunt of it this year. And he laughed. 14:36 - Lau Lapides (Host) Exactly, and you know what, annie, I have to say. He said that's what a CEO does. Let me tell you, these Wall Street-type cats could care less. In fact, they plan those for their Saturday morning. They have a ball at Target practice. No one knows, no one understands, understands like what a boardroom is like unless they lived in a boardroom or lived in corporate America or lived in executive C fights. Like no one gets that. I remember my husband, who's now a CFO controller type. He said boy, when I was coming up the reins and I was already a controller at that I was dealing with ownership of a company and they would literally get up and throw a vase of flowers at me and it would hit the wall and crash. Literally, they would throw things at each other. 15:20 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) So I really think— it's dog-eat-dog kind of. You know what I mean. Yeah, I think that. 15:24 - Lau Lapides (Host) that's like we want to feel as talented, satisfied that we got some comeuppance in the deal. 15:30 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Well, I'm sorry oh my God, I just rolled my eyes. 15:35 I mean, guys, I love the voiceover community Do not get me wrong but sometimes the drama, okay, I'm just saying we've got to remember guys, we are dealing with businesses, when we deal with these platforms and when we deal with our clients, they are businesses and in reality, in our own little bubble, we may think you know what I mean that, oh my God, yes, and I want. We may think you know what I mean that, oh my god, yes, and I want to say, you know, I'd love for everybody to be human and say, yes, they need to be good people and good humans and ethical. But gosh, it's not that way in a lot of places it's not that way, you have to open your eyes and be savvy and be smart. 16:08 yes, when you are dealing with businesses, that now for me and I would say a lot you too, I mean, do I want to deal with a business that I feel has questionable ethics and practices? No, I don't. I am fortunate that in my business I'm not dependent on that money, so I can choose who I work with, and I think that's the really wonderful thing about us in our industry that you can choose who you work with. Right and for me, that's always been where I felt like I won the corporate game If I was working for a particular company. And I work with a lot of students who they work in the corporate world and at some point they all want to get out of it because they don't feel appreciated or loved or they do a lot and they're working for someone else, and now that we have the option to work for ourselves first of all, I think we're the hardest CEOs, but also we have choices as to who our clients are. 17:03 So we can absolutely choose not to work with somebody who we feel that their business practices are questionable. That gives you more time to look for people who are right and get that business to somebody else. 17:14 - Lau Lapides (Host) Exactly. And to piggyback right onto that, I was talking to a client this week who is also in my agency as well and who said, listen, I have a friend and he's on Fiverr and he came to me and we're actually accountability buddies and I told him everything I thought about this and he said but Lala, I don't know, Did I do the right thing? What do you think about that? What do you think about that? What do you think about what? 17:34 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) he's doing To be a friend. Is somebody on Fiverr? Well, no what he's saying is. 17:38 - Lau Lapides (Host) He came to this person and he said what do you think of me being on Fiverr? I know that it has some dark imagery in the business and people are dissuaded away. What do you think? So I said and I had to be a diplomat as well, because I'm not here to wreck businesses and give businesses a bad reputation but here's what I said and I honestly believe this. I said listen, whether your friend goes on Fiverr or not, or a million other platforms or not, you're the accountability buddy, which is terrific. Keep them checks and balance and remember this. That exactly what you're saying, annie. 18:16 Your business is your business, it's yours, it belongs to you. It's private to some degree. It puts food on your table, it makes you happy and sleep at night. You're an artist, you're a business person, but you're an artist and I don't want to sit in judgment and jury of other artists. I don't want to censor their moves. I say you do what works for your business. 18:38 Now, if you want to go into areas that are illegal, criminal, whatever, I'm not going to go there. That's just not where I'm going to go. It's not what I do and what I'm about or what my personhood or brand is about. But I still. I don't want to judge anyone, I don't want to be in judgment of anyone, because I feel like they're the ones, at the end of the day, who have to get up in the morning and go through a whole day supporting their business, and I don't know what their lives are like. Right, they might be poor, they might have no money in the bank. They might say law, I can't even afford a simple ad in like you know whatever. 19:15 And I said, well, listen, you do what works for you and that's going to bring you to the next thing. I mean, that's just the way I roll. You know what I mean? It's the same discussion we've had about FICOR, about financial core. We get a lot of people. I just got an email this morning from someone who is in my class who said I went SAG and law. I need your help now. I need your help. I want to go FICOR. I'm a little conflicted. I don't know what to do, how to do it. I know the union doesn't want to talk to me about it, of course, right. And I say listen, you know there's pros and cons to every choice you make, but as a coach because I'm still a coach. I'm going to talk to you and educate you about what your choices are Sure absolutely. 19:56 And then you go and make your choices and I'll support you in the choices you make. It doesn't mean I agree with them. 20:02 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) It means I support you Sure, absolutely, absolutely. 20:04 - Lau Lapides (Host) Right, and isn't that at the end of the day? 20:06 Annie where we want to go is like we're not always going to agree with. This has been a big ethical. For a week I had another from my roster. He emailed me about an AI company that reached out to him and wanted to work with him. He said number one is this legitimate? Is it a scam? And number two I don't like it. I don't like their rates, I don't like the usage. I don't like it. I don't like their rates, I don't like the usage. And I said, well, go with your gut. Yeah, absolutely Go with what you feel, Otherwise you won't be happy. Absolutely, Absolutely. 20:35 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Right and I'm going to say that I do believe that when a company is not acting in an ethical manner, I do believe it's important that people speak up and speak their mind about it, because that is the only way that change will become enforced, or change can happen, if there are enough voices that are raised up about it. So I do believe organizations like NAVA, even the Facebook groups and again, like I said, I say there's so much drama, but I mean we are creatives, I mean there is drama in our world, but I also want bosses out there to, yes, embrace your creative and embrace your drama, but also embrace the business aspect of things and try to understand that it's not an affront against you personally. 21:20 I mean Voicescom did they insult you personally by charging a fee? 21:26 I mean it can infuriate you absolutely, but it wasn't a personal attack. 21:30 However, it is up to you to educate yourself on the practices of any given business and then decide whether that is something you want to support or not. 21:38 And if you feel that you're being taken advantage of, absolutely, I say raise your voice. But I don't say raise your voice and stomp off like a spoiled little child. That's not getting your way, but raise your voice in an educated and smart way that can help to promote change, I would say, or promote awareness in the industry, which is what VL Boss I set out to do was to provide a resource for the community so that we could talk about things like this and it could be open and we could discuss and I will be the first to say there's many of you who know the VL Boss podcast from the very beginning and there was a question, there was a question of certain people that I had on my podcast whether they were ethical. Now, I was not educated at the time and that could be something that people may or may not believe is true. However, at the time, I was not educated about business practices no-transcript. 22:57 - Lau Lapides (Host) You're buying items, retail items from big box stores. Right? Let's say you're going to Target, walmart or a Macy's or Nordstrom's, whatever, and you walk in. I'm going to guarantee you you are paying 50% to 100% over retail in terms of the profit margins that they are charging you, but somehow, somehow, many of us go. 23:19 Well, you know, you know. And are you going to go to the manager and you're going to complain about that? The manager will say hey, with all due respect, ma'am, I don't make decisions. You got to go up. Are you going to spend all day? I'm asking a real question to the audience Are you going to spend all day, every day, fighting that good fight, even though you're right, you're right fighting that good fight to get to corporate, to get to the CEO, to make sure the prices come down, to make sure they're affordable? Probably not. 23:49 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I love that you brought that up. Law, probably. But one more thing. 23:53 - Lau Lapides (Host) I want to say and I'm not talking about boycotting, that's up to you. I'm not suggesting that in any way. I'm just saying we make ethical decisions every day of our lives, all day long. Where am I going to go to the gas station? Am I going to pay that for gasoline? Am I going to go to the gas station? Am I going to pay that for gasoline? Am I going to whatever? So everything you could be fighting, I think there is a level of toleration we have to find in our lives to stay happy and healthy, knowing we're being taken for a ride. 24:23 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yeah, absolutely. I love that you made that comparison. That is so, so important, because I think we're in such a bubble and we think that everything's in front to us personally. 24:32 And it's not. It is business business in this country, I mean. So we ourselves are free to set our prices, right, we are free to set our prices. And so what if the tables were turned and somebody said, well, that's not ethical, I mean, in a very weird sense, right? If you think about AI and you think about synthetic voices and people's value of, okay, what is a voice worth? 24:58 Now, my human voice and my acting and my personal brand is worth a lot. That's where I will make that bold statement to say this is what I charge, this is what I'm worth, will make that bold statement to say this is what I charge, this is what I'm worth. However, there will be people who need a voice that may not see the value right for their project, for a human voice. They don't have a need for it, right, and they make that choice not to work with us. And so, again, we are in the free societies where we can make our price, in the free societies where we can make our price, and the rebellion against us, right, or the speaking up against us is hey, we don't have that budget or we don't feel the value is there to pay that amount of money for a voice. I mean, I hate to sound so cold, but that's just the reality of business. That's the reality of it. 25:48 - Lau Lapides (Host) When you deal with people and you deal with budgets, you're going to run up against the same thing. I had a client of mine in my roster that said law, I need your thought because I have a long, long, long time client and she's just not going to pay me what I'm asking. She's not going to pay me what I'm worth. She's not going to. What should I do? Should I walk away from it at this point, or should I stay with it, or whatever? We talked that through. But the point is, that's your world, that's our world, that's business. 26:14 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) That's what we do every day. 26:15 - Lau Lapides (Host) That's not going to go away. I mean, whether you call that unethical or not, I'm not sure, but thousands of years ago I'm sure, we were being overpriced for fish and beef and meat on the open market. You had to haggle, you had to negotiate, you had to figure out what you're willing to pay for that item, and there's also supply and demand. So when you have a tremendous supply, tremendous supply, you don't always have the demand to meet that, and so therein lies the ethics, exactly exactly. 26:46 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) And supply and demand has a lot to do with paying me what I'm worth. I mean honestly like if there is more demand for our voices. 26:55 - Lau Lapides (Host) We can afford to pay Go higher, go higher. 26:58 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yes, if there is less demand, then you know what We've got to kind of compete in the marketplace. 27:04 - Lau Lapides (Host) Right, and let me qualify it by saying we're in no way suggesting for the listeners that you need to sell out or you need to do things you don't want to do or you're not comfortable doing. We're saying you live in a world, you live in a world and no one said that world is going to be fair. 27:20 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Oh yeah. 27:20 - Lau Lapides (Host) So fair practices, best practices, are ones that you set and your clients set, and you have what they call a meeting of the minds. And if you don't and you want to fight for it and it's worth fighting for, then fight for it. But just know you got to pick your battles wisely. 27:40 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Absolutely, because you could be fighting all day long, every day, yeah, and it can be exhausting. And in the meantime, if you're spending all of your time fighting those battles, then you're not making money in your business, right? So and again. I always bring it back to this right. I find value in this. For me, my Chanel lipstick is worth the money that I pay, right, and I always like to bring it back to my Chanel lipstick. 28:00 But in reality now I found that the quality of the Chanel lipstick has gone a little bit downhill, and so now I'm on the hunt for something new, right, that can give me the quality that I am willing to pay the price for. So, bosses, keep in mind, you will have clients out there that will go out there and hunt for that voice, right, that is the quality that they desire for their project. So you can be that voice and you can, at that point, charge, right. You can charge, as we were mentioning before. It is your option, it is your option and so, ethically, I think it is up to you guys out there to educate yourself right on business practices and then take a deep look at yourself, take a deep look at what it's costing you in your business Not necessarily, like, as Law was saying before, fighting every single day and taking up a lot of your time and energy in fighting that so that you have no time to have a business. 28:57 - Lau Lapides (Host) Yes, you want to choose your battles wisely and I always like to say I don't mind losing some battles and you will throughout your life but I want to win the war. 29:06 - Intro (Host) And what that means is I want to win my business. 29:09 - Lau Lapides (Host) I want to win overall my business practice and my goals. But that doesn't mean every day is going to be fair and every day is going to come out the way I want it to come out. And you know it's like I love Dunkin' Donuts and when I go through, if I get a donut, that donut is two or three bucks, is half the size now, and you'll say but Law, with all due respect, you shouldn't be eating donuts. Well, that's beside the point. The point is I have a choice. I'm not talking about health, I'm just talking for fun. Now I don't have to buy that donut. 29:39 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) You don't have to pay the money for that donut, but am I going to? 29:41 - Lau Lapides (Host) go fight the CEO over the size of it and the cost of it? Probably not, because it's not a battle that I really want to take up Wise words Law. 29:48 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Wow, what a great discussion. I really really enjoyed it so good. 29:52 - Intro (Host) Yeah, bosses. 29:53 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) So remember, educate yourself and look deep within and pick your battles. So, all right, I'd like to give a great big shout out to our sponsor, ipdtl. You too can connect and network like bosses, like Law and myself. Find out more at IPDdtlcom. You guys have an amazing week and we'll see you next week. Bye, see you next week, bye. 30:15 - Intro (Host) Join us next week for another edition of VO Boss with your host, Anne Ganguzza, and take your business to the next level. Sign up for our mailing list at voboss dot com and receive exclusive content, industry-rev, revolutionizing tips and strategies and new ways to rock your business like a boss. Redistribution, with permission. Coast-to-coast connectivity via IPDTL. 30:44 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Hey bosses, we are so excited to announce our audition demolition, our third audition demolition coming up September 20th. That is our live event F***. 31:00 - Lau Lapides (Host) Oh no, f***, oh no, you got to submit this for bloopers. 31:06 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yeah For OVC, yeah right, all right, stop Record.

Wondering how to convert your cluttered space into a voiceover success story? Let Anne Ganguzza and the ever-resourceful Tom Dheere, be your personal guides in the transformative journey of setting up a home studio that screams professionalism but whispers in costs. Starting with the bare bones of our make-do booths fashioned from closets and basements, we'll share how to shield your sound from the noisy world outside, using everyday materials to master the art of sound absorption. Our candid conversation is a treasure trove of relatable anecdotes and practical wisdom, perfect for any voice actor eager to refine their recording environment and captivate their audience with crystal-clear audio. 00:01 - Intro (Host) It's time to take your business to the next level, the boss level. These are the premier business owner strategies and successes being utilized by the industry's top talent today. Rock your business like a boss, a VO BOSS. Now let's welcome your host, Anne Ganguzza. 00:20 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Hey everyone, welcome to the V-O Boss podcast in the Real Bosses series. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzza, and I am so excited to be back again with Real Boss guest co-host Tom Dheere. Hey, tom. 00:33 - Tom Dheere (Host) Hey Anne, I'm feeling very bossy today, but not in a mean to tell people what to do today. I'm just feeling bossy, but in a good way. 00:38 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) You got good boss colors on. 00:40 - Tom Dheere (Host) Yeah, and I got some good boss vibes going today too. Yeah, and you sound good, Tom. I do sound good today. It's funny, so do you, as always Well thank you. 00:49 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I'm going to be speaking next week at a conference to podcasters who are interested in becoming voice of artists. Part of my conversation is going to include the equipment they need, the skills they need and, of course, what's so important to us as voice actors our environment, our studios. 01:08 And you know it's so funny because we are on opposite coasts and I feel like we also have opposite type studios, but yet they both work amazingly well for our businesses. So I wanted to talk to you about your studio and our differences so that this could be a good reference for those bosses. Just starting out that you don't necessarily need a $20,000 recording studio, because when I first started I certainly didn't have one, and I know that Tom has the same story. As a matter of fact, when I first started, I was in my basement in New Jersey, because basements are a good place where you don't have to deal with, let's say, external noises as much because you're half underground. 01:50 It was a closet for me that I started off with, and, tom, I mean talk to me about when you first started. What was your first studio like? 01:58 - Tom Dheere (Host) Okay, my first studio was also in New Jersey, parcipany, new Jersey. I'm sorry, where were you in New Jersey? 02:04 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I don't remember Northern Jersey. I was in North Haldon, oh, right, by Wayne. Okay, I know exactly where that is. 02:10 - Tom Dheere (Host) I was in the 20, 25 minute drive west of North Haldon, so I lived in a garden apartment. For those of you who don't know New Jersey, garden apartments are these sets of apartment buildings. 02:21 They're almost always red brick, they could be white or other colors, and there's usually there's anywhere from like three to 50 of them. And I lived on a second floor and my first home recording studio was the front closet which was over the steps that would lean to the door that would let you go outside. So what I did was I went to Home Depot and I got carpet remnants on the cheap. I had a quilt that I think my mother-in-laws aunt made. It's a lovely quilt but like oh, this is a good use for it, I wove it into, you know, like the bar that you'd hang your coats on. Sure. 02:56 I would weave it through there. 02:57 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) So it's like a little tent. 02:59 - Tom Dheere (Host) Yeah, actually it was even better than a tent, because the shelf that was above the bar rested on wooden blocks in this apartment so you could lift it up. So I actually threaded it through, threaded it back and folded it under so it completely encapsulated the shelf that was above the bar and that was that. So the quilt was around there. The carpet remnants from Home Depot were on the ground and in front of me and behind me and I made a point to, since the closet was a square box instead of having be an angle, I wouldn't push the corner of the carpet remnant all the way into it, so it would be curved. 03:32 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) So all of the corners, so it would be like square, sharp corners Right. 03:36 - Tom Dheere (Host) So I would put it in with penny nails. And then I had, you know, those football blankets, the kind that you roll up to take a football game. I had one of those and I nailed that into the closet door and that was it. And then I had a little snack tray with a desktop mic stand and my mic was there. And then I got a monitor which I drilled into the well, no, that back then I didn't drill it into the wall, it was on a stand which was on the snack tray. And then I got a splitter, so the monitor that I would sit at at my desk would show the same exact stuff that it would show inside the booth. And then I would bring my air mouse into the booth and sit down and I would just, and then it's. 04:14 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Well, you were actually advanced because you had a monitor in your booth and you had an air mouse. 04:20 So, for me. I'm gonna tell you, my first experience was when I moved from one place in New Jersey to the next and I had my second studio in the basement. Was really cool, because you don't know what you don't know. And so for those bosses just starting out and I've done multiple audio episodes, just a real quick recap you need to really have a good environment before, I think, you even make a decision on your microphone and within that environment you have to make sure that you're not having any kind of echo or noise. So there's internal noise of your studio and there's external noise that might be trying to come into the studio and you certainly don't want any of the noise that you're making, right as you're voicing, to be echoing off of walls or hard surfaces. So it's important to kind of have yourself surrounded with some sort of material that can absorb that sound rather than have it be reflected back into the microphone. So when Tom talks about having his blankets and his carpet remnants up above him, to the left, to the right, keep in mind you wanna have some form of absorbing material that's in front of you, to the left, to the right, behind and above you and that will help curb any type of reflective sounds that might come back into the microphone. And then, of course, there's always sounds that come in from outside of the studio that we can't always control. I mean, studios have a recording sign for a reason. So even in a real studio, right where this is what they do for a living, you can't run down the hall screaming at the top of your lungs while people are recording, because not everything is completely soundproof. 05:53 However, getting yourself in an environment where you're not gonna get that much reflective sound and sound that might come in is best, and so one thing that that proves, tom, is that for both of us, when we started, we didn't really have to invest a lot of money into our studios to get good quality sound. 06:12 You just have to be a little bit educated about where you're gonna place those materials, and I think it takes a lot of experimentation. I do know when I first started, I didn't know what kind of sound I was supposed to have, and so really helpful to me was getting an engineer on the line and kind of assessing my sound and assessing my studio. However, in the beginning I didn't know anybody, and so I basically it was trial and error, trial and error, and sometimes you can place a blanket and it doesn't do any good. And sometimes you can put another blanket and it still doesn't do any good, and at that point it's helpful to maybe have somebody come and assess your studio sound. And with that I've got multiple places that I recommend. I know, george, the Tech is one of the best. 06:57 That's the first one came to my mind and I think both of us recommend him and bosses will put that link in the show notes for you. But it really can help to have a trained ear, assess what your studio sounds like but also know that you don't have to spend thousands and thousands of dollars. Now I remember back when I moved right from New Jersey to California. Then I had a town home and I was up on the second floor and then I had an office. Well, I had a second bedroom which was right outside of the kitchen and I had a closet and I said, oh great, I've got a closet, I'll make a studio out of that. 07:31 Well, that closet had no clothing in it, right? And that became a whole different set of circumstances where I thought, oh, it'll be easy, I'll just hang carpet, or I've got some old carpet, I'll hang some blankets. Well, it was actually more difficult to create a good sound with an empty closet than it was to actually build. My father actually built me a structure, so it was a little four by four by eight foot room in a room which actually works better than my closet which had nothing in it, like no clothes. So I feel like a clothing closet with clothes in it is really something that can help and can be better in a lot of cases than a clean closet. 08:10 - Tom Dheere (Host) Right, I think I don't remember who was it said it, but sound functions like water and you have to understand where the sound flows and it always has to go somewhere. It's gonna go down, it's gonna go towards you or behind you, it's gonna get bounced around and moved around. So, under a standing, how and where the sound goes will help you figure it out Whether that involves getting bass traps or whether you gotta get Aurelix. 08:35 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Now people are going what? Or some people buy pool noodles. What are bass traps? 08:39 - Tom Dheere (Host) Aurelix is a form of acoustic foam. I don't even know if I can properly define bass traps are. They're usually in the corners of the room, corners of the room, padding the corners there. 08:47 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I think what you're trying to do is not have any. The other thing, if you can, because of reflection, right, Sound bouncing If you have walls that are perpendicular to one another or parallel. 08:59 - Tom Dheere (Host) Right, you don't want angles, you want curves. 09:01 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Curves or angles, or if you do and I'm gonna get to our studios in just a moment if you do, you wanna make sure that you've got adequate coverage for sound absorption in there. 09:11 - Tom Dheere (Host) Right, but at the same time you don't want a dead space either. Too much acoustical treatment can be a bad thing, because your space has to have some kind of texture too. Not like a signature texture that is like oh, I could tell I listened to that commercial. I know Ann did it in her booth. It's not like that, but just something that doesn't sound like you're talking in a safe. You know what I mean. 09:29 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Absolutely, absolutely so. Ultimately, tom, it wasn't until I moved and this is after 14 years of actually being a full time doing voiceover and making money and so I had to have a booth that created good audio that people didn't reject. And, trust me, I did have a time when people rejected my audio, and that was when I didn't have an ear for what I needed to know, and that was very distressing. 09:53 By the way, all I can say is that once you figure out how to get your sound where it needs to be, it is a big load off your shoulders. But once I decided to move, I actually was able to kind of plan and really think because, okay, I'm 13, 14 years into my full time business, I wanna actually have a space that is created just for recording. And so I was fortunate and I researched, I researched a lot of different things. I thought, well, I can't bring the booth. My father had constructed a booth for me at my town home in Irvine and I couldn't really deconstruct it and reconstruct it again to have the same properties and everybody. I love that booth, by the way, and it was really wonderful and I had had that assessed and blessed by George the Tech, by the way, at the time. But now that I had an opportunity to actually have some time to sit down and think about it, I decided and I looked into researching, I looked into buying a Studio Bricks and it was gonna be really expensive at the time and at the time they were shipping it from Spain, I believe. There was no timeframe as to when I would get it and I thought, oh God, I can't move to a new home and not have a place to record, and so I said, well, let me look into something different. I spoke to George the Tech, who said you know, you might consider having this built for you a custom booth built for you and I started looking into that and fortunately I was able to find someone and, of course, everybody that's ever followed me or I definitely have a podcast on this with Tim Tippetts who designed and built my booth a custom built booth for me and I'm going to tell you that it was a luxury, but it was also something that it was great, because everything was custom tailored just for me and I'm sitting in it now. So if you're watching this podcast on YouTube, you can see my studio. 11:36 I've got sound panels in here. I actually have something that's not quite 90 degrees to one another, but you wouldn't know it by looking at it. It's just very slightly angled, but I do have ceiling acoustic tiles. I have acoustic tiles on my left, to my right, behind me, and I've got a double door, and so that cost me some dollars. I'm gonna say my first studios were a few hundred. Once I upgraded the studio that my father built for me, I would say that cost me about $1,000 with all the treatment and improvements to that, and this one was in the thousands of dollars. 12:09 But it's kind of set it and forget it and done, and so, comparatively, I live in a very quiet area to you, tom, and we'll make that comparison Cause, right, I'm West Coast. I live in a home, I'm in a studio that is dedicated and built custom for me, with double walls, green glue, acoustic panels. I live in it over 55 retirement community, on a cul-de-sac. There's not people racing around here. Well, if there are, that's some other issue. And so I have all the blessings of being able to sit in here and very rarely have to stop recording because there's something noisy happening outside. But, tom, tell me about yours because, again, mine cost thousands of dollars and I'm not saying it was super expensive, because I think for a custom built booth I got a really great deal. But, tom, talk about your studio because, again, you have an amazing studio that you've been working out of for years and just producing broadcast quality like beautiful stuff, one after the other. 13:05 - Tom Dheere (Host) Well, it's funny because I lived in that apartment in New Jersey for 12 years, so I was recording from that space for 12 years and it was regularly a pain in the butt because there was landscaping going on, there was a lot of cars driving by, there was Snow shoveling, there was kids going to school, coming home from school because the high school was right across the street, so there were a lot of problems with that one. Now I live in Midtown Manhattan. For those of you who don't know, there are certain cross streets in New York City 9th Street, 14th Street, 23rd Street, 34th Street and then higher. I live on 34th Street, which means it's one of the two-way streets. Also the Lincoln Tunnel entrances just stones throw away. So I am literally living in the second floor of an apartment building over one of the most heavily trafficked Streets in Manhattan, if not the country. 14:01 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Wow, not the world. 14:02 - Tom Dheere (Host) Wow. So what's crazy is that when I moved in here about five and a half years ago, there was a front closet, just like I had in New Jersey, and I'm like, well, let's not try to reinvent the wheel, let's just do what I did there and do it here and see what happens. It turns out that it's even better. The sound is even better than the one in New Jersey, and here's why is that. I'm sitting here at my desk and the front door to my apartment is like literally right here. I can't quite touch it, but it's pretty close and then there's a closet front closets right here, so I sit in it. When I'm sitting, my back is to the hallway and behind me this wall separating the hallway from the apartment is concrete, so that's yeah, concrete is always good. 14:45 And I using my Sennheiser 416, which is facing the concrete now. 14:50 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Why is that important that it's a 416? 14:53 - Tom Dheere (Host) the 416 is great because it has a very, very tight field. It doesn't pick up a lot outside of here, which is why, if you get a Sennheiser 416, your angle to the microphone makes a very, very big difference. So you need to find that sweet spot where you're sitting, how it's angled up like this and where it is like this, and where you are seated In relation to it to kind of get into that very tight Right and that's what makes that an ideal microphone for, let's say, a less than ideal Space right and it's also one of the reasons why I use it for travel as well, because of the pickup pattern, is very Concentrated and you don't have to worry so much about. 15:32 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Like I also have a TLM 103, which is a beautiful microphone. However, it picks up when you breathe because the pickup pattern is much broader than a 416. So yes, I think in terms of studio spaces, if you have less than idea, 416 or a shotgun type of mic that has a smaller pickup is much more ideal for that right. 15:51 - Tom Dheere (Host) The other thing is that the windows this is a 60-something year old apartment building here in New York City, but the windows are very new. They're very, very tightly sealed. 16:02 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Are they double-pained? 16:03 - Tom Dheere (Host) They are double-pained. 16:04 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I think most apartment buildings that are in in cities are double-pained anyways, right, A lot of them are double-pained yeah and I used the same exact carpet remnants and and Bessie's quilt. 16:14 - Tom Dheere (Host) From there I said everything I love it. 16:16 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) You got Aunt Bessie with you, see I ban out Bessie's quilt. She's with us, ann always she supports it. 16:22 - Tom Dheere (Host) Yes, and the monitor. Actually my wife, who's actually more mechanically inclined than I, and she actually drilled the monitor into the wall, so we set up all the acoustical treatment. She drilled it right in there and then it's still. It's a new set of monitors since the ones I had in New Jersey, but they're also networked the same way, with a splitter I bring the earmouse into the booth and so I just scroll, scroll, scroll. So I haven't printed a script in years, in years. And the quality it's even better than it was in New Jersey and I attribute it to a more solid floor and the concrete wall and better treated windows, so I actually didn't spend anything on the new booth actually. 16:58 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Right. And the other thing, too, is you probably have to be concerned A lot of times, like an inside wall or a wall that has concrete on the other side of, or a wall that isn't near plumbing is very helpful, and so if you're too close to a window, sometimes you don't have the protection I mean because that's yet another medium that can allow sound in or out or be reflective. I, literally right outside of this door, probably five feet away, is my front windows, and so I've got double windows there. But because I've got double doors here, if the waste removal trucks come right, actually I don't hear it through this, which is really fantastic, but if I've wanted the doors open, or if I have both these doors open, or if I'm sitting outside, yes, obviously I won't be able to record. 17:42 - Tom Dheere (Host) I've had jackhammers outside. 17:44 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Wow, that's fantastic. 17:46 - Tom Dheere (Host) The only thing that really really gets through is if my upstairs neighbor is vacuuming. That's the only thing that makes it impossible to record. 17:53 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) So you're talking about the closet, then your actual studio is the closet behind you. 17:57 - Tom Dheere (Host) Right now that I'm seeing right, there's a front closet right here and then these other doors actually leading to the kitchen. 18:02 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) And how big is that closet? 18:03 - Tom Dheere (Host) Three, by three maybe. 18:05 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Okay, and do you have anything else in it besides your recording equipment and or absorption material? 18:10 - Tom Dheere (Host) Not really. I mean, there's two shelves above it which we use for storage of various things. This time of year I've got two winter coats in there, but the rest of the year they're not in there. 18:20 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) So actually, the two winter coats actually make it even a little more insulated, absolutely Especially if they're puffer jackets, right, I mean you can-. 18:26 - Tom Dheere (Host) One's puffy and then one's like a really nice one, like when we go out out. Actually, the only thing I did buy was the cable. I needed to make sure that the cable can run. So I'm sitting here and it runs and it runs across the floor right all the door and then I've got a rug that covers that and just snakes into the booth. I think that was the only additional investment and I live it by B&H, so it was like 20 bucks. I just went across the street, got it. Whatever, this is a 15-20 foot cable. I think that was the only additional expense to moving here from the old department and that was it. I also want to say this, ann, is that I was ashamed of my studio setup for a very, very long time. I thought that I wouldn't be regarded as a true professional, much less the VO strategist, if I didn't have a $5,000 booth. I am proud of my space. 19:07 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) You should be. 19:07 - Tom Dheere (Host) I am proud of the work that I do in it and the work that me, and with the a lot of help from my wife, did to get it to where it is. No, it doesn't cost a lot. No, it isn't pretty, but your job, bosses, is to be effective as voice actors on a performance level, on a logistical level, on a financial level and on a technical level. 19:25 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) So I don't care if it ain't pretty Well again, nobody's necessarily looking, and even if they are looking at you and your studio, really what comes out of that studio is what's important, right? It's not what the studio looks like, and I know a lot of bosses out there. I think it becomes complicated to them and sometimes a pre-built studio solution or a studio solution like Studio Bricks or Vocal to Go or LA Boos or whichever is out there, it becomes a solution that's simple to them. Well, you don't necessarily need to spend that kind of money. If you have it, of course I think that's great, but I think if you're just starting out in the industry and you're just trying to see if this is something that is going to be good for you, and if you're going to really make a go at it and have a successful voiceover business, I don't think you need to invest a lot in a studio right away. 20:15 I mean, gosh, I always talk about when we are traveling and on the road. Tom, we certainly don't have optimal recording situations in a hotel room, because a lot of times you've got the ventilation system, you've got fans running, you've got people out in the hallway in your hotel room, you've got windows and what's happening outside of windows to deal with. And so for us again, what's important is that we protect ourselves to the front, to the left, to the right, behind and above. And so a lot of times when we are away and traveling, I do the old pillow fort, the non-glamorous pillow fort, and that is literally put the pillows in front of you, to the left, to the right, above you. I take the actual luggage rack and put it on top of the desk. 21:01 And then I take the extra comforter and I make a tent out of it and then I take my 416 and that's what we do. Now I also have a tri-booth, which is great. A tri-booth, love the tri-booth, and I've got a review of the tri-booth on my blog for any of you that are interested in it. That is a PVC kind of put together constructed booth with moving blankets and a stack that has been created by George the Tech so that you can recreate your home studio on the go, and so I absolutely love my tri-booth. If I decide that I want to take that, I can check that right on the plane. It comes in its own suitcase and it's super, super easy to assemble, and so you can do that. 21:42 It's not always necessary, though. I say Create a studio, try to get yourself acclimated to what sound it is that you're looking for, great sound. If you are somewhat into audio today, if you're a podcaster, make sure that that studio really does have your acoustics properly set up and oriented, because sometimes a podcast I mean I know that when I first started podcasting I would listen to other podcasts and go why are they not concerned about their room, their sound? Because I would hear echo, sometimes the sound quality just wasn't there. But if you are coming in from another segment of the industry or another part of the industry, understand that your environment is important so that you can create good quality audio Does not have to cost a lot of money. 22:29 And, tom, I love our conversation because you are proof that you can have an amazing sounding studio and not have to invest a lot of money. You can be in a crazy city with tons of traffic, not a lot of space, and create an environment that you can do work and excel at over and over again and you don't have to invest lots of money. So thank you so much for talking to me today about your studio. Any other tips that you have for, let's say, bosses, maybe just starting out, or investigating what kind of studio to get or things to do to create a great studio. 23:07 - Tom Dheere (Host) Well, I do at vostratagescom. I also have blogs and videos that talks about gear, and I also have a gear section on my site. 23:13 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I believe you do too right, I do Absolutely Studio gear. 23:16 - Tom Dheere (Host) Check out both, because I guarantee there are some gear recommendations I have on my site that Ann doesn't, and then she has some on her site that I don't. So definitely check them out. There's different price points and I've talked about this stuff for many, many years, just like Ann is. But do your research. Harlan Hogan's Guide to Home Recording Studios is a great book. Sound Advice by Dan Friedman is another great book those who can be a very, very big help. And you can always book a free consult. I believe George the Tech has free consults, or at least you can contact him through the George the Tech website, because he's got an army of great engineers and that between all of them they know every microphone, they know all the hardware, they know all the software, they know all the acoustical treatment secrets. 23:57 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I have an affiliate page with him too, so do I VO Boss can get you a discount as well, so there you go, whether you come to Tom or VO Boss, absolutely you can get a discount ona consult with George I don't promote that because I am an affiliate with him, but literally George has been with me from the beginning. I mean, he is the one who and I have blog articles written on that who literally took my father and my homemade booth and when we were like, okay, what else can we do? There's something missing, he was the missing key. He was the one that was able to take what we had done and make it sound. 24:31 And I used to get complimented all the time by audio engineers saying what is your studio? 24:36 It's amazing and in reality it's hysterical, because if you saw what my studio looked like, it certainly wasn't glamorous or elegant, but it really did the job and just like Tom's. I mean absolutely. And I think you can be proud and it's important for you to feel proud and feel good in the space that you're in, because it is our personal voice and it is our performance that needs to excel in a booth or in a space that we feel good in, and so you want to make sure you create that space. And so if Ant and I'm sorry, your Ant's name again, bessie, so if Ant Bessie is fully supporting you in your booth. I mean, I cannot tell you the affection and how good I felt being in a studio that was designed and built by my father and my father, by the way, had a lot to do with this studio as well and it does help. I sit in the studio and I feel good, and when you feel good, you can produce good audio, and I think that that's super important. And what a fun conversation today. 25:29 Tom, thank you so much for sharing your space and talking about studios with me today. Bosses, I want to invite you to imagine a world full of passionate and empowered, diverse individuals giving collectively and intentionally to create a world that you want to see. You can make a difference. Visit 100voiceshukerorg to learn more and, of course, our sponsor, ipdtl. I love IPDTL and use it on a day-to-day basis. I just love it. Use it for all my coaching students. Find out more at IPDTLcom. You guys have an amazing week and we'll see you next week. Thanks, guys, bye. 26:10 - Intro (Host) Join us next week for another edition of VO Boss with your host, Ann Ganguzza, and take your business to the next level. Sign up for our mailing list at vobosscom and receive exclusive content, industry revolutionizing tips and strategies and new ways to rock your business like a boss. Redistribution with permission. Coast-to-coast connectivity via IPDTL.

Anne Ganguzza and special guest BOSS Emma O'Neill talk about enhancing your voiceover performances through a fusion of fitness and wellness. Emma is an award-winning voice actor who's also a seasoned yoga instructor. the BOSSES discuss how the disciplines of health and performance are deeply connected. Emma shares her inspiring transition from a gym enthusiast to a holistic voice professional and illustrates that a strong body fosters a strong voice. Anne also discusses her current health journey, shedding light on the profound influence of nutrition and exercise on the art of voice acting. Navigating the world of mindful eating is no small feat, especially with the demanding schedules of voiceover artists. The BOSSES talk about instinctual eating and its benefits for those who rely on their vocal cords for a living. Plus, we delve into strategies for managing mental health and how a strong support system can be your ally in maintaining peak performance for both mind and body. 00:01 - Intro (Announcement) It's time to take your business to the next level, the boss level. These are the premier business owner strategies and successes being utilized by the industry's top talent today. Rock your business like a boss, a VO Boss. Now let's welcome your host, Anne Ganguzzaa. 00:20 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Hey everyone, welcome to the VO Boss Podcast. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzza, and today I am absolutely thrilled to have a very special guest, Emma, O'neill, with me today. Hello, yay, Emma is a multi-award-winning voice actor and gosh, don't I know what. I've seen her receive multiple awards at these ceremonies in the last few years. She specializes in radio, tv commercials, tv narration, promo and corporate training videos and, of course, outside of her major success in the booth outside of the booth, she is a fitness and wellness enthusiast and I'm so excited to talk to her, and she's been a certified yoga instructor for more than 25 years. 00:59 So, emma, thank you so much for joining me and I'm so, so excited to talk to you today. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here, absolutely so. I'm excited because you've combined now two of the things that are becoming my favorite thing, and what I've proven to myself over this health journey is that fitness and wellness has really helped me in the booth so much, and I'd love to talk to you about it and your experience, because, I mean, you've known this for forever, I'm sure, and, however, for me it's just kind of like wow, I can't believe how amazing I feel and how it's really helped me in my voiceover and my voiceover business. So tell the boss listeners a little bit about your journey, how you got started and how you got in voiceover as well. 01:43 - Emma O'Niell (Guest) My mother was a dance teacher, so I was in dance as a kid, in gymnastics, and then we moved to Canada and I continued with gymnastics but discovered the gym and discovered step classes at the age of like 16 or something and it was just really fun Step classes. 01:57 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I have to interject and say that my husband, when I met my husband, he was teaching step at a gym in addition to spin, and I would watch him on the step. I just have to say this because I'm not coordinated and he'd be like doing great vines up around the step and all sorts of dance moves and I would be like in the back because I liked him back then and I would just be kind of like trying to follow along, you're cute, but I'm not going to kill myself on the step. 02:19 - Emma O'Niell (Guest) Yeah, I'm just going to stay in the back. 02:21 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I'm going to beat him so I didn't want to hurt. Well, maybe hurting myself. God is attacking right? Didn't ever know. 02:28 - Emma O'Niell (Guest) Yeah, so I did step. I was a gym kid for a really long time and I got into yoga because I was at the gym all the time and I had hit a plateau. I was into fitness competitions and I was training for a fitness competition and I had hit a plateau and nothing was changing. Nothing was working. I would change my nutrition, I changed what I was doing, and someone suggested going to a yoga class and I was like, yeah, that's just like stretching. They're like no, no, no, go to this woman's class. I went to this class and the woman was in her late 70s, early 80s. One of her arms did not work. She had a stroke and I crawled out of that class. She handed my butt back to me. It was one of the hardest things I had ever done and I was like, oh well, now I must do that again because, yes, it was something. I just fell in love with the practice. 03:17 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) That's fantastic. I can't believe you're doing step when you were 16. One thing that I'm excited to talk to you about, because I mean bosses who have been following me know that I kind of went through a health journey. I've been through a few health journeys in my life, but this last one seemed to be more significant than others After I was diagnosed with breast cancer. 03:34 Things just kind of catapulted after that and literally my hormones got thrown off balance. I had actually just lost a significant amount of weight before I was diagnosed and I believe that that saved my life, because I think that my doctor was able to find my tumors because of that, because otherwise I had had a little, you know, she was able to feel them, so I'm very thankful for that. However, after treatment, mine was estrogen-based. I then had some chemo treatment which started kind of trying to block estrogen, because that's it was an estrogen-based cancer. I went through menopause and then it became one hormonal thing after another and then the pandemic, and so everything catapulted. 04:12 I gained a lot of weight. I gained at least all the weight back on that I had lost previous to it and then some, and this shirt that I'm wearing right now. So if bosses are watching on YouTube is my Wonder Woman shirt, which was given to me by Natalie. It's a big shout out to Natalie because after I was reconstructed and declared cancer-free, she said you are like Wonder Woman. And I'll tell you what. I have not fit into this shirt, since I have now discovered again how important nutrition is and exercise, and I've come back from my health journey losing a significant amount of weight. So I feel like Wonder Woman and I think you're going to be able to explain to our boss listeners why that's so significant and how that can really impact us in the booth. So I'm really excited. Tell us, tell us, tell us. What are you seeing is the most important thing that bosses can do to positively, let's say, affect their performance in the booth through nutrition and fitness and all of that good stuff. 05:09 - Emma O'Niell (Guest) Thank you. One of the things I always try to drive home and people tend to not want to believe it I think it's not that they don't believe it, they don't want to believe it is that health and fitness is 90% nutrition and 10% what you're doing in the gym, on a walk in a yoga studio. It's 90% what you're putting into your mouth. And the health and fitness industry I put that into air quotes it's a business and it's a multi-billion dollar business because we're fed all of these lose a dress size in 30 days, but no one's taught how to maintain the loss. 05:41 - Intro (Announcement) Hello, exactly, so we yo-yo and all of us do it, and all of us. 05:44 - Emma O'Niell (Guest) Yeah, you are not alone. You are not alone. We need to learn how to reverse diet, and reverse dieting isn't something that's taught. So, yes, you need to cut calories, calories, calories out it's just science. But you need to learn how to then build back up the calorie intake to maintain the weight that you've lost without gaining back the weight by increasing your calories. 06:03 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I think that's key, and I think if we all had the magic pill or the magic injection, that could help us to do that right. Isn't that what the craze is now? Everybody wants these injections to magically lose weight, and I think there's one thing to be said for me, having had a significant amount of weight to lose, it took me a significant amount of time to lose it, which I think is good because, during that time I was able to really develop, I think, what I hope to be health habits that will stay with me. 06:31 I, for one, will tell you, I've lost and gained multiple times in my life, and I am at this point in my life. I am too old. I do not want to gain it back again. I'm terrified. I'm terrified to gain it back again, and so I literally am committed right now in my mind, in my mental space, to continue with the eating. 06:49 I think that's where it starts, right With the nutrition that you put in your mouth, because for the first year I couldn't exercise really, because I was so out of shape. I just couldn't. I thought I might die. To be honest with you, and people say that, oh my God, you work so hard, but I literally had a hard time breathing and so I couldn't exercise for a good year. And now I'm finally starting to and I've seen where I still need to make sure that I know exactly what's going into my mouth at all times and that's what really is helping me to keep weight off right now. That and I want to be accountable, which is one of the reasons why I'm so happy to talk to you and to find out more from you, because I feel like if I'm accountable to the bosses out there, I'm accountable to people who can educate me on this. I'm going to stand a better chance of keeping the weight off. Yeah. 07:38 - Emma O'Niell (Guest) Movement is important, like one of the best things you can do for your body is walk. Walking is fantastic. If you're sedentary we're all sedentary being voice actors it doesn't matter if you're working out on a daily basis. You're sitting for longer than you're moving, so that means you're sedentary. But if you can get your 5,000 to 10,000 steps in a day, like aim for 5,000. If you're sitting down all day, aim for 5,000, that's a good start. If you can get up to 10,000 by increasing it by a minute of walking a day, it's doing things in bite-sized pieces and it's the same with food. Everyone's biodiverse, so it means they're bio unique. So what works for me isn't necessarily what's going to work for you or what's going to work for anybody else, but in general, especially for women, we tend not to eat enough, especially during the day, and then we over eat at night. 08:25 Because then we're really, really hungry, and especially as self-employed people, and our business hours are crazy and they're all over the place and we're working as the work is kind of coming in. I know that's what I do. So it's like I'll get up in the morning and I do my meditation and I do my workout or I do a yoga practice and I have a great breakfast, and then it's six o'clock at night and I've had tea and I'm like now I'm going to stand in front of the fridge and eat the contents of the fridge because I'm hungry. 08:49 - Intro (Announcement) Why am I making dinner? 08:50 - Emma O'Niell (Guest) Why am I making dinner? I'm eating the contents of the fridge. Meal prep is a huge step. It's very helpful to have grab and go foods in your fridge, because the grab and go foods will grab bread will grab, chips will grab a banana will grab easy food. 09:03 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) The quick stuff. 09:04 - Emma O'Niell (Guest) Yeah, but if you've got like boiled eggs, tuna salad, chopped salad ready to go, chopped vegetables with hummus, if you have things that are grab and go and easy to grab and go but they're good for you, it's much easier to maintain or it's much easier to lose. If your goal is to lose weight, you have to meal prep. If your goal is to maintain, I think that everybody really needs meal prep, meal prep, meal prep. Just keep repeating myself Grab and go and meal prep. 09:31 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) You know, what's so interesting is that I've tried every diet under the sun. I've been on every diet. I've lost weight on most diets. It comes down to like maintaining and keeping up, but the one difference about this last plan that I went on was that I was eating, every two and a half to three hours, small high protein meals, and that worked for me, and I was that person that said no, I need to fast. I never was a person who ate breakfast in the morning. I always waited, and you're right. I mean when you wait, when all of a sudden you're like, oh my God, I'm hungry, I'm starved, and then everything goes in my mouth quickly, and then it's hard to really control what it is, and so I like, six times a day, at least tiny little meals, and for me that's perfect as well. 10:07 - Emma O'Niell (Guest) You don't need to be full. It's one of those things. I come from Ireland, originally born and raised there. I came over to Canada. We did not have a pot to piss in, so it was whatever was put onto your plate. You consumed because you did not waste. 10:19 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) What was there? 10:20 - Emma O'Niell (Guest) And if there was too much food on your plate, it didn't matter, you had to eat it Like it wasn't put away, it was. You will sit there and you will finish that. So I was raised with that mentality. So you would eat a meal and you would be full, full, full, full, full, full. You don't need to be full, you need to be satisfied, and it's learning how to instinctually eat that you're eating until you are. I'm good Like, could I eat more? Absolutely Do. 10:43 - Intro (Announcement) I need to. 10:44 - Emma O'Niell (Guest) No, I don't, Because I'm going to eat in another two hours anyway. 10:47 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Right, right, and that makes a lot of sense, because I found that when I did eat small meals, I could hold off until the next two and a half to three hours. I will tell you, though, the other day I came back home from a trip and I'm still kind of on that plan, but I my time was off, like I went from the East Coast to the West Coast and so I was overtired. And then, when I'm overtired, I think that's so dangerous, because then you just don't, you're not thinking straight, and then you just want to put anything in your mouth, and I probably ate one more tiny meal than I should have, and I actually got full, and I was like whoa, it's been so long, and I was really uncomfortable at that point because I had not been full. And then I was like I might have indigestion. I'm not sure, and that certainly doesn't help me when I try to voice anything in my studio, right when I've got like reflux, because that definitely affects my vocal chords. 11:36 - Emma O'Niell (Guest) Well, especially speaking of being full when you're in the booth, you don't want to feel full, you don't want to feel bloated, you don't want to feel gassy. You're voicing something and your tummy's making all sorts of noises because you're like oh, hang on a second. Oh no, there's another gurgle in the belly, so you want to be eating fibrous foods, high protein foods and thermogenic foods. Thermogenic food basically means that it takes your body more energy to consume, to digest the food, than the food is worth. 12:04 It was like there was the old myth that celery was a negative calorie food because you consume more energy eating the celery than the celery had in caloric value. It's not true, but it's the same idea. Instead of having a protein shake, have a piece of chicken. It takes your body longer to digest something solid than it does to digest something liquid. That's what thermogenic means, very interesting. So you're asking your body. It's like so you need to burn more calories to consume this food. Cool, because it takes longer. It also keeps you fuller for longer. 12:35 So, you're not full. It's not that I can't take a proper deep breath. I can't use my diaphragm. It's I'm full, I'm satisfied, but I'm going to be fuller for longer, so that when I'm reaching for food again I'm not starving and shoving. It's usually carbohydrates we're looking for when we're really hungry. 12:50 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Well, yeah, I find, if I try to stay away from carbohydrates, that was my guilty pleasure was carbohydrates. It wasn't sweets, it was carbs, because I was also well raised in a large family and I think my father might have had a piece of bread and butter with every meal and it was like that kind of bread, potatoes sort of thing and that's what I loved, and so that did not do my waistline any good for sure. But how do you feel? In addition to like what you put in your mouth, how do you feel about your mental state? Because when I got into this I was like, oh, I just can't. I've lost weight before it, just nothing I am doing is working. I find that I had very negative. I can't lose weight. How do you feel mental health effects? And I also had very bad body dysmorphia so I couldn't look at myself, and so how does that affect weight loss and how does that affect your performance on any given day in your business and in the booth? 13:43 - Emma O'Niell (Guest) Your mental health is paramount, absolutely. I start my day every day with meditation. When the alarm goes off, I sit up and I meditate because I'm still in kind of theta brain, so I'm not in awake, let's do things. Brain. I'm still in a different state where you can kind of program your brain to learn new things and it's about exercise releases serotonin, which is the happy chemical, like you want to feel good and so you want to find ways to feed your brain and calm yourself down. 14:18 Losing weight can be really challenging. If you are struggling with your weight, it can be challenging and it's also it's the devil, you know. It's so much easier to just go back to old ways because you know them, even though you know they're not good for you or they're not healthy, they're not beneficial. They're easier because you know them and it's more difficult to stick on a track that's initially a little bit challenging. Once you get past the first hump, I think things get easier. But mental health is really important, like getting off your screen before you go to bed. Easier said than done. 14:48 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yeah, that is the truth. 14:49 - Emma O'Niell (Guest) Surrounding yourself with really positive people, surrounding yourself with cheerleaders especially in those times because we all have them that we're not going to be kind to ourselves, like we're not going to be our biggest cheerleader, we're going to doubt ourselves, we're not going to be. As I can do this, as we possibly can, you need to be surrounded with people who pick you up when you're in that state. So feeding your brain proper foods, breathing, exercises are fantastic. What you're reading, what you're consuming from an intellectual and mental level is really important for your brain health. But this is why yoga, for me, has always been. When I found yoga, it was so helpful for my mental health because I struggled with anxiety and I'm an introvert. 15:29 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) So talk to me a little bit about. I do some cardio. I actually, because I had complications with my weight gain and age. I was also diagnosed with diabetes, which also affected my feet a little bit and my balance, and so walking on uneven terrain is sometimes a little difficult for me. So for me I have a pre-core in the garage, which I always love pre-core because it's not impact. So if I want to walk right, that is my walking, and I also do Pilates. So for me, I think trying to build some muscle through that is also going to help me. But let's talk about yoga a little bit, because I've not really done much yoga. But tell me, what does that incorporate for your body and also for your mental health, and how can that help us? 16:14 - Emma O'Niell (Guest) Me personally, I practice what's called Ashtanga yoga, and Ashtanga yoga is one of the older lineages of yoga. It's kind of the parent of power yoga or vinyasa yoga. So the faster paste, the faster moving styles of yoga, and I studied extensively in India. I spent a lot of time in India at the source with a guru and it's not Western yoga at all Like, it's not pretty. 16:37 You don't listen to music, no one tells you to open your heart, you are told to shut up and bend your knee and do what you're told. And it's a really interesting way of being, especially from a Western mindset. When we're speaking like I am independent and don't tell me what to do and I will do it, but it's like no, then you can't be here. Ashtanga yoga is about doing the practice, doing the movements and paying so much attention to what's happening in your body and your breath that you stop thinking. You stop the spiral of the I have to do this or the negative thoughts or any of that, because if you think too much, you're going to fall over the practice is. It's challenging, it's a very physically complicated practice to do so it gets to a point where it becomes a moving meditation, because all you're doing is paying attention to where your foot is, where your hand is, how you're going to balance. 17:25 Pull your core in. Where's your breath? 17:26 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) That's so interesting. Do you incorporate that at all in your booth, maybe, or during performance? Because that's so interesting. I find that for my students. When I talk to students, I say stop thinking about what you sound like and be in the moment and be in the scene. It almost sounds like you could use those principles to keep you in a scene so that you can be more authentic as a performer. 17:48 - Emma O'Niell (Guest) That's a really interesting way to put it, because I'm a classically trained actor and I haven't been in proper acting class for decades. So I decided to go back to actual acting versus voice acting, and I've gone back to Meisner, and Meisner is exactly that. Like Meisner is about making something real in imaginary circumstances, and it's the same idea. All of this has nothing to do with the sound of your voice. It's got everything to do with connection. 18:11 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Right, absolutely. 18:12 - Emma O'Niell (Guest) And your breath. Mind, body connection is what we're trying to do in all forms of movement. And it's the same in what we're doing in our booths. It's breath, mind and body. 18:20 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Right, and it's absolutely. We are trying to connect with our listener and that is. 18:25 I think it's such an important concept and it's such a difficult concept, I think, for people that are just starting out in this industry, because they just know it should sound like this, and I'm always trying to get my students out of their listening, out of their brain and into a scene where they can actually react and tell a story, and I feel like that's got to be so interesting in terms of you practice it in that style of yoga that that makes sense, that you could do the same principled thing in the booth. 18:54 - Emma O'Niell (Guest) It can be difficult to cross the two of them over. But when you have those moments of magic like I mean, obviously you don't record with your cans on. You've got your headphones off so that you don't fall in love with the dulcet sounds of your voice, and we all do, and a lot of people will talk about like you've got your engineer hat on and you've got your actor hat on and they should never be worn at the same time. So that's why you're not listening to yourself when you're recording. There are those magic moments where you just feel like you've dropped into. I am really telling this story. 19:25 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) It felt right. I'm always saying like what did it feel like to you? Did it feel right? Then it probably was, it was probably authentic. You were in the moment. It's so hard, I think, for people that are thinking so much and they're in their head when they're in the booth. So do you have any special tips or exercises that you would recommend for voice actors to kind of help them? Because I think a lot of times it's a performance anxiety in the booth, even when you're by yourself. Sometimes you can just be too much in your head. Is there an exercise that you can do that can help you maybe relax, so that can help you get more into your performance? 20:02 - Emma O'Niell (Guest) You can do. I think it's called square breathing. I speak in Sanskrit when it comes to yoga stuff. I don't know the English translations of a lot of the stuff, but I think it's called square breathing and it's just about balanced breath, that you're counting your breath in for five, holding for five, exhale for five, hold for five and repeat that until you calm down. But the breathing is about it's diaphragmatic breathing. So you're trying to make sure that when you're taking an inhale, when we're nervous, when we're scared, we only breathe into the very, very top part of our chest, like from our collar bones, kind of like to above the boob, and there's nothing else happening. And with breath that's going to calm you down, you have to get it into your body. So, putting your hands on your belly, putting your hands on your lower back and trying to feel your body expand, as you breathe and not trying to stuff breath into your body. 20:50 So it's just a very simple kind of seeing your body as a jar or a vessel and you fill that vessel like any vessel, from the bottom to the middle to the top. Let it hold and then exhale it from the top to the middle, to the bottom, and if you just let yourself, slow down for a second and feel the breath enter the bottom of your body, the middle and the top, immediately the nervous system calms down. 21:21 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yeah, you know, what's so interesting is that I don't want this to be all about Anne's health crises, but I'll tell you what I mean. Being unhealthy, I mean it affected every part of my body and the other part, besides being overweight, being diagnosed with diabetes, having neuropathy, I also was diagnosed with high blood pressure. I mean that's what my oncologist had said to me, that I want you to get more blood work because your blood pressure is stroke level high, which scared me, really scared me, and so, interestingly enough, I had done a lot of breathing exercises since I had a double mastectomy and when you have surgery on your chest after that surgery, it was hard for me to. I did a lot of long format narration, so I needed to figure out new ways to breathe, because a lot of times narration is lots of long sentences. Sometimes they're not written wonderfully well, and so I think the better you can breathe, the better you're going to be able to execute your sentences that are long and unwieldy and make them sound more natural. 22:16 And so there's a lot to breathing, and I found that being diagnosed with high blood pressure. Then, of course, they put me on medication which I'm now off, which I'm so thankful for, but I still take my blood pressure every day just to kind of keep it in check. And I found that if you're breathing and then exhaling and you're breathing before you take your blood pressure, it's amazing how low your blood pressure can go once you've done a few of those breathing exercises. And it's funny because my doctor will ask me she'll say are you breathing before? Because my blood pressure was so significantly lower. Every time I go in there and I take it and I said, let's see how low I can get my blood pressure this time right, so I'll just do some breathing and then exhaling too through my nose really helps a lot and it lowers your blood pressure amazingly well. That and mentally going to that place where you're happy and not stressed. 23:06 So, it's incredible Like I see the numbers change, how it really can help. And it's so interesting because people say, just take a couple of deep breaths and I'm like, yeah, what does it really do? Okay, but in reality I've seen the numbers, I've seen the numbers go down and it's incredible Just what good breathing will do and what good breathing will do in order to execute your scripts more believably and authentically, because you're not just like, oh my God, I'm just going to read and then I just went. Oh, I just went out of. Because we don't really run out of breath when we talk, naturally, because we pace ourselves right and we know where we're going to take that breath. But when there are words that aren't ours, if you have good breath support, you can certainly navigate them and make it sound a whole lot more natural. So breathing to me is incredibly important, and especially in a live directed session, I would imagine that. Do you ever get nervous, like when you're in a live directed session, and do you practice your breathing? 23:59 - Emma O'Niell (Guest) Yeah, yeah, it probably just comes naturally to you, like breathing is meditation and there's a great book that I got one of the trips that I was in India. The preface began with people think that meditation is about turning your mind off. That will only happen if your friend hits you on the head with a hammer. I don't recommend it. 24:17 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I like that because that's what I always thought. It's not. 24:21 - Emma O'Niell (Guest) Yeah, it's about not getting engaged with your thoughts. The way I describe it is like you're at Starbucks, you're reading your book. It's really quiet, yeah, but then it gets busy, like now the lunch rush has come in, but you still want to read your book and you don't want to leave because you've got the chair in the sun. It's great, it's wonderful, but everyone's talking around you and you're being really distracted. So you focus on that book. And you're focusing on that book and you fall straight back into the story and all of a sudden, everybody else in Starbucks fades away. They're still there, you're just not paying attention. That's meditation, and you do that with breath. 24:51 I love that. It's just you paying attention, that's all meditation is. And if you can do that with your breath, of paying attention to the feeling of the inhale, feel the breath coming through your nostrils. 25:01 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) All right. So in the morning, when you're up and you're meditating, right, are you simply just breathing? You're not necessarily thinking. 25:07 - Emma O'Niell (Guest) Let's say positive thoughts or some days I do positive thoughts. Most days I just do breath because it helps me start my day with a really calm peace of mind. I feel much more grounded because you know an alarm will jar you as you're waking up and it kind of pulls you out of your sleep. You're not necessarily ready to be out of sleep. So if you give yourself five minutes, 10 minutes, before you get out of bed and just sit in a comfortable position and breathe and ground yourself, it starts your day in a completely different energetic place than launching yourself up out of bed, running to throw the coffee on, do whatever it is that you're doing in the morning. Take five minutes, 10 minutes. It doesn't need to be long. 25:47 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Our days are busy, so you just sit, breathe and start your day from there In terms of, let's say, if you're in the studio for a long amount of time, maybe somebody is doing an audio book or a long e-learning module. What are your recommendations? Because, for me, I know what my limit is in the booth before I have to kind of get up and shake things around and go pet my cat. Because, for me, I'm super hyper focused because I am trying so hard to just be in the story and to be in the moment. It's exhausting mentally at some point. What are your tips on if you have to be in the booth for a really long time, in terms of should they get up and stretch, breathe? What are your thoughts? 26:23 - Emma O'Niell (Guest) Yeah, absolutely Generally I stand for most of my sessions just because I'm comfortable doing that. But for long stuff I do have a stool that I bring in to sit in. I do chair yoga if I'm in a booth where I'm sitting for an extended period of time. So just simple body stretches, twists, bringing my knees to my chest, turning my body side to side, deep breaths, back rolls. Spinal rolls are really helpful, especially when you're waiting for release or you're waiting for approval for something. But yeah, get up. If you're sitting down, get up and move around as quietly as you can and stretch, breathe, reach as high as you can to the ceiling and stretch, especially stretch out your ribs, stretch out your torso. It's helpful. 27:01 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Have you found that physical stretching exercise breathing has actually changed your voice in a physical sense? 27:08 - Emma O'Niell (Guest) Probably. I mean you can change the shape of your body by changing your lung capacity. So because you can change your ribs, because it's just muscle, it's the same as working a bicep, right I? 27:18 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) mean it's muscle and bone. 27:19 - Emma O'Niell (Guest) But if you're working your intercostals a lot, you can actually change the shape of your torso and broaden your ribs. But yeah, I think that in general with my voice, when I'm calm, my voice is much deeper. 27:33 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) When I'm not calm, my voice pitches up into my head because I'm tense and I'm breathing Sure, that makes sense and I feel like your voice is coming from here in your vocal. Any specific exercises that can help maybe relax vocal cords, because I feel like that's where a lot of tenseness is, when people are reading and their voice tends to pitch up a little bit higher. Anything that can help relax in terms of I think your tongue out, does a ton of fantastic stuff. 27:58 - Emma O'Niell (Guest) Oh really, uh-huh, uh-huh. I love that you grab your tongue with a tissue, just because it's difficult to hold your tongue with your fingers, because it's slippery. 28:04 - Intro (Announcement) But if you grab your tongue with a? 28:05 - Emma O'Niell (Guest) tissue and pull it out and try to speak. It actually stretches the tongue root. Simple pressing in with your thumbs into your tongue root and turning your head up, so you're pressing underneath the jaw, because the tongue root can get really, really tense, especially again if you are uncomfortable, if you are stressed out, all the things that your tongue will hold. So getting your tongue out of your mouth and then tying toothpick, as I said, tongue turning up will relax the tongue root. 28:33 And one of my favorites, which can be uncomfortable but very, very beneficial, is stretching out the muscles of your jaw. Okay, by putting your heel of your thumb, okay, just below your ear, underneath your cheekbone. Yes, so you go underneath your cheekbone, so up over your jaw, between your jaw and your cheekbone. 28:51 - Intro (Announcement) Oh yeah, uh-huh, uh-huh. 28:52 - Emma O'Niell (Guest) And push and pull down. So you're pushing you pull down and the bone of your thumb will press right into that muscle. It's like oh yeah, do them both at the same time. Wee, I love that. 29:05 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I want to be able to keep my voice in a more relaxed, lower sound, and I feel like that might be something that could help me to do that, that when you said, when you're more relaxed yes, when I'm more relaxed, my voice is lower. 29:18 - Intro (Announcement) At the end of the day. 29:19 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I have to be careful when I'm doing long. That's the e-learning modules, right. Because if I start to just go into like automated mode, right, then my voice tends to get higher and higher and especially, I think, for females, it tends to get a little screechy, and then I'm kind of talking like this, I'm a little bit more stressed and I will tell people like, shake it out, do some breathing, because what you're not realizing is that all of a sudden, your voice is now starting to sound very strained. So what tips can you give for our boss listeners out there? What would be your best tips for mental, physical health, for impacting positively their voice and their voiceover careers? What are your best tips Take? 30:00 - Emma O'Niell (Guest) time for yourself. All of us just people in general tend to give too much Like we're making sure we're taking care of the kids, we're taking care of our partner, we're taking care of whatever we're doing we're taking care of. Make sure to take time for yourself because you cannot. You cannot pour for an empty cup, so you have to make sure your cup is full and then from there you can give. 30:21 So it's again as you're waking up in the morning, take five minutes and it's like if you've got a busy house. Take five minutes in the bathroom, sit down and close the door. No one's allowed in. It's five minutes and just be with yourself and breathe. If you can get out for a walk, whether it's on a treadmill or outside, it doesn't matter where you're walking. Walk it's just beneficial for your lungs, it's beneficial for your mind and it's beneficial for your body. 30:49 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I'm so happy you said that, because I finally have made that time for myself. 30:53 - Emma O'Niell (Guest) It's so important. It's so important you have to take the time and meal prep. I take about an hour on a Sunday to meal prep for most of the week. It doesn't take that much time. Keep things simple. It's almost like when you're packing for a trip and you don't want to take too much clothes, so you mix and match, Like you make 12 outfits from like four pairs of pants and four shirts. 31:14 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Okay well, I have already done that. I know I'm terrible. I have a really hard time doing that. 31:17 - Emma O'Niell (Guest) I haven't figured it out, but other people are good at packing. We're just using this analogy. 31:22 But it's the same kind of thing with food that if you pick kind of like eggs, tuna, chicken and tofu, they're your four proteins that you really like, and you really like this type of lettuce and you really like this type of vegetable and you really like this type of carb, like sweet potatoes or whatever it is that you're liking. Make all of those and then you can mix and match them into meals and they're ready to go already there. 31:43 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Oh, so I want to kind of expand on that. So what do you do? Now? We're going to be at Vio Atlanta, so what would you recommend when you are traveling? Are you prepping food for when you go or are you researching, like places that you might eat and healthy options? 31:59 - Emma O'Niell (Guest) I am known at conferences for figuring out where the grocery store is or if I can order from a grocery store into the hotel. I always bring a blender. Oh okay, so always I always bring a little magic bullet. 32:13 - Intro (Announcement) So I can make protein shakes. 32:14 - Emma O'Niell (Guest) Okay, so I'll bring my own protein powder. I'll bring anything that I can. I'm probably going to get arrested at some point flying because I've got all of these powders in Ziploc bags. 32:23 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I've been doing that too, I have that like I'm drinking my electrolytes here and I have all the powders and yeah, I did get stopped, actually, and they said, oh you've got a lot of special food in here. 32:33 And I'm like you're right and it's helped me so much to plan. As a matter of fact, I end up either losing or maintaining weight for the last few trips that I've gone on, and I'm so thankful for that, because typically that's the time where I'm just going to let myself go and have a drink or I'm going to let myself go and have the bread at dinner, and thankfully that has not happened. 32:51 - Emma O'Niell (Guest) So yeah, there's tricks around it. It's like if you want to have a glass of wine, have a glass of wine, just like if you have generally. If you have a lot of fruit during the day, cut out a couple of pieces of fruit and then you have your glass of wine. So it's about balancing things out and understanding where calories come from and how things are burned. But yeah, big planner, I always get spinach and boiled eggs and whatever fruit. I'll always have something in the fridge so that I have breakfast in my room. So I get up and I go to the gym. 33:17 And then I have breakfast in my room and I have snacks in my bag, whether they're protein shakes or something handful of nuts or whatever. And then I only ever have dinner in the restaurants. 33:28 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) That makes a lot of sense. I'm so glad you said that You're validating me, because I bring all of my stuff for breakfast and during the day, but then at night I'll go and I'll have my lean protein and vegetables. 33:39 And it's amazing how accommodating restaurants are these days, which I'm very, very happy for. I'll just be like, oh, I have dietary restrictions, and if I think they're not, they don't understand. I'll just say I'm allergic. I'm allergic to potatoes, I'm allergic to bread, no, but they always come through for me. So I'm very happy that I've been able to make that work. So I'm excited to kind of see you in Atlanta, and so now I feel validated. Thank you so much. 34:03 - Emma O'Niell (Guest) Oh, absolutely. 34:04 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) And it's been an amazing conversation. How can bosses find out more about you and find you on the internet and maybe, if they have any questions for you, chat with you about health and fitness? And voiceover? 34:14 - Emma O'Niell (Guest) On the interwebs you can find me. My voice website is Emma at EmmaOniallvocom, or my yoga website is mysoretocom, like my M-Y-S-O-R-E-T-Ocom. I love that Because that's where it comes from, and Instagram is my name, emma. 34:31 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Oniall. Okay, perfect, I'll put those links on the show notes. Emma has been so wonderful talking to you. I'm so excited to see you in person again at Vio Atlanta and maybe I'll get to work out with you in the morning, absolutely. And we'll compare notes on our meals. I love that. 34:46 I love that. Thank you so much, bosses. I want you to take a moment and imagine a world full of passionate and powered diverse individuals giving collectively and intentionally to create the world they want to see If you can make a difference. Visit 100voiceswhocareorg to learn more. Big shout out to our sponsor, ipdtl. You too can connect and network, like Emma and myself. Find out more at IPDTLcom. Have an amazing week and we'll see you next week. Bye. 35:17 - Intro (Announcement) Join us next week for another edition of Vio Boss with your host, ann Gangusa, and take your business to the next level. Sign up for our mailing list at vobosscom and receive exclusive content, industry revolutionizing tips and strategies and new ways to rock your business like a boss. Free distribution with permission. Coast to coast connectivity via IPDTL.

Ever find yourself wondering how a thick Boston accent might play out in the voiceover world? This week is about speech impediments and regional accents in the voiceover industry. It's not just the hurdles; the BOSSES cover strategies and encouragement for those voice talents looking to make their mark while staying true to their sound. From the importance of clear articulation to embracing the quirks that make your voice distinctive, they cover the gamut of what it means to stay authentic. It's not about mimicking a character; it's about bringing them to life with your unique vocal fingerprint. And for those thinking about their own twang or drawl, we discuss whether it's a hindrance or a hot commodity. This episode isn't just a discussion; it's a roadmap for voice actors striving to find their niche and shine in the competitive voiceover landscape. 00:01 - Intro (Announcement) It's time to take your business to the next level, the boss level. These are the premier business owner strategies and successes being utilized by the industry's top talent today. Rock your business like a boss a VO boss. Now let's welcome your host, Anne Ganguzza. 00:20 - Anne (Host) Hey everyone, welcome to the VO Boss podcast and the Boss super power series. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzza, and I'm here with my very special, wonderful friend, special best boss guest co-host. Well, that was a big old mouthful. 00:35 - Lau (Guest) Well, I'll see you next time. Thank you, Anneie. It's awesome to be here. What a great introduction, oh. 00:40 - Anne (Host) Lord, you know how I was like. That was such a mouthful to say and literally I try to talk for a living, and it's a great segue into the topic that I'd like to chat about today, and I know we've discussed this briefly before, but you and I have both had either people on your roster or people that submit to you, and I have students that ask me. They come to me, they have a heavy accent or they might have a little bit of a list or a speech impediment and they will say to me so is this going to affect my voiceover career? Will I still be able to do this Lau? I'm going to ask you, how do you approach that? 01:21 - Lau (Guest) It's a lot, Anneie. Well, truth to tell, the agency does get quite a few submissions. We just got a couple today that clearly, if anyone has a pretty decent ear can pick up some sort of speech issue going on, whether it's an impediment, a slur, a sibilant sound, whatever it is, and it's common. It's actually quite common and I'm careful not to tell people oh, forget it, count yourself out, can't be in this game, forget it, forget it. I always like to say let me offer some. 01:52 If I'm going to do it, let me offer some strategies based on what I'm hearing and what you could be doing as the talent to see is it accurate what I'm hearing. 02:02 So the first thing I would suggest with talent is cross check it and pull it with six or eight of your closest peeps connected to the industry, if you can, whether it's an audio engineer or a coach, a couple of VO talent, and say, hey, listen to my recording. Do you hear any kind of an articulation issue? Do you hear a slurring issue? Do you hear anything? And be honest with me and get kind of like an informal poll on that first, because I never just take one person's opinion on it. So that's the first thing I would do. If they are hearing issues, if they are hearing problems, I would actually say, okay, let me see who is around that I can be getting on a consultation with, who is maybe a therapist, a speech therapist in figuring out how do I diagnose where I'm at right now with my speech and who can help me get to a cleaner, clearer sound. That's really the first thing you have to figure out. 02:57 - Anne (Host) Yes, my prerequisite is that I need to be able to understand you. So I like to say there's a lot more acceptance for, let's say, minor speech impediments and dialects and regionalisms. I mean. It's more accepted than ever before. However, I need to be able to understand what you're saying. So if it gets in the way of me understanding what you're saying in a normal conversational speed, then I feel as though you might want to either talk to a speech therapist or a dialect coach to see if it's something that can be cleaned up. 03:28 Sometimes it's a physical impediment, like it's placement of your teeth, or I've had people that come to me with braces and they're like I want to do voiceover, and so they have a big mouthful of lists and saliva and sometimes that's not going to be hireable and I'll just say well, at some point you'll want to make sure that you're going to be getting those off and whatever it takes for you to be able to speak a little bit clearly. Now, I'm the big fan Lau and I don't know about you, but I don't want people to be too articulate. 03:56 I need to be able to understand you, but too articulate creates a persona which is maybe not forgiving enough for the copy. A lot of times it might sound too proper, it might sound too robotic, it might sound too perfect, and I don't want that. 04:11 - Lau (Guest) But I certainly want to be able to understand you Right and I think it's the old rule of thumb, like if it's something that is pulling focus away from the messaging and people will tell you. A listener should be able to tell you. Even just a layman listener should be able to say am I focused on what you're talking about or am I focused on the particular speech or the particular dialect issue that you may be having? 04:33 - Anne (Host) Sure. 04:34 - Lau (Guest) And I would even talk to voiceover coaches that deal with speech, articulation and breathing, as many of us do. Many of us are trained in that and oftentimes that unto itself can help Learning breathing. Are you breathing properly? If you did have those braces and you had them taken off 10 years ago, did you ever learn to speak with proper placement, based on now where your teeth are and where your tongue is going and all your major articulators? Did you ever acclimate to the speech? Of that, I think it's a really good question to ask. And also we can't discount any mental acuity when it comes to our habitual patterns that we're doing. Are we even aware of them? Do we even hear them? Do you mumble? Do you mumble? People will say, oh, I know, I do that Lau, oh, I know, I've been told. 05:22 - Anne (Host) And I said well, do something Exactly. Yeah, right, right. It can't just be all. I have knowledge of it. Right, I have knowledge. 05:30 - Lau (Guest) Right, exactly, and it gets me into accents and dialects a little too, in the sense that we just had met with a potential client today and talked about that, where he came from. I said where's your background and where do you come from? You have such an ethnically amorphous dialect and it's so fascinating. And he said here's what one of my coaches told me Don't bother trying to eliminate that sound, it's going to be really hard, really impossible. You get to a certain age. You know you don't want to be spending tons and tons of cash on dialect coaches. It's immense to do the training to really flatten out that sound, to get what's called a North American dialect, which you probably can't get after a certain age. It's very difficult. So I said no, you have to celebrate what you have. You have to celebrate, celebrate your diversity. 06:17 - Anne (Host) Celebrate your uniqueness, yes, but Absolutely. 06:19 - Lau (Guest) But yes, but instead of yes and yes, but you have to be real about what placement that's going to give you. Sure, I'm a commercial agent. If I got a bunch of North American clients coming through, they're probably not going to want your particular sound just because the target market you don't represent that and basically tacking on the end of that Lau. 06:41 - Anne (Host) I get a lot of people British accents right that want to do commercial and I'm like, well, your market is probably not the United States right now. The wonderful thing about voiceover is that it's global, but probably in a commercial market in the US you don't hear a lot of commercials that have British accents right. However, you'll hear a lot of e-learning that has British accent, because, hey, who isn't a sucker for a really lovely British accent and it's pleasant to listen to you, for sure. But I think you have to talk to someone, and your coach or your agent should be very real and very honest with you to understand that there can be limitations to your market, for sure, and they should advise you as such. 07:21 I would welcome the diversity, I would welcome your uniqueness and your sound. If you have an accent or a regionalism, and I think that it's wonderful. I mean, I am so happy because, god, how many dollars did I spend trying to get rid of my? First? I had an upstate New York accent and then I moved to New Jersey and then I had a Jersey accent and then I moved to. 07:39 California. So I've got a mishmash of all of them and over the years when it was important to people to have that very neutral whatever a neutral accent is these days right, and I beat it out of myself and so in reality it's not uncommon for people who've been in the industry for a while, they're used to that. But I think today I welcome, I welcome people that sound unique, that sound like themselves. I think it's wonderful. But again, you have to understand your market may be limited, but also embrace what it is. And if it is an impediment or it's a problem physically with how you're speaking or you're physical in your mouth, I think it's something to maybe take a look at if you truly want to be in this business. 08:22 - Lau (Guest) Oh, I couldn't agree more. And the vocal patterns that we create over time. I'll get a lot of submissions of people that again, they have a beautiful voice and they're articulate, they're fine. But they're in these patterns and what we call them as mono patterns, where they're not one tone specifically they change their tonality. But it's patterned, it's like rhythmic or rhyming, or there's a certain cadence to what they're doing, so that it's formula, it's expected, it's a rhythm. And I say, take your acting classes, work in your coaching sessions to break that. 08:53 - Anne (Host) Well, yeah, that's absolutely where acting comes into play, because you're basically just trying to do voice acting by mimicking what you think you hear, or what you hear in your head is to what you think people want to hear, and in reality, just wipe that out and just act, because we don't ever think about what we sound like when we talk to one another. We just, you know, I'm not, oh, do I inflict up? How do I, how do I sound? 09:17 - Lau (Guest) You know I'm talking to you right now, laura, I'm not concerned with how I sound, to be honest with you. 09:22 - Anne (Host) I mean, I just we're talking, we're having that conversation, but yeah, you're right. There are patterns and anything that is repeated or consistent can become very white noise, very robotic, very reedy sounding, which does not engage your listener, and the whole purpose of what we do is to be able to connect with our listener. 09:44 - Lau (Guest) Yeah, and I think that just the basic rule of thumb is and again you can ask around to get this feedback is is there anything that's getting in the way of my messaging? Like, whatever it is, just tell me what it is, and it may even be something beautiful like oh I have a sexy seductive sound and I turn that on. I turn that on all the time. Well, sometimes it's not appropriate to do that. 10:04 Yeah, stop that Sometimes it's, yeah, sometimes it's coming out on a product that they're not looking for. That Exactly so it's getting in the way. The mechanics of that are getting in the way of the product itself. 10:16 - Anne (Host) And I have a big issue, and I know that you brought that up. I have a big issue with females trying to sound that way and people expecting that female sound that way. Because, number one, that's a horrible stereotype and that's the chocolate commercial or the alcohol commercial you know what I mean. 10:29 - Lau (Guest) Yeah, I can't take another job commercial. I just can't. I just can't. 10:32 - Anne (Host) As a matter of fact, there's so many ways to be sexy with your own voice and not trying to put on any kind of sound. So, yeah, ladies, please leave that one, or even men, too, that have that please. And women who have that voice, that can be yes, hello, it's my elegant. Well, elegant is different than sexy. And then there's the male voice that you get a lot of Anneouncers right and they just wAnnea hear themselves land the word right, and then we'll land it like this and they like to hear the end of that and that becomes a pattern, it becomes repetitious, it becomes something that is expected and certainly does not engage your listener. It just becomes something that becomes boring after a while. 11:11 - Lau (Guest) No, and credibility in any kind of style that you're doing is a sort of unintentional kind of delivery that it really is about connecting with the other person that you're connecting with, rather than sounding like you're connecting with the other person you're connecting with Right, and so that sameness whatever that is that sameness oftentimes comes from let me manufacture, let me create, or I hear a lot of clients say Lau, you want me to sound like this. I say no, I don't really want you to sound like this, I want you to be this. 11:43 - Anne (Host) Yeah, yeah, yeah, I want you to be it. 11:45 - Lau (Guest) I want you to be it. I don't want you to sound like it, because it would be like in our terms, like can you just sound like a mother? Well, I'm a mother and I can tell you there's many different sounds to being a mother. It isn't just a mother sound Right, or I want you to sound sexy. Well, there's many different intonations of what that could be like, so I would caution people to be careful of sounding the mechanics of sound and getting too much into that versus the landscape of intrinsic emotional value and authentic connection? 12:17 - Anne (Host) Oh, absolutely. And especially when you get, when you're auditioning, too right and it'll say you might have a sound delay. So what you do when you have a sound delay, you're trying to just sound like them. And then what you forget to do is you're trying so hard to sound like them that you forget to tell the story. 12:31 As a matter of fact, I always say when casting specs come out and they say think Jennifer Garner or think whoever they might have, whoever the voice of the day is Chris Pratt, don't think that way, but just chAnnel their personality and that's where the acting will come in. And then, because nobody wants you to necessarily, well, sometimes there will be special occasions where they really do want a sound alike, and in that case I think there are people out there that have very, very, it's unmistakable, and you're like, oh my gosh, you sound just like, and that, I think, is a separate marketing tactic. However, for the most part, when casting is asking for a particular sound, I always say, well, don't try to reproduce the sound or mimic the sound, just chAnnel the actor. 13:16 - Lau (Guest) Oh, I love that. ChAnnel the actor. And you'll notice, with actors, especially those that are mimicking, say, a political figure or something, because they're comedians, they're going to throw their whole body into their whole, their mind, their body, their content, their whatever. They won't just sound like that person, they'll start becoming that person. 13:36 - Anne (Host) They have to embody that person. 13:38 - Lau (Guest) Yeah, they have to embody that person really, to do it authentically and to do it well. And so we do the same thing. We're mimicking as well in terms of we're mimicking a real person in this industry, but in order to do it, we have to embody. 13:50 - Anne (Host) Yes, yes, so you know you don't sound but embody the sound. 13:54 - Lau (Guest) Yeah, it's like oh, can I mimic an executive? Let me mimic an executive. Sound, don't sound B. It's hard because I have to know, like, well, where are they and what's the situation and what industry are they in and how old are they, and that's going to give me a lot of cues as to the authentic connection versus just the pattern of a sound that they're creating. This is a great conversation. I love this. 14:14 - Anne (Host) Yeah, so if you have somebody who is Latino and has a very heavy right Spanish accent, what would you say to them? 14:20 - Lau (Guest) Well, in regards to there's a market, there's certainly a market, I think. In regards to Latino, you've got a lot of different dialects. I'd say. First thing that comes to my mind is Are you accent free in your native language? You would know that, or you could ask to find out if you're accent free and if not, what is your dialect? What is the particular dialect, so that we know for the particular castings, if they're looking for certain dialects, that you've fallen to that, and a lot of them are not. A lot of them are saying we would like native, authentic Spanish, latino, but not particular dialect. So that's interesting. That opens up the playing field for you. 14:56 - Anne (Host) I think it's great yeah. 14:58 - Lau (Guest) I think being able to speak Spanish is just like a gold card. 15:01 - Anne (Host) Oh, absolutely, to a ton more work, right, absolutely. And understanding that and understanding where the markets are for that. And so I might have somebody that says to me, well, will this work for e-learning or will this work for corporate? And I'll say, well, you have to understand that your market is going to be more of a global market or your market will be those companies that are looking to be able to expand in that region. So I'm not going to say no and I'm not going to say that you necessarily need to go spend thousands of dollars on dialect coaching, right, and it's also difficult. 15:32 That's not like oh here let me sound like somebody from Minnesota, but yet I I'm. 15:37 - Lau (Guest) And also Anneie. It's not fun. It's not fun work. 15:40 - Anne (Host) No, it isn't. It's very hard, it's very boot camp. 15:43 - Lau (Guest) It's very drill. It's very hardcore, Like in conservatory actor training. Oftentimes they'll do a training system where they'll learn a particular dialect or they'll have to get a particular accent. It's hard. It's a regimentation that you have to go into and really prescribe to and you have to have a reason to do that. Most people don't have a reason to do that. 16:02 - Anne (Host) Yeah, so that's a good question, laugh. Now, is there a reason? I mean, there used to be a thing we have dialect coaches, but we also have coaches that teach dialects, right? So I have a role and I need to have an Irish accent. So is it something these days that you believe voice actors should pursue, and what type of genres could be looking for that these days, or are they all looking for authentic? That's a? 16:26 - Lau (Guest) good question. Right, it's a good question. I think, years gone by, when I was training, yes, you'd have more reason to do it Now. No, you don't have as much reason to do it, because even in animation, oftentimes we're looking for more authentic native sounds and accents of people, talent that really come from the place that they are voicing, and so I'd be very careful of spending too much time and energy and money and resources learning accents when really oftentimes you're going to see those auditions calling for indigenous speakers to these particular areas, absolutely. 17:01 And if it's something that they're asking you for and they're interested in working with you, then it's really a pointed reality of why you would do it Like there's an end game to it. You know what I mean. Otherwise I wouldn't. I wouldn't do it so quickly. 17:14 - Anne (Host) All right. So we've discussed people who have, let's say, accents, dialects, regionalisms let's just say a Boston accent that are not necessarily a different language but definitely a regionalism, and what would you say to them in terms of their marketability, let's say in commercial or their marketability, right, okay, so I have a strong Boston accent and I want to get into voiceovers and do commercials, and what do you do when you get a demo where you hear that everywhere? 17:47 - Lau (Guest) Right, I mean. I personally love it because I know there are a lot of gigs out there that look for authentic New England dialects, and there's many of them. There is no such thing as the Boston accent. Massachusetts has like over a hundred dialects. So, it really is specific. But the first thing I ask is can you drop your accent and do North American? Many Bostonians can, actually, if they're actors, they can and many cAnneot. They just know the difference whether you can do it or whether you can't do it. 18:14 - Anne (Host) Is it worth it for someone to invest in doing it, would you say, if they wanted to get into voiceover as a career? 18:20 - Lau (Guest) No, I do not think it is. I honestly don't think it is, because it only takes one or two slips on a vowel sound yeah. 18:28 And you know it and you know it. I think it would be very, very highly stressful to do that kind of thing, especially like as an adult. If you're a kid, that's different. You can pick it up young, but if you're an adult, I don't think it's worth your time. I think you should just go for the gold, just like, go for every single thing that that Boston dialect will offer to you. Yeah, absolutely, and just claim it. Say I'm the Boston gal, I'm the Boston guy. This is what I do. 18:54 - Anne (Host) And I'll tell you what I've created many a demo, many a corporate demo and an e-learning demo for people in New York and people in New England and people who have a bit of a regionalism Now, Southern, even Southern, like South Carolina, North Carolina and Texas I've definitely done Texas, so anybody that has somewhat of a Southern accent, as long as it's not, like I said, as long as it's not impeding my understanding of what it is that you're trying to convey, and I don't think that it's so full of the regionalism that other people can't understand either. But I always, always make sure that my students know that there may be a slightly limited market because of it. 19:32 - Lau (Guest) That's all, oh but listen, you know what, Anneie. Here's the truth. If you're in the larger market of, say, the commercial world in North American sound, it's highly competitive, Absolutely. Just because you're in the majority of what the sound is what they're looking for. It does not mean it's easier to book, oh gosh, it's harder. 19:49 - Anne (Host) In fact, oftentimes it's harder to book. It's harder. 19:51 - Lau (Guest) I'll give you a quick example, because you were talking about British earlier we just had a casting for British, authentically British, and we had in our roster we have about 500 talent. 20:00 - Anne (Host) Authentically British. I say, that's another topic. 20:03 - Lau (Guest) Native, native British. We had four people audition four and out of the four we had to drop one who we know was not Native British, and why she submitted, I don't know, but we ditched it, we dropped it right out. The others are natively. They live in the UK, right, and there you go, so they have much more chance of booking their job. 20:24 - Anne (Host) Oh, gosh, yeah, well, that's it. 20:26 - Lau (Guest) Then the 85 who just auditioned for our North American bank commercial. 20:31 - Anne (Host) That's just my thought and that's understanding your market and understanding. So, like I'm a big fan of target market specific demos right. So if you have a regionalism, if you're bilingual, if you have that capability, I always say let's showcase that in a demo right, so that the people who are hiring or want to hire you or potentially hire you, understand those are what I consider to be unique specialties and also understand for yourself that those are markets you will seek because it's great to be we always talk about. Well, you need to be versatile, but also knowing what your niche is and knowing where your market is is amazing because you can be the go-to for that market. 21:11 - Lau (Guest) Right, like I can't name all the talent in my North American roster, but I know my British talent. Wow, they're memorable, yeah. Well, it's not because the North American talent are not as important, it's because there's many more of them. Sure. 21:27 And a lot of them are very similar in traits, in terms of how they sound. So that's just me. But I say listen, if you're in a minority, I would boast that, I would brand that, I would have a ball with that, I would not hide that and I would never. Here's the thing don't try to be something you're not. Yeah, be the best version of you that you can be. If you want to work on the side, let's say you have some extra income and you say, oh, but I want to work on it I say, well, then go work on it. But don't have unrealistic expectations of being able to compete in a market with people who have those native sides, absolutely. 22:03 - Anne (Host) Wow yet another really amazing conversation, wow, I love it. Bosses, so embrace, embrace that individuality. If it happens to be something that might be a physical impediment speech impediment you might want to take a look at maybe how can you take steps to correct that if you truly want to be in voiceover to do that. And also, yeah, get the opinions of trusted coaches, trusted colleagues and friends, just to see. And if somebody tries to sell you a demo right away without addressing those things, I want you to just literally just run, run the other way. You should absolutely. If you're looking to get into this industry and you do have a regional dialect, if you do have a speech impediment, if it's your most cherished dream, I still don't want you to go ahead and get a demo right away. I would absolutely, absolutely speak to a few coaches about it, speak to trusted colleagues, trusted friends and family and absolutely get their opinions on it. So, la, thank you for great code as always Wonderful chat, as usual. 23:09 And, of course, bosses. We want you to create a world in which your voice can absolutely make a difference and you can by giving and finding out more at 100 voices who care to learn more, all right, big shout out to our sponsor, ipdtl. You too can connect and network like bosses. Find out more at IPDTLcom. You guys have an amazing week and we'll see you next week. See you next week, bye, bye. 23:39 - Intro (Anneouncement) Join us next week for another edition of VOBoss with your host and Genguza, and take your business to the next level. Sign up for our mailing list at vobosscom and receive exclusive content, industry revolutionizing tips and strategies and new ways to rock your business like a boss. Redistribution with permission. Coast to coast connectivity via IPDTL. 24:07 - Anne (Host) Hey, la, do you know what time of year it is? What time is it? It is the audition demolition holiday, holiday Audition. Oh my gosh, la, I am so excited for this audition demolition. It is, of course, holiday themed. Guys, it is on December 14th. Get those auditions in and of course, you're going to have so much fun with the themed scripts and what. I don't even know what I'm saying. Oh, I can't say A blooper. Yeah, there we go One more time.

Today's voiceover landscape is brimming with untapped potential, and we're here to map it out for you. From acing live Zoom auditions to nailing in-person meetings, we've got you covered with all the preparation and adaptability tips you'll need. Join us as we delve into diversifying your voiceover skillset and why leaning into a variety of genres, like e-learning and corporate narration, could be your ticket to consistent work. Plus, don't miss our candid discussion on the art of evolution in the voice acting world, emphasizing the importance of ongoing training and a measured approach to carving out your niche. Whether you're a newbie to the mic or a vocal veteran, this dialogue is tuned to resonate with your voiceover aspirations. 00:01 - Intro (Announcement) It's time to take your business to the next level, the boss level. These are the premier business owner strategies and successes being utilized by the industry's top talent today. Rock your business like a boss a VO Boss. Now let's welcome your host, Anne Ganguzza. 00:20 - Anne (Host) Hello everyone, welcome to the VO Boss podcast and the Boss Superpower series. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzza, and I'm here with my super special boss guest co-host Lau Lapitas. 00:33 - Lau (Guest) And it's great to be back, as always, yay awesome, all right Lau. 00:39 - Anne (Host) We've got a topic that I know is probably pretty common that you hear. I've been hearing it quite a bit lately and it's all about and I have been at this for a year now and I just am not booking. What can I do? I don't know what to do at this point. I don't know if I should just give up voiceover, or how do I get more bookings? So there's a good question, Lau. 01:09 - Lau (Guest) It's a great question and it's a common question. I know you and I have fielded that one for years and continue to do so, and I just had a client in a coaching session who the entire session was about that. Right, she was angry, frustrated, she was frustrated, she was hitting a wall, depressed, yeah, but just kind of like at a loss. Really like what am I doing wrong? Or at a loss. And I'll say one of the first things on our hit list that I'd like to talk about is redirecting the energy. So the first thing I did was and I know her very well for many years I wanted to redirect the energy towards her, not in the sense that she's doing anything wrong. 01:48 It's not about right or wrong here. It's about how am I moving forward in my marketing plan? Do I have a marketing plan? Is this something that is a real part of my day? And going into a time management, looking at a time management organizational tool of some kind and really, really making it real. Because she kept saying to me Lau, you know me, I'm a realist, I'm a realist. I said I'm a realist and I'll tell you for real you got to have a calendar in front of you For real. 02:16 Every day, every day. What am I doing in this day to put myself into the universe? That's really on me, that's on you, that's on me. 02:26 - Anne (Host) Right? Well, first of all, amen, applause, applause, applause. And so I want to just say the word that I think is so important, that so many people miss, and that is marketing, marketing, marketing, marketing. When you are not getting work right, you can have the best voice in the world. How many times do I say this Lau? 02:44 And it doesn't go good if nobody knows about it, okay, and so nobody can hire you. Like, nobody can hire you if they don't know you exist. And so if you're not booking, the first thing I say to look at is marketing. And I again will say to you companies hire departments full of people who are marketers, and those marketers, their only job is to go out and get leads, send emails, create marketing campaigns, do social media, do all of that stuff just to get a lead. And I can just tell you, like my husband who works in event management, right, they go to conferences, they sponsor booths, they talk, they present and they spend thousands upon thousands of dollars in their marketing efforts just to get business right and to stay afloat and to keep that business thriving or build the business, no matter what they're doing. 03:35 So I think that voice actors tend to really miss the mark when it comes to thinking about how important their marketing is, or their marketing because they're not familiar with it. They're not marketers, they didn't go to school for marketing. They kind of just go oh yeah, I got a market. And so then they think maybe a post on social media is marketing. Or they think I sent an email, nobody responded and you have not tried hard enough. I'm just saying Lau. What are your thoughts on that? Because I think most people have to put like a thousand percent more effort into their marketing than they do. 04:07 - Lau (Guest) I really think that when people come into this profession and I'll call them actors because it could be any kind of performer yeah, I don't think it's specific to voiceover the marketing element is something that we're just oftentimes not trained in, we're not aware of. It isn't like business 101. I didn't get an MBA, so what am I doing? Kind of thing. Well, it's just kind of the coach throws it at you and you go what? Wait a second, I thought I was becoming a voiceover talent. Now you're telling me I have to be my own production team, I have to be my own talent, I have to be a producer, I have to be a marketer, I have to brand myself. Yeah, you really do. So. I see it step by step. 04:45 I think it's important to understand your schedule first. A lot of folks that I work with come in and they literally don't know what they're doing. They don't know their schedule. I say how many hours in a week are you dedicated to putting your business out in the world? They say I don't know. Maybe a couple hours in a week or maybe six hours. I said not enough, not even close to marketing departments. 05:05 - Anne (Host) eight hours a day and more Eight hours a day. 05:07 - Lau (Guest) You got to go into it every single day and have a. It doesn't need to be constant, it needs to be consistent. So the consistency is really what you're looking for. You don't have to be marketing all day long, because you may be auditioning all day long, but you have to be able to multitask as you're editing, as you're delivering, as you're talking with a client, as you're auditioning. You have to be able to multitask. And here is the homework assignment I gave to her. I said I want you, once you understand your calendar and you have your schedule in front of you. Thank you too. Pull three leads for me every single day. Three, right. So if you do it five days a week, that's 15 leads in a week. That's pretty sturdy. If they're leads, they could be cold, they could be warm, you could be connected to them, they could be out there in the universe. But I want you to do that because every potential lead you have, every suspect that turns into a prospect, opens up potentially a door to a whole world that you don't have right now. 06:10 - Anne (Host) And I want to now kind of tack on to that and say that now that you've got leads you did three leads a day, you've done five days and 15 leads. Now understand that those leads are just that. They are leads. Right, those are people that you want to be able to market to. However, you also have to assess are they at a point, right at this time in space, to hire? Right? Do they have a need for you? Do they have a need for your particular animated character voice that is female and is high-pitched and young sounding? Do they have a need for it at this precise moment? Probably not. 06:45 I'm just going to say right, More than likely, the lead that you have chosen, if you're really choosing lead after lead after lead, right. They more than likely do not need it at this moment. However, they may need it down the road, and so that's where the consistency has to come in consistent, consistent, consistent. You have to revisit that lead, right, and you have to revisit that lead because they may not need you today, but they might need you tomorrow, they might need you six months from now, and you have to really be consistent with that and then keep good track of those leads so that you know when you last contacted them. So you're not contacting them every day and you're not Anneoying them, because, God only knows, I have had Anneoying people contact me over and over and over again. 07:26 - Lau (Guest) You have the stalkers. 07:28 - Anne (Host) Literally trying to sell me SEO services or web services or whatever it is that they're trying to sell to me. And I can tell because I see the thread in my email right. There's like oh, there's the sixth time they've tried. 07:40 Sorry to bother you, but not really so you do need to understand that those leads that you get more than likely aren't ready at this precise moment to purchase your voice, unless, of course, your leads are hot leads right. Then we talk about cold leads, warm leads and hot leads right. Hot leads you already have knowledge that they need a voice that fits your particular description. Right, and that would be something that is timely. You want to make sure you're timely and that you address that at the time. Otherwise, you've got cold leads, which is what most of us right, because we don't wear. 08:14 We just want anything. Right? We want any kind of job, right? I need a commercial, or I need a corporate narration, or I need an e-learning from this company, right? Well, there could be a multitude of things that the company needs, but maybe they don't need a commercial voice right away, maybe they are not doing any training because there's no new products. So just understand everything involved with that, with the marketing, which is again why companies hire entire departments with lots of people to do this, because the more leads they secure, the more chances, right of making a sale. 08:46 - Lau (Guest) I love that. I think it's terrific and I think too here's the second thing, technical tip I want to put out there as well that I said to this particular client I would suggest that you go out into the world. It's up to you how often you can do that, depending on your life and your transportation, but you should be going out into the world to a live event Now. We should be able to find them around, okay, whether it's a Chamber of Commerce, a BNI, a Toastmasters or whatever a women in business, there's a billion groups out there. All you have to do is make Google or DuckDuckGo your best friends and then you can find your lists of live groups that most of the time they're gonna be hybrid on Zoom and live if they're doing live. 09:30 I love the energy and the feel of meeting people in person and oftentimes you'll find that when you do meet people in person, there's no one in that room that does what you do, because what we do is very unique and a lot of times we have to educate the people on what a voiceover talent actually is. They don't even know what a VO really does. So it gives you an opportunity to practice a pitch, to practice a handshake, to practice a live networking in a room, to practice putting on your face, your clothing, your whatever right. 10:03 - Anne (Host) It's different than being in a booth Very very different and it's also different from sending an email, because you get that physical presence, that energy, there's a synergy to it and you're gonna be a lot more memorable. 10:15 And again, I think it's a combination of all of these things that we're talking about that can be effective marketing. 10:19 But absolutely I don't think there's any dispute over the fact that face-to-face networking can really generate relationships that can get you hired. I was thinking about relationships the other day because I just had headshots taken by my photographer, who I've worked with for 10 years, and I realized that we have such a great relationship. Like she knows me so well, she's able to capture my very best so that I can actually promote my business and I can promote myself in the very best light. And I feel as though your relationship building in those face-to-face networking can really help you to become memorable to someone and while they may not need your services, they might know somebody that will, and then you can come highly recommended. And word of mouth I think there's no better marketing than word of mouth. Oh, I have this wonderful talent here that I think will be perfect for your next campaign. You should hire them and a lot of times those are the best types of referrals to get, because then you don't have to audition your butt off for them. 11:18 And essentially, that's just a wonderful way to acquire work. 11:22 - Lau (Guest) I think that's terrific and listen, call it old school, but I'm a big fan of live. I think when you live whether you're on Zoom in real time or whether you're in a room with someone it has a whole different stress level and pressure that we need to perform. That you're just not gonna get in crafting an email, you're not gonna get in submitting your website, you're just not gonna get it. That's much more at your leisure, right. But when you're in person with someone, you have to think about what. If I only have five minutes with that person, what do I want to do for them? What is it about their business? How can I help them? 11:58 Okay, so, I have to educate them on what I do oftentimes, but how does it benefit them? Because that's why they're standing there. They're standing there to meet you, not because you're so fabulous, but because what you do is potentially what they need. So it's up to us to figure out well, how do I apply what I do to your particular industry? Therefore, you have to do your research, right? You gotta go on your websites. You gotta go on the YouTube chAnnel, look at the advertising campaigns. You gotta go in their literature and take a look at what they're doing. I also wAnnea suggest that you open up you were saying this earlier and I loved it open up your possibilities of the kinds of work that you can do, the genres of work you can do? 12:41 - Anne (Host) Oh, absolutely. You just segued so nicely into that, Because the other thing was that I just had a student who said you know, I've been doing this for a year and I can't seem to get anything booked. I can't get any work. And I said what have you been auditioning for? And they said commercials. And I went well, tell me, do you have other demos? Do you have other places, other things you're auditioning for? No, just commercials. And I said well, that's part of it. 13:05 You have to understand that the market for commercials well, it's probably one of the most popular market for new people to get into or want to get into. What you don't understand is that the commercial markets maybe only 5 to 10% of what's out there. Right, there's a big part of that which is narration, it's corporate narration, it's e-learning, it's medical narration. It's like 80% of the market, is that? And so if you're only restricting yourself to one specialty, to one genre, then yeah, Also, we just did an episode on transformation, right? This is where you might want to now expand your offerings, right, Get yourself coaching in a genre in a market space that is plentiful, such as corporate or corporate training, and that can really open up your possibilities. 13:51 - Lau (Guest) It's also one of the most highly sought after and competitive varies of the industry, the commercial industry, you know like 100% of the people that are swimming with you are out for commercial and want to do commercial work. So you just have to be realistic about that. 14:08 - Anne (Host) I'm going to just say, bosses, get over the fact that corporate narration or e-learning isn't glamorous. Just get over that, because, honestly, you've got a business to run. And I'm just going to say that most people are like, well, I want the national spot, or I want to do the next animated series, or I want to do that video game. But here's the deal. Probably everybody I know, whether they're an animation specialist or do promos they also do corporate narration, they also do e-learning. They just don't talk about it. It's not as glamorous, but I'll tell you what it's the bread and butter for a lot of people out there in the industry. 14:42 - Lau (Guest) Absolutely it is. And remember, I mean I can speak as an agent having a base and I'll tell you that I don't know anyone in that roster that only does commercial work. I mean, I think it's a little delicious part of the toast on the bread, but they have a lot of other spreads they're putting on that bread and not just for the money's sake, but also they're multi-talented. They have a lot to offer. They have a lot of different. They might be producing an animation pilot and doing audio book. 15:11 - Anne (Host) Right, exactly, e-learning thing, exactly. And how many people Lau? May I ask as a talent agent and I know as a casting director, how many people do you know book a national spot every day or book a commercial, even a commercial every day? 15:24 - Lau (Guest) No, not at all. Some won't book for six months to a year Exactly, and those could be super talented people too that get national spots. 15:32 - Anne (Host) They're not going to book a national spot every day. They might book one a month, one every two months, once every six months, and the rest of what they do is a smattering of other genres and a smattering of other projects. So really try to expand. And again, this is not where, oh, I want to do everything. I am the voice talent that is doing everything. However, the other options that you offer for clients should be well thought out. You should be trained in the genres so that you can really understand the most effective way, the most effective read, the most effective techniques, and that includes not just performance but also marketing for the market it does. 16:09 - Lau (Guest) It does, and diversifying what you're doing is a really, really smart thing. I hear a lot of newer talent what I call newer talent in the first three years of their business, talking about niching in and niching down and choosing something specific, and I said you don't even know what your business is, yet you don't even know what you like. You don't even know how people hear you, yet They've not even explored the other genres. 16:32 - Anne (Host) And that's another thing. When you talk about brand evolution and how you evolve, or how do you find out, like, what you're good at right? Unless you try it, unless you audition for it, unless you train a little bit in it, and you can. I mean, I found a passion in medical. Now, of course, I worked in the medical industry, but did I think about going into medical narration right away? No, I didn't. 16:52 I was all enamored with commercial and I thought, oh, I'm just going to do a bunch of commercial work. And that was just me being new way back when, not understanding right, not understanding the business and all the different genres. But ultimately I started saying, well, I can't, I'm not getting any work commercially right away, or I only get very few jobs. So I need to do something else, otherwise I'm going to have to go back to work, I'm going to have to go back to corporate and I did not want to do that. So really thinking about how you can expand your offering, so marketing number one, and then expand your offering. 17:27 And then I'm going to talk about, I think, the third thing, and that would be performance skills, right, and we even had a whole episode dedicated to this bosses about how sometimes talent think they're actually better than they are and they really could use some performance coaching to make their reads more competitive. No doubt about it. You know this is an agent Lau, probably every single day, right, and I do it when I cast and when we do our audition demolitions. We hear a lot of people auditioning and I think to myself there's a lot of people who could really utilize some specific one-on-one coaching or more workshops. 18:07 - Lau (Guest) No doubt, Anneie, no doubt, and I'll tell you what I'm hearing over and over again with submissions that are coming in that are looking for representation in the roster, is the fact that they sound like the tool of their voice is strong and it's beautiful and they seem like very nice people, at least on paper, but they either do not have the skill set just yet to where they would need to be competitive in a commercial market. 18:31 Yes, absolutely, and I'm really speaking about a real read, understanding what a real read is, how that happens the mechanics of how that happened. 18:40 I've even been sending out notices to people. Instead of saying, ok, you're not a good fit right now and they're sending me demos, I said, can you just send me a couple, just a couple dry reads of you doing your most natural read and they'll send it to me and it's authentically a Anneouncer, authentically, absolutely and authentically all of that stuff. So already I know they don't really know what it is, they're not sure what it is. 19:05 - Anne (Host) And you know right away as a casting director, as a talent agent and so yeah, also, guys, we don't need to hear that over and over again If we listen to it and we say, oh, you don't have it yet we know you don't have it and we're probably not going to ask you, we're not going to refer you, you're probably not going to get it until you do have those skills. And it's so interesting to me the students that come to me that just, they want to hurry up and get their demo done and they don't want to do the work they don't want to do a rush. 19:31 They're in a big rush. They don't want to do the work to figure out. What does it take to be an actor? And especially, I see it all the time with corporate e-learning and what people typically assume to be like I just want to teach e-learning or I just want to speak corporate. I hear the corporate this way all the time and again, you need to be the actor, and even more so with longer format stuff. You just do. 19:54 - Lau (Guest) Yeah, and inevitably yeah when you hear someone say how much money will I make? Or I'm quitting my job and I'm coming into this so that I can make money and do what I love, and yet, and yet. 20:07 - Anne (Host) The first question is you don't want to put the work in. 20:09 - Lau (Guest) Yeah, and ironically, the first question is will I make money and when will that happen? Yeah, well, if it's something you really love, the first question will be I'm excited about what you're providing here. Can you talk to me more about what the process is like or what the clients are like or no? If it's money first, I say you know you're asking the wrong question. I have to tell you you're not in a position yet to ask that question. 20:31 - Anne (Host) I'm not in a position to answer that question and I'll tell you that I offer consults to people and I will have so many people and I know that there are many people, many coaches, that offer consults, that offer the free consults and people will just say, yeah, well, I'm a singer and I'm a theater actor and I already have a studio at home and I can make my own demo. So you'll get those people that are not aware and you know, it's just one of those things I will always say look, I'm not going to put on any rose colored glasses here and I'm going to tell you exactly. Here's the story. It's difficult. 21:01 Even though you already do theater acting, even though you're a singer, even though you've got the equipment already, you've got the studio competitively, it takes some time because there is a difference. Obviously there's a big difference between theater acting, on-camera acting and voice acting, and most the time it's assumed that voice acting oh, it's just simple, I can read pretty, I've got a great voice, and again, it's just the same old story. But yep, literally it's. You don't know what, you don't know, you don't know. It's okay, I mean, I think this is a journey of education, but if you are really frustrated, if you have not been booking for a year or however long, if you're frustrated. 21:42 I want you to look at these three things, right marketing, look at your marketing. Look at your offerings. What you're offering, make sure that it's something that people want out there. Right, you can be a great character actor, but your market is smaller than, let's say, a corporate narration specialist right, and it's a whole lot more competitive. Your national market commercial is a whole lot more competitive than an e-learning module. So, understand your markets, understand who you're selling to and then, of course, take a hard look. 22:14 - Lau (Guest) Take an honest, honest look at your performance and how can you improve that yes, yes, be honest with yourself and develop what we call the hustle muscle. You need a hustle muscle so that you understand I'm not waiting for work. The newer ideology is don't work harder, work smarter. And I say, okay, work smarter, but work harder, yeah. Yeah. Smarter doesn't take the place of harder. 22:38 - Anne (Host) You have to grind and working smarter means you realize that you probably need more skills right. And working smarter means, oh, you probably need to expand your offerings. Working smarter means yes you understand marketing better right and you understand what people are looking for, and why didn't you get picked? Or why didn't that person respond? Well, that's just. They don't have a need for you, right? 23:01 - Lau (Guest) now, right right and look at, look at some of your idols. If you have an idol the gurus that are out there in the world pick someone that you really respect, that you follow. Maybe you read their books, maybe you go to their webinars, maybe you follow them. You know, just popped into my head I saw him on a network tv last night was tony robin. Some people adore him and some people don't follow him, but the one thing about him and his brand that's last at a hundred thousand years. 23:27 - Anne (Host) Right, he's been around forever is. 23:29 - Lau (Guest) He's a grinder, he is a hard-working person and he's had his tentacles in everything. He was in Hollywood, he had little bit parts in movies, he was on the conference circuit, he did a. What didn't he do? And now I don't know how old he is. He's got to be 60. At least he looks fantastic, by the way, he looks amazing and he's out there. He's got a new summit and he's got a new book and he's got it and he's very wealthy. Let's be honest, he's a multi-millionaire. But it's really the joy, the excitement, the challenge and the energy of moving forward. 24:05 - Anne (Host) That's what he sells his motivation right, he sells, he's motivating, he's motivating, he's inspiring and so, yeah, you better believe he's got that muscle developed. So absolutely, and people want that, right, but it's what you were saying. 24:17 - Lau (Guest) Anneie, it's exactly what you were saying. If I'm not moving, if I'm not doing, then I'm static, I'm stagnating. And I always have to bring it back to myself and saying well, if I'm not getting enough work or if I'm not booking, what can I do? Don't ask the question what am I doing wrong? That's not the right question to ask. Ask the question what can I be doing to strategize, work harder and smarter and make better use of my work days so that I can be putting myself into new leads, into new situations? And also here's another one for you. I got a bonus one for you you should be producing, you should be self-producing projects at all times, whether it's a little whatever, a little web series or a little YouTube commercial. 25:01 For your business or an adult Sure that'll help you to market, right, I mean, and it's exciting because you can get your friends and colleagues involved you can maybe pay someone a couple bucks to help you edit it or whatever. Incorporate work, work breeds work, at all times so that you feel like, wow, I'm creating, I'm creating to be creative and also to breed work. 25:21 - Anne (Host) Absolutely good advice. Wow, all right, yet another, I think, very empowering episode for the bosses out there and bosses so just really sit down, take a hard look at what you're doing now and, if the bosses can be of any assistance, we are here to help you guys. Also, take a moment to imagine a world full of passionate, empowered, diverse individuals such as yourself giving collectively and intentionally to create the world that they want to see. Find out more at visiting 100voiceswhocareorg. And our shout out to our sponsor, ipdtl you too can connect and network like a boss. Find out more at IPDTLcom. Thanks so much, guys. Have a wonderful week and we'll see you next week. See you next week. 26:10 - Intro (Anneouncement) Bye. Join us next week for another edition of VO Boss with your host and Ganguzza, and take your business to the next level. Sign up for our mailing list at vobosscom and receive exclusive content, industry revolutionizing tips and strategies and new ways to rock your business like a boss. Redistribution with permission. Coast to coast connectivity via IPDTL. 26:38 - Anne (Host) Hey La, do you know what time of year it is? It is time for the audition demolition holiday Bosses. We are so excited for this episode. Why can't I just do this? Sorry, let's try that one, okay, movers.

In this episode Anne Ganguzza and Lau Lapides discuss health and business transformations, sharing personal journeys and business changes. Together, The BOSSES dissect the essence of finding a compelling 'why' to fuel profound changes and prevent old habits from creeping back. They navigate the intricate process of embracing a new identity after such shifts. The conversation takes you through the peaks and valleys of goal setting and the importance of evolving these goals to sidestep complacency and promote growth. Whether you're toasting to recent victories or charting the course for your next big achievement in voiceover or other business ventures, this talk is peppered with inspiration. Tune in and let the shared experiences and guiding wisdom propel you toward seizing new opportunities and savoring the ascent to success and fulfillment. 00:01 - Intro (Announcement) It's time to take your business to the next level, the boss level. These are the premier business owner strategies and successes being utilized by the industry's top talent today. Rock your business like a boss, a V-O boss. Now let's welcome your host, Anne Ganguzza. 00:19 - Anne (Host) Hey everyone, welcome to the V-O Boss podcast and the Boss Superpower series. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzza. I'm here with the lovely Lau Lapides, my very special boss co-host. How are you, annie? I'm doing amazing, Lau, I'm doing amazing. How about yourself? 00:39 Wonderful, amazing as well Good, you know Lau. I've been thinking about this a lot. I mean, for me, I have gone through a little bit of a transformation over the past few months Actually, I would say year and a half. Physical transformation, because I've been trying to get healthy. I lost a little bit of weight and I was thinking about in terms of wanting to transform my habits or what I do on a day-to-day basis and transform and evolve into something that can really move me forward and progress. 01:12 I thought that we can also apply the same kind of transformation thoughts, mentality, rules maybe not rules, but strategies for our own businesses. I thought it would be a good time to talk about transformation and transforming our VO businesses, because I think it's something that it's the beginning of the year. I think it's always a good time to think about. Everybody talks about New Year's resolutions, but I don't want to talk about resolutions. I want to talk about transformation and how you can assess if your business needs to transform, if you need to evolve, and what it would look like for you to set a course or a strategy on how to transform your business, because I think our markets have shifted Lau and we need to really evaluate that and transform our businesses to evolve along with them. 02:02 - Lau (Guest) Well, that's amazing stuff. I love talking about transformation and I can't help but bringing up the fabulous frog, because the frog in Eastern culture is a representative as symbolic of transformation when you think about leaping forward. And, by the way fun fact, I'm sure everyone kind of knows this, but this is leap year, which means in the leap year calendar, you have an extra day in this year for your leaping, for your transformation, for the new calendar and thinking about wow, what am I going to do in that extra 24 hours? Right, but I mean what you have done in terms of your physical, your mental, your spiritual transformation is nothing short of like miraculous, amazing. 02:50 - Anne (Host) Now here's the question. 02:52 - Lau (Guest) Here's the question what do we do once we are transformed into something else? There's a great question. Right and how do we acclimate to that? How do we that's a wonderful question Assimilate with that, how do we, in essence, blend into the form that we want to be and, all of a sudden, are becoming Sure Now we're a new entity, right? 03:15 - Anne (Host) Yeah Well, first of all, I want to say thank you for that. I really appreciate that. One thing I will say, and I want to stress this to you bosses out there, that transformation doesn't happen overnight. Very rarely does it happen overnight. 03:28 And I will say that my transformation, my physical transformation to better health, literally was a journey, and I really had to make sure that I gave myself grace and patience with myself in order to be able to transform. And I know that, gosh, we've been in business for so long and we've been transforming our businesses for years now, and I do know that it's not a simple nor a quick process. And so I want you bosses out there to give yourself some grace and to kind of be prepared and enjoy the journey as you evolve and transform and go through it. And, yes, law, one of the biggest questions is once you have transformed, how is it that you will maintain consistency or continue to progress or continue to keep moving forward, if you want to, with that transformation? And I will tell you that for me physically because this is multiple times I've kind of been there and gotten healthy and lost weight, and so I think this time it means a little bit more to me, I think there's always that what is your why, right, what is your why? Why do you want to transform? Well, I want to be a successful voiceover artist. Well, I want to be healthy. Well, I want whatever it is that you are looking to transform. 04:44 Your why is so very important and that why can evolve over time as you are transforming, right, that why can change and I think, depending on the importance of that why to you, right, that really becomes a catalyst for being able to sustain that transformation and to make sure that it's something that is moving forward. You're not going to let necessarily, let's say, slip back into bad habits or slip back into the things that will not move yourself forward. And I am the first to tell you that I am terrified, terrified of slipping back into old habits, right, I do not want. Health wise, I do not want to slip back. Business wise, I do not want my business to go backwards, and so that, right, there is a great motivator for me to figure out ways and strategies to actually maintain and or move forward from that. So I think really understanding your purpose and your why for the transformation is key. 05:45 - Lau (Guest) So here's the question, the million dollar question what is or what was your why? 05:53 - Anne (Host) Oh. 05:53 - Lau (Guest) Annie, for doing what you did in this major transformation, powerful stage that you've been in and still are in in your process and your progress. What was this last? Why? 06:08 - Anne (Host) for you. Well, that's really a good question. So if we're talking about my health transformation, I will say that it was an eye-opener from my doctor who said Anne, you are at stroke level high blood pressure and I want you to get some blood work done. And that's just the simple facts of it which just literally scared me straight into getting blood work done. And that blood work was not good. 06:33 And as a result of that blood work, I was then diagnosed with some other health issues which then I was prescribed lots and lots of medication for. It scared me and I thought, after having been through and people know my cancer journey, I thought I'm invincible, right? Well, no, no, I had kind of slipped into some habits. There was lots of reasons. I don't want to say that all of them were excuses for poor habits. I mean, some of them were just consequences of medication, but ultimately that was a priority that my why all of a sudden became like, well, goodness, like I beat cancer. I certainly don't want this new revelation of these new health issues to take anything away from me that. 07:13 I worked so hard to build in the first place, and so that kind of just woke me up right, and I think we all kind of tend to get into those things. I know there's many, many people that are either trying to get healthy on a weight loss journey that will slip back. They lost weight, they slip back, and then they're like oh, and they beat themselves up. But I think that things evolve, as we were talking about right, your why evolves, your reasons evolve, and I think you always need to keep an eye on that and you need to really, if you want to make that change and that transformation, you have to really keep your eye on that. Why write it down and really understand what now is the strategy, what are the consequences if you're not going to be making those changes? 07:57 - Lau (Guest) And really understand that if you are serious about transformation in your business, in your life, in your inner world, your inner being one has to have discipline. You talk about habits and rituals and routines and patterns, and so do I and the importance of that, the success of people that can stay with a successful discipline, a habit, and even if you fall off sometimes the frog does fall off the lily pad and gets wet and then has to come back- on. 08:27 That's okay, but are you moving forward? Are you moving backwards and really keeping track of that, whether it's goal setting, whether it's just about your inspirations for the year, or whether it is something as grave as oh, this is very serious for my health. I almost have no choice. I have to move in that direction or I'm compelled to move in that direction. 08:47 - Anne (Host) Absolutely. 08:48 - Lau (Guest) Understanding like prioritizing. What transformations do I want to have? Will I prioritize those? Because you and I meet so many talent that they want to do 12,000 things. 09:01 - Anne (Host) Oh, yeah, absolutely. 09:03 - Lau (Guest) They want to transform everything in one day, all at once, and you and I know it's just not possible to do all at once. It really isn't. The day isn't long enough and our life isn't long enough. So, really understanding, like what is most important, where is that going to get me? What is my end game in that? Sure See, it's really. I think and I speak personally as well, because I'm a creative too, I'm an artist too. It's easy to fantasize, it's exciting to dream and get inspired, but then sometimes we fall off the cliff on the other end, because there is no real end game to some of those dreams. They just feel really good in the making. 09:42 - Anne (Host) Or it feels good in the dreaming law, right. 09:44 - Intro (Announcement) Yes, you know what I mean, and so, but when it? 09:46 - Anne (Host) comes time to putting it into action. I think that's where most people they're really looking for. How do I get motivated? How? 09:54 - Lau (Guest) do I Right and that really becomes that. 09:56 - Anne (Host) Why that priority? It's almost like you're clawing your way sometimes to get that motivation, because you don't think that for 2 and 1 half years or three years, during that pandemic, I wasn't commiserating, saying oh my gosh, I'm not feeling good, or you know what I mean. I feel like I'm so busy but I don't have time to take care of myself or my health. And really you have to be able to somehow find that motivation to start the climb. And it is a climb and it's not more than likely. It's not an easy climb. The dreaming is the easy part. 10:29 And I like how you said inspirations instead of resolutions, right, because resolutions, a lot of times people get dejected from the beginning because they make a resolution and after the first week of the new year they're like yes, I'm going to go to the gym and I'm going to work out and literally that's just been something. And it's interesting because now that I've gotten healthier, now I'm on that mad terrified like, oh my gosh, I've got to maintain it. So now I'm physically working out every day, right, and the only time I have to do it is early in the morning. So literally I am like at 7 AM, sometimes 6, 30 AM and I don't, I'm tired and I literally I get on that machine or I go to Pilates and I'm like I am so tired, I almost feel sick. You know what I mean? That's how tired I am, I can't. But I push myself through it and usually you get through that lactose, burning through that lactose, and then you'll start to feel better. 11:18 But before you start getting better, boy, there's a lot of pain and it's hard. I don't want to do it. I don't want to do it. 11:25 - Lau (Guest) But isn't that a great metaphor for exactly what we do in our industry is that we want to reach that zenith. We all want to reach the apex of whatever we're doing. 11:34 - Anne (Host) The first thing I thought of we want that. Yes, we want every day. We want to get work for commercial work. 11:39 - Lau (Guest) Yeah, exactly the first thing I thought of was a film I just saw about the Andes Mountains and I thought of a huge mountain like the Andes and how impossible it is to climb it. And we want to be right up on that little sliver, right up on that vista, that we can walk on the absolute top, and we say, I want to get there, that's my dream. But rather, what are the plateaus, what are the places that we have to get to in order to make it up there? And there are many stopping points, there are many resting points, there are many points where you're going to slide down, you're going to fall, you're going to roll over, you're going to stumble. And, really understanding, in order for me to get to that zenith, I have to think through and have almost a mapology of all the sticking points that could happen and how I'm going to deal with them when they happen, not if they happen, but when they happen because they will happen. 12:32 - Anne (Host) What's also I was thinking about in terms of inspiration? Right, because I thought, oh, have I reached my goal? Have I reached the place where I want to be? Have I reached the apex? No, I have to keep moving that apex Now. Does it have to be upward? I like to think it's moving upward, but I'm going to say it's moving in a positive direction, so I'm not going to lose 100 more pounds. 12:50 - Lau (Guest) Do you know what I mean? 12:51 - Anne (Host) But no, what am I going to do? Well then, maybe I okay. So now my goal has shifted right. My transformation goal has shifted, especially, let's say, in our voice ever business right? Oh, I want to do national spots, or I want to be in animation and I want to be on Cartoon Network or whatever. Your goal is right so you can have that apex. But again, where are those places that are going to get you there? And then, let's say, you ultimately get to the apex and you get that national. You get that. What are you going to do? Are you going to sit there? I'm going to say complacent in that, of course, I'm not saying you shouldn't celebrate that but I also feel as though you need to be continually evolving and moving that goal to continue transformation or continue growth. 13:35 I've always said this multiple times in the podcast, that the death of me is when I feel stagnant, when I am not changing anything, when I'm not doing anything. So in voiceover, maybe you can explore a new genre. You can work with a different coach. There are so many different things you can do. Take an improv class, right. Work up the relationship with your agent, right, like there's so many things that you can do. Yes, and what do? 13:59 - Lau (Guest) you do with the prize, with the celebration once you have it, once you get it. I once had an acting professor in grad school who talked about that. He said you know, once I reached where I wanted to reach, I got incredibly depressed. I got severely, clinically depressed. Yeah, because I reached it. I said that what else is there? Right, right? And I said there's no place but down from here. Well, we had smart colleagues that said you're wrong, your perspective is wrong. Now you need to reach the next level of where you're headed next. And remember you're not just headed north, you can go east you can go, west you can go diagonal right you can pivot in different directions. 14:38 The meter diver is going to go down south, so it's really about how you open up that framework for yourself. 14:44 I like that I like that Of success, and when you do reach a success, take the time, celebrate it. Yes, do something with it to make it real for yourself, make it count, make it something that you can apply to life, because you're going to want to move on to something else and you don't want to forget about that. You don't want to imagine that that never happened. Have you ever felt that way? I've had that many times where I've achieved exactly what I wanted to, oh yeah, and then by next week I forgot. 15:08 - Anne (Host) I did it. I forgot Exactly. You need to always celebrate that, and you're so right because I'm literally, I'm not quite at my goal right, but I'm pretty much at my goal right, and I'm like, oh gosh, now what, right, now what. And so, in reality, I needed to make a new goal. And so now I have a new goal. And now my new goal is well, okay, maybe health wise, I'm good. 15:28 I got most of my medications are. Now, you know, I don't need to take them anymore. Now I just I need to build up some muscle. This is just physically right. I need to build up muscle. So I don't have any muscle. 15:38 I got a lot of that weight had to go somewhere in my skin, said what, what, where did my skin go? It didn't disappear. So so I need to bulk up a little bit, and I love that, because I didn't feel depressed. I thought, oh God, I've done everything. And everybody says be proud and I am proud. 15:54 But I also was like, oh God, well, what do I do now? And so therefore, I will say to you law, I'm so glad you said that, because everybody that knows me knows I have all the different divisions of my business right and I always say well, it's because I can't be stagnant and I don't want to be bored. And so I decided, well, let's open up another brand, right? So I've got another brand, and people are like I don't understand how you do it. And I'm like, well, literally, I am one person, I have so many hours in the day, right, and so, yeah, am I doing a lot? Sure, but I also hire a lot of people too that can help me, right, and they're helping me to get to my transformation and my goals, and that is the way that I can do that. 16:32 - Lau (Guest) And so again keep setting goals, keep setting. 16:35 - Anne (Host) And you're right, you can go east, you can go west, you can even go south, but I think you always need to continually grow. 16:42 - Lau (Guest) That's right. And just remember with transformation comes change, and it sounds like well, obviously, but change is something that frightens us oftentimes because we like control and we like to know exactly who we are and what's coming next. So when you welcome transformation, you welcome change, and when you welcome change, you welcome the unknowing at times. So just keep that in your mindset. 17:06 - Anne (Host) And I think also there's something to ask yourself too is to really be truthful with yourself. Are you fearful of not just failure, but are you fearful of success? What will happen when you get to that successful level and that, of course, you know part of the fear of the unknown right? What will happen now that you're successful with that? Success may come like a whole new series of maybe problems or issues or things that you'll need to think about or deal with that you have not ever experienced before, and that is scary, yeah very scary. 17:39 - Lau (Guest) So as wonderful as it is and as much as we're going after it and chasing after it, we have to know that there's also a fear factor involved with transformation. And I say recognize the fear and do it anyway. 17:51 - Anne (Host) Yeah, just lean into it. I think really don't run away from it. Lean into it and just know that it's scary, no matter what. 17:59 - Lau (Guest) It's scary. 18:00 - Anne (Host) It's scary for all of us, really, and you're not alone. You are not alone, and I think that one of the reasons why I love this podcast is that we can talk about topics like this, so that people don't feel alone, because, again, we are in such an isolated business and you're an entrepreneur, and so, therefore, there are many things that are scary being an entrepreneur because it's so funny because, having come from corporate right where I was told what to do here, here's your job, this is what you do, and if you want to advance, this is what you do. And that was it. It was easy. I could take instruction. It's kind of like taking direction right. 18:35 But, as entrepreneurs, when we're trying to move forward and transform and evolve, where are we evolving to? What are we transforming to? Well, I know that. Let's just say I've had a lot of frustrated students who will say to me I've not been able to book work right, and so I've been here for a year and I've not been successful, and my loved ones are asking me what's going on and I feel like a failure, I feel like I'm not successful, I need to do something, and so I think that really, it could be a why right All of a sudden, if something's not working for you, right, that could be a good why to propel yourself to make a transformation. 19:14 Now, again, as I would always say, as being the teacher, right, educate, educate yourself. If you don't know where to go, you can ask a trusted colleague, ask a trusted coach. What do you think I should do? Where should I go? What do you think is next? Read up on the industry. I think that's another really helpful tip is read up on the industry and understand what the trends are, understand what's happening culturally in the world and in the market. Right, in the global market, because and I think we talked about this in one of our previous episodes right, that will dictate what are your buyers looking for? Right, how are you going to transform your business so that it can be something that will serve, right, the market and serve the buyers? 19:56 - Lau (Guest) Absolutely, absolutely. Do your homework, because it's not easy to transform. It takes a lot of work, a lot of research, a lot of homework, a lot of practice and then, all of a sudden, before you know it, you've turned into something else and hopefully it's in the direction of where you want to be. On behalf of your whole audience, you know, I thank you for being an amazing, transformational, super beautiful frog. Thank you, I appreciate that, and you as well we are all frogs. 20:25 - Anne (Host) Right, we are all frogs, we are, we are all frogs, and so I think that it's inspiring and it's motivational and it's exciting. I like to always embrace challenges and I try to embrace fear. It doesn't make me feel any more confident I have. So many people are like you're so confident. I'm like, well, okay, I put it on a good show, don't I? But I always like to look at things with positivity and I realize that if it doesn't work out the way that I think right and maybe it didn't work out I always say, well, look look at what I learned. Like, how cool is that? Absolutely Turn that into something good. You have to love the leap, yeah yeah, love the leap, love the leap. 21:04 And it's funny because when you first started talking about the frog, I was thinking, oh yeah, because frogs. Well, tadpoles, right, I mean gosh. When I was young I used to like I love little polywogs, polywogs that turned into tadpoles, that turned into frogs, and literally I mean look at them, look at how they grew. Look at how they grew. Yeah, they're incredible Caterpillars that blossom into butterflies. That transformation. So, bosses, we have complete faith, complete faith in your ability to transform yourselves, transform your business. And transformation doesn't just have to be business For my health, that's affected. My business, right, everything personally. We talk about how personal this business is. Everything that affects me personally affects my business too, Absolutely. 21:47 - Lau (Guest) You can't separate the two, because you need your energy, your focus, your mindset, your health. You need everything working in tandem to make that transformation happen. So take care of your inners before you take care of your outers. There you go. 22:00 - Anne (Host) I love it, guys, and we have all the faith in the world that you can transform Great conversation, laugh. Thank you so much, my pleasure. 22:08 Bosses, here's your chance to use your voice to not only transform, but to make an immediate difference in our world and give back to the communities that give to you. Visit 100voiceswhocareorg to commit and big shout out to IPDTL, our sponsor. We love IPDTL. It allows me to connect with law and my clients every single day and I love that relationship. I love the building of the relationships with my clients and with law. So you guys, visit IPDTLcom to find out more. Have an amazing week and we'll see you next week. Bye. 22:46 - Intro (Announcement) Join us next week for another edition of VO Boss with your host and Gangusa, and take your business to the next level. Sign up for our mailing list at vobosscom and receive exclusive content, industry revolutionizing tips and strategies and new ways to rock your business like a boss. Redistribution with permission. Coast to coast connectivity via IPDTL.

The BOSSES discuss how to embrace the intricacies of your finances as owners of your voiceover business. As tax season approaches, they delve into self-employment, discussing how different business structures, such as S-Corps and DBAs, can significantly impact your taxation and payment schedule. They also examine the emotional factors that can influence your approach to money management, taking into account personal backgrounds and societal pressures. Health insurance options are also discussed, from leveraging a spouse's plan to state programs. The BOSSES also explore the merits of keeping distinct business bank accounts and utilizing tools such as Health Savings Accounts and business credit cards. Whether you're a spreadsheet enthusiast or a QuickBooks aficionado, they provide insights on tracking transactions, automating invoicing, and the smart utilization of business credit cards for cashback rewards. 00:01 - Intro (Announcement) It's time to take your business to the next level, the boss level. These are the premier business owner strategies and successes being utilized by the industry's top talent today. Rock your business like a boss, a V-O boss. Now let's welcome your host, Anne Ganguzza. 00:19 - Anne (Host) Hey everyone, welcome to the V-O Boss podcast and the Real Bosses series. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzza, Again back with the amazing Tom Dheere. Tom, I'm so excited to talk to you today. 00:33 - Tom Dheere (Guest) Yay, always glad to hang out with you. 00:36 - Anne (Host) Except I don't have such a fun topic to talk to you about today, tom, oh no. Well, my accountant. The other day she sent me an email saying well, anne, I'm going to be taking out thousands of dollars for your free payment, for your taxes, for your S-Corp. As April is coming along here, I thought we should probably talk about finances, and I know it's not everybody's favorite topic and I've talked about this before, but I think, getting closer to tax time, it's important for us to have an intelligent discussion right and talk about why it's so important, bosses, for you to have some financial intelligence surrounding your business, and I think, tom, you're going to be the best source of information for this. So let's talk about financial intelligence. What does that mean? 01:25 - Tom Dheere (Guest) Okay, I derive my understanding of financial intelligence versus emotional intelligence from Robert Kiyosaki rich dad poor dad books. If you've never read rich dad poor dad, it is a must read for people who are self-employed in general, and it's really great for voice actors in particular, because it talks about making decisions based on feelings versus making decisions based on facts, and part of my philosophy is that everybody has their own weird relationship with money. 01:55 - Anne (Host) A lot of people are afraid of it. That's a polite way of saying it. It's a weird relationship with money. 02:01 - Tom Dheere (Guest) Yeah, Well, yeah, because some people are terrified of it. Yeah, some people covet it, some people hate it, and a lot of that is influenced by you, but it's also influenced by what your parents taught you or didn't teach you about money, or your culture, or your home or your school or your friends kind of taught you what your relationship with money is, not necessarily what it should be. So, as the VO strategist, there's a lot of grown-up poopy stuff that I talk about. 02:28 - Anne (Host) You made me snort, sorry Sorry. 02:30 - Tom Dheere (Guest) Or maybe I should do them more over there. That was pretty funny. What I mean by that is that a lot of people try to get into the voiceover industry to get away from the grown-up poopy stuff, and what they find is that they have to do all that stuff too, yeah, but they don't know how to do it. No one has told them how to do it, or when to do it, or where to do it, or why to do it, nor being held accountable for it. And the financial literacy is a huge component of that. Yeah, understand the difference between how employees get paid versus how managers get paid, versus how self-employed people get paid, and how they get taxed is very, very different. Yes, and can I just interject really quickly? 03:12 - Anne (Host) I said my accountant right, and of course, I always talk about my accountant and how wonderful it was one of the best decisions I ever made for my business. However, even though I have an accountant, I need to be able to direct my accountant and understand what my accountant is saying. So, yes, I need to be financially literate, I need to understand what's important, I need to understand how things operate, and she can be part of my education. She can talk to me about that. But also it's definitely upon myself to be educated and smart, because if you're going to have someone helping you with your financials, then you want to make sure that you've got the right person. 03:48 - Tom Dheere (Guest) Yes, and there's a lot of ways to do that. There's a website. I'll have to find it. I'll give you the link. I think it's the AEA or AEE or it's like the American Association of Accountants or something like that, and you can do a search based on where you live and what kind of financial advisor you need help with. So there are CPAs certified public accounts who specialize in working with people who are self-employed. So because the way that someone who's self-employed files their taxes, because the way they get paid what tax, if tax is withheld, what tax is withheld, how it is withheld and all of the expenses that you can write off in deductions that you can make is completely different from a person who has one nine to five job, who gets a paycheck every 14 days and gets one W-2 in the mail every year and you take the standard deduction and you're done. 04:33 - Anne (Host) Now I have a bunch of different information right At the end of the year that if I'm paying people I need to provide or I get a bunch of information depending on how much money I've made from different clients I will get a bunch of different pieces of information that are important for my taxes, and I will also mention that, having been a DBA prior to an S-Corp, right, things are different now that I'm an S-Corp. 04:54 I mean, I used to, as a DBA, I would quarterly make an estimate on my taxes and pay it, but now I have to pay myself a salary, and so that is also different and I have different paperwork to file. I'm gonna say the S-Corp saved me a whole lot of my taxes. And again, what's the difference, right, between the different types of businesses and how can they help me when tax season comes about and how can they help save me money? And so, while I am saving money with an S-Corp versus my DBA, because of the amount of money that I'm making, it also becomes more time consuming on my part because I've got more paperwork to fill out, more things to mail in, and I've constantly, for whatever reason, the government is always coming back to me saying, hey, you owe us $13. No, I don't, because there was a number that was reported incorrectly. 05:40 And I'm not always getting it, but it certainly happens a little bit more than when I was working for a company and just had one piece of paperwork to file at the end of the year. 05:48 - Tom Dheere (Guest) Your VO bosses may be freaking out a little bit right now, but I wanna put them at ease. The question is should you incorporate or should you form an LLC, or should you stay self-employed? The answer is different, for everybody. Just because Anne is an S-Corp doesn't mean she advocates that everybody should be an S-Corp. 06:06 - Anne (Host) Yeah, absolutely, Because you all live in different right, Right exactly. 06:12 - Tom Dheere (Guest) And that has a huge effect because different states have different incorporation laws. So what benefits her living in California and forming an S-Corp? May not be good for me in New York forming an S-Corp. So that's why you need to have a living breathing CPA, not filing it via QuickBooks or stuff. You need to have a human. 06:33 - Anne (Host) And I'm gonna say yeah, and not just once a year for taxes. I really highly recommend some sort of an advisor. Now your accountant doesn't have to tell you what kind of business, but mine did because she was very familiar with working with people who are self-employed. So that helped a lot, tom. What do you recommend for people who don't have a clue, like what sort of company should they form? 06:55 - Tom Dheere (Guest) Right, okay, talk to. Well, not all. And to your point, not all CPAs are financial advisors and not all financial advisors are CPAs, right? So if you are gonna have a conversation with someone about it, I would strongly recommend you find in your state a certified fiduciary, that's a person who has literally taken an oath and certified that they will give you financial advice that is in your best interest. This is why you should not walk into some national franchise bank looking for financial advice, because there's always some guy or girl sitting in the corner at a desk who don't care if you are penniless when you retire, they're gonna try to sell you the retirement packages that will give them the best commissions. So I say, stay as far away from them as you can. Go to your credit union also. They may be able to help you. Your credit union is more of a vested interest in your financial wellbeing too. 07:49 - Anne (Host) I just caught you saying I'm gonna sell you a retirement package. Now, that's something that most voice artists, right? If you're working for yourself and self-employed, you're not even really thinking about, right? That's in addition to registering your business, paying yourself a salary or whatever it is that you're going to do. Are you going to incorporate? Are you going to be a DBA? There's also other things like retirement funds and healthcare, right and so? 08:13 - Tom Dheere (Guest) That's a whole other thing too. 08:14 - Anne (Host) Let's talk about that for a moment, Tom Sure. 08:17 - Tom Dheere (Guest) Okay. So if you have a spouse who has an insurance plan, get on it. Yeah, that's probably your best way to go. Also, sag-aftra has a fantastic health insurance program. If you are SAG-AFTRA, you need to earn a certain amount of money every year to qualify for that. So if you can get it through a partner, great. If you can get it through SAG-AFTRA, great. 08:40 - Anne (Host) If you cannot, If you work for the government too, county or state before this this county-state government employees also have fantastic plans. 08:46 - Tom Dheere (Guest) When I was a teacher yes, I had a great plan because I work for an educational institution and I have a nice pension Right. 08:51 Also, the Freelancers Union has healthcare. Nava has health insurance packages that you can look at. I, who live in New York, go through this state New York healthcare program. So my wife and I built an account. We entered all of our information, all of our assets, all of our expenses, and then it says okay, based on your adjusted income, you qualify for these health insurance programs through these companies and it will cost this amount. So that's been fantastic for us. The big thing is that if you are self-employed, you can write off legitimately, legally, ethically, a lot of stuff. Yes, yes. So when it comes to applying for a mortgage, it doesn't look good because your income looks a lot lower. 09:30 - Anne (Host) Absolutely. 09:31 - Tom Dheere (Guest) But if you are applying for health insurance, first-hand experience. 09:33 - Anne (Host) It's great for you yes, first-hand experience. If you're self-employed and then asking for a mortgage, it is something. You will have to provide a trillion pieces of evidence of the money that you make. It is very difficult, because that was my experience when we applied for a mortgage a couple of years ago, before we bought this home, and so, being self-employed, you have to be more financially intelligent than you ever thought, because you're going to have to have lots of different proof of income when do you get your income and how much income, and what are you writing off? And the cool thing is is that, yes, you can write off a whole bunch when you're self-employed. However, sometimes it makes the government look at you a little closer too. 10:13 - Tom Dheere (Guest) Yes, you gotta be careful about that Because if you take a loss too many times, they're gonna designate your voiceover career as a hobby and then financially, you're kind of boned when it comes to that. I will also give another piece of advice regarding health insurance. Is that the best advice that I can give that I give my VO strategist students is to try to get a health savings account, or HSA. This is separate from a health insurance policy. Hsa is basically an IRA or a retirement account, but the purpose of it is to put money into it and take money out of it only for medical expenses. And what's great about it is for those of us who get paid voiceover gigs where there is no withholding. They don't take taxes out. You can deposit that money in that HSA and it will not get taxed when you take that money out for a legitimate medical expense. 11:08 That money does not get taxed, it is protected and a lot of them function like actual funds, like retirement funds where you can choose. It's like an index fund or a retirement fund where you can choose Apple or Microsoft or whatever, and it will be influenced by the market and some of them are purely interest rate based, like a straight up IRA so you can have multiple HSAs. I have multiple HSAs. Some are performance based, some are interest based, and what I do is I don't take anything out of them ever, even if I have medical expenses, because what I'm going to do is that down the road you can reimburse yourself for medical expenses as long as you provide the receipts, anytime you want. So if you've got $1,000 in your HSA and you take out $500 to repay yourself back for a medical expense, you've only got $500 in there. That's growing or performing. If you do it 10 years from now, that $500, and you have $10,000 as a result of market growth and additional putting more money in. Now, when you're taking $500 out, it's a drop in the bucket. 12:10 Yeah yeah, absolutely, and when you hit 65, you can just withdraw from it like a retirement fund. So I strongly recommend a health savings account. It's very, very powerful. A lot of your credit unions may already have one, or you can go to hsabankcom and check it out. 12:25 - Anne (Host) Well, I'm also going to say now what's so important right that establishes you as a business is a business bank account, which is something I think is imperative, and also a business savings account, and I have a high yield business savings account, which is really. I don't take money out of that If I don't have to. That is really, and I don't know if it's just in the last couple of years, but I've seen more and more offerings of this with different banks and with I actually happen to have one with American Express which is doing really well, and so I have that. 12:55 I just put the money in it and I don't touch it and it just sits there and it really is doing well, interest wise, and so if I ever do need it, that's going to be kind of like my little nest egg. But talk about the importance of separating your accounts out from personal into business. 13:11 - Tom Dheere (Guest) This is so important. The biggest reason why you need to do this is so you have a clean audit trail, because if the IRS does ever come and knock in, they can look at your accounts and you can say this one, all of my business expenses went in and out of this account. All of my personal stuff went in and out of this account. They are separate because if you are mixing it all up, it's a big mess and you could get in a lot of trouble. 13:34 - Anne (Host) Yeah, and it's horrible at tax time Horrible, horrible at tax time, horrible, especially if you're not keeping track. 13:40 - Tom Dheere (Guest) Yep. These accounts are super easy to open as well. Most of us can just go online, log on to your bank online and just open the account. You don't even need to talk to a human, you just go, click, click, click. 13:49 - Anne (Host) You just transfer money and they want your money, they want your money and, as a matter of fact, they will reward you if you have a certain amount of money in that account. Free checks, higher interest, that sort of thing, lots of different. So I think you can shop around for a bank, because banks want your money right now. 14:04 - Tom Dheere (Guest) Yeah, because, like, my business checking account is with one major bank chain and then my personal checking account is with another one because the interest rate is so much higher in the other one. But I like all the benefits. Sure, the business one. That's also the same one that I got my PPP loan when the pandemic happened. So when I applied and lined everything up, I got approved in 15 minutes and the money hit my account within 24 hours. 14:25 - Anne (Host) Yeah, yeah, same. For me, it really makes such a big difference when you have those accounts separate, and I cannot tell you how easy it is to have those separate accounts when you're working, let's say even with an accountant, right, because I actually happen to have the same bank for both my personal and my business. However, they're entirely separate when it comes to my software. So how important is it, tom, to have a software that helps us to financially understand what's happening in our business? You know inflows, outflows, profit and loss. 14:57 - Tom Dheere (Guest) I'm going to give you an answer that you may not expect, but I hate those. I hate them. 15:02 - Anne (Host) Okay. 15:03 - Tom Dheere (Guest) What I do is I have I know this sounds terrible, but I have a spreadsheet. Well, of course you do what the spreadsheet does is I know because Tom dear loves a spreadsheet. 15:14 - Anne (Host) Yes. 15:14 - Tom Dheere (Guest) My spreadsheets, which you can download for free at vostratigistcom. You sign up for it, you will get the spreadsheet that I'm talking about. I log every penny that goes into my business and every penny that goes out of my business. 15:25 - Anne (Host) Okay. 15:26 - Tom Dheere (Guest) So what's also nice is I've been messing around with some formulas lately, so the 2024 version, which I have yet to upload, but if you email me at tomatomgcom I can send it to you directly is that I log the amount, whether it's me as a voice actor or as the VO strategist. I have separate columns for those revenue streams and then I have the genre of voiceover in another column and then that populates a report, a running, living report. 15:51 So I can see exactly how many e-learning things I've done this year and how much money I've made and what percentage of my overall revenue that is. 15:58 - Anne (Host) So now does that also incorporate? Now the only reason I'm gonna say to you that, yes, I realize that you hate them. The reason, one of the reasons why I like them it use QuickBooks online is that I can integrate my bank account and so if somebody's paying me through an invoice and it goes into my bank account, it automatically gets recorded and because I am working with an accountant, she can remotely log in. She's not in California. She can remotely log in and manage my finances and the two of us. I can see what she's doing and that basically works really well for me. 16:30 - Intro (Announcement) And I have. 16:31 - Anne (Host) PayPal coming cause clients can pay me via PayPal, Venmo, my QuickBooks invoicing, which is three different streams incoming, and so those three act as banks and get automatically entered into QuickBooks and it can also take the fees, cause you know PayPal and they all charge fees. 16:49 That's the one thing, and so that can be yes, that can be separated automatically, so it's not something that I have to go and say, oh, all right, so $20 was paid to me. However, I only netted $18.57 because of the PayPal fee. So all of that can be automated and that just makes it easier for me and my accountant. 17:08 - Tom Dheere (Guest) I will say that I do use Wave for my voice actor invoicing, which I have my credit card set up on that, I have PayPal set up on that and I have direct deposit set up on that. 17:19 - Anne (Host) My VO strategist revenue goes through Wix, so I don't really generate invoices manually as the VO strategist Wix does, wix does it for me, and then it collects all the payments. 17:30 - Tom Dheere (Guest) Yeah, wix is great for that, and then I have it set up where once a week it'll take all the money I earned from Wix and just put it in my business checking account. So I get an email saying here tomorrow you're gonna get a direct deposit for this amount. 17:42 - Anne (Host) And then I just I write it in my checkbook and then you know, this is all income. Yeah, that makes a whole lot of sense. 17:46 - Tom Dheere (Guest) Right and I just write Wix in the right part of the side, or PP or DD or whatever. So also I'm so anal and I am so diligent with my spreadsheets and my CPA loves it because everything is auto-summed. So at the end of the year, when I don't bring my receipts to my CPA ever, I just send in one print out that has all of the expenses added up Automatically. I do very little math. 18:11 And then another spreadsheet that has all the 10.99s that I collected and all of the W-2s that I collected and then like the interest on my savings accounts or capital gains, the insurance interest and all that stuff and I just give that all to her. So I like my system. It works for me. 18:27 - Anne (Host) Yeah, no, absolutely. 18:29 - Tom Dheere (Guest) And working with the QuickBooks works for her, so it's good. 18:32 - Anne (Host) Well, yeah, I will tell you in terms of expenses, like so, my expenses. I have one business credit card and everything it's put on that business credit card, and so the statements from that credit card become my expenses. 18:45 And the nice thing is I just get a credit card that gives me all kinds of benefits. It actually gives me cash back, so again, that also is a bank that can be input into my QuickBooks and so all of my business expenses are also there, and so again, that works for me. So, and also my business checking account, obviously in savings account, are also in the QuickBooks. So yeah, I mean, I think, whether you do it via spreadsheet. Now, in terms of the amount of time, tom, that you spend doing financial things every day, once a week, once a month, how does that work for you? What's your time? 19:18 - Tom Dheere (Guest) I mean, the spreadsheet is open every day, so if an expense comes in or a gig comes in or I work with a student, I just log it as I go. It's just part of my workflow. It takes a minimum amount of time. I pay my credit card bills like twice a week. And that's the same time I'm updating my checkbooks. I send out invoices. Well, I mean, it depends. There's some clients where the second I send the audio files, I send the invoice. For some clients I wait a week for retakes. 19:43 Then I send the invoice and then I have some clients who all the work that I did in one month I'll send them one invoice for, so I don't have a set time of day or a week where I'm invoicing. It's usually that. But again, I've been doing this for so long and it's just such a part of my workflow and I'm one of the weirdos that likes doing the invoicing and paying the credit card bills and balancing the checkbook and logging the spreadsheet. 20:04 - Anne (Host) And I'm one of the people that doesn't I actually enjoy? 20:06 - Tom Dheere (Guest) it and that's fine. You're the minimum majority. 20:08 - Anne (Host) I'm the weirdo on this one, but that's okay. I mean, I think, your method with the spreadsheet. I mean the spreadsheets are so, so valuable. 20:16 - Tom Dheere (Guest) Number one yes, especially if you can find the right formulas, because, like, I like to know what percentage of my voiceover work is coming from my agent, so I know at the top of my head in 2023, 12% of my voiceover revenue came from representation Wow, and that's important, because I need to know how my business is functioning and why my business is functioning and I also learned things on a marketing level. 20:39 - Anne (Host) Yes, yes, absolutely About how my voiceover. 20:41 - Tom Dheere (Guest) Business is doing so. If I do a marketing campaign to put myself out there as an explainer video narrator and then I notice in third quarter 2023, my explainer video bookings went up by 20%, that means that marketing campaign worked. So these things all have a relationship with each other how your money comes in and out, your marketing methods, the tools that you're investing in, the training that you're investing in on a genre level All of them are interrelated. Everybody thinks they're these separate silos, and I love this one and I eat this one. I love them all because they're all related to each other. They should have a synergistic relationship. Most people coming into the industry, as you know, dump all their money into performance training, which they pretty much should at the beginning because they need to know if they can do this and how to do it. And then they invest in the demo and while they're doing that, they're investing in the home recording setup and all that stuff. 21:31 But what they're not a lot of them are doing is investing in their financial literacy. While they're doing this, they kind of wait till later or they don't know they have to work on this, because if you can start to develop your financial literacy as you are developing your performance skills and working with great coaches like Ann, when it comes time, when you've got that shiny demo in your hand and your website is up and your home recording studio is ready, you can hit the ground running, not just on audition and pray mode, but also on what do I do when I get my first gig. Oh, my God, I did the gig. 22:01 - Anne (Host) What do I? I got to do. What do I do now? Oh my God, what do I do? I got a gig. What do I do now? 22:06 - Tom Dheere (Guest) And what do I do with the check? How do I invoice them and what do I do with the check? 22:09 - Anne (Host) Well, first of all, if you go, oh my God, what do I charge? And then it's like, oh my God, how do I invoice? And then it becomes like, okay, now I've got the money and think about it. You don't want to just throw that in your personal checking. 22:18 - Tom Dheere (Guest) Right, and that's why Ann can help you with that. I can help you with that Kind of developing your financial literacy muscles and your marketing muscles, your business muscles, along with your performance muscles. So you are well rounded and when you're ready to hit the ground and really start your voice over career, you'll be firing on all cylinders. 22:36 - Anne (Host) Well, absolutely. And Tom. I just want to promote you, tom, because for all of those bosses out there that are just starting out like a lot of people out there going, oh my God, I don't even know where to start. Do I incorporate, do I create a business? What should I do? How do I even go about getting a separate account for my business? All of these questions you've got the VO strategist right here at your fingertips. And Tom is just amazing. He's been in the industry for gosh a billion years already and he didn't even pay me to say this. But I am highly, highly recommending for you to get with Tom. Get yourself a plan right, get yourself a strategy so that you can go into this as a business and not be panicked and be prepared for success. I love it. There's probably a whole lot more that we can talk about financial literacy. 23:20 - Tom Dheere (Guest) Tom. 23:21 - Anne (Host) However, I think we've really covered a lot of ground here. That I think is important for all bosses out there to understand and know that again, we're not just in the booth performing. That's not who our business is. There is that other component which I think is super, super important for us to understand so that we can go and make a profit, because that's what the whole purpose is. That's why we've become unless you're a hobbyist and I don't think VL Boss is I don't think we're talking to hobbyists here. I think we're talking about bosses. We are entrepreneurs, we are business owners, and let's get yourself prepared financially so that you can be on the road to success. Tom Dheere, is your pathway to get you started. I'm telling you, tom, thanks so much for talking with me today about this lovely topic which I know most people. I'm going to have to title this episode something completely different. Maybe I don't know, because I think sometimes, when people even see the word finance, they're like, oh God, my head hurts. 24:20 - Tom Dheere (Guest) But it doesn't have to be. Learn to love it. Yeah, love your finances. Yeah, that's what it's going to be called Love your finances Right, love your finances and have business success. 24:31 - Anne (Host) All right, tom. Well, thank you so much again for your wisdom. Bosses, big impact, simple mission, 100 voices, one hour, $10,000. If you want to know more, that's four times a year. By the way, bosses, visit 100voiceswhocareorg to find out more. And big shout out to our sponsor, ipdtl. You too can network and connect like VL Bosses, the VL Bosses that you are. Find out more at IPDTLcom. Have an amazing week and we'll see you next week. Bye. 25:01 - Intro (Announcement) Join us next week for another edition of VO Boss with your host, ann Ganguzza, and take your business to the next level. Sign up for our mailing list at vobosscom and receive exclusive content, industry revolutionizing tips and strategies and new ways to rock your business like a boss. Free distribution with permission. Coast to coast connectivity via IPDTL.

Voice actor and entrepreneurial spirit Cristina Milizia joins THE VO BOSS podcast to share her VO and GVAA journey. From her iconic performances in "League of Legends" to her shows on Nickelodeon, Cristina's career has spanned, toys, games, animation, and more! Cristina talks about her artistic influences and passion for performance, how being bilingual influences her career, and unexpected stardom in the face of adversity. Beyond the microphone, Cristina's legacy is amplified by her profound impact on the voice acting community through the Global Voice Acting Academy (GVAA) and its pivotal rate guide. We discuss the ethos of leadership, the cultivation of a nurturing community, and the unyielding push for fair compensation in the industry. 00:01 - Intro (Announcement) It's time to take your business to the next level, the boss level. These are the premier business owner strategies and successes being utilized by the industry's top talent today. Rock your business like a boss, a V-O boss. Now let's welcome your host, Anne Ganguzza. 00:20 - Anne (Host) Hey everyone, welcome to the V-O Boss podcast. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzzaa, and I am so excited to be here with a very special guest who is not only super Uber talented but one of my closest friends. Cristina Milizia is an award-winning bilingual voice actor and coach specializing in animation. She is a 2022 Voice Arts Award winner for outstanding animation character, film or TV best voiceover and is best known for voicing Annie and a Moo Moo on League of Legends, poison Ivy on Cartoon Network's DC superhero girls, Jessica Cruz for Lego DC Carlitos on the Casa Grande's, teresa for Barbie, mattel and Baby Bottle on the Cuphead Show. And while most of you know her for her acting roles, guess what? She is also a badass entrepreneur and a boss like no other, and she's the founder of the GVAA and the creator of the GVAA Rate Guide. Ah, Cristina, I am so excited to finally have you on the show. 01:19 - Cristina Milizia (Host) Thank you so much for having me. Also, any excuse to get to be with Ann is, like you know, awesome. I feel so fancy with your introduction, so thank you. 01:30 - Anne (Host) That long list of credits is amazing and I just want to reiterate, bosses out there, while most of you probably know her for her amazing acting abilities and her characters, I wanted to bring Cristina on because she's a pioneer woman. She is an entrepreneur from gosh knows. We've known each other for how long, Cristina now 10 years, 10 years about yeah, I think, at least 10 years. 01:52 Cristina was like a baby when she started the GVAA, and there's nothing more entrepreneurial than just starting an online school and then having the idea for the GVAA Rate Guide. So let's talk a little bit. Maybe brush people up on your career, because you've been acting for also, you're like 12 and you've been acting for 31 years. 02:12 - Cristina Milizia (Host) At least right. I have been acting for 31 years, so I am about to be 40 on February 1st, so very shortly, Happy birthday. 02:19 - Anne (Host) Thank you. 02:20 - Cristina Milizia (Host) Happy early birthday. Yeah, I know, that's a big 140. 02:23 - Anne (Host) Right. 02:24 - Cristina Milizia (Host) I'm feeling that when I'm like, wow, that's impressive, but no, I started acting when I was about eight years old. Again, my parents are musicians, so I was used to being on stage with them because they couldn't afford babysitters, so they were just like hey, kid, shake this maraca on stage, and that's what we did. So I learned to play all kinds of random instruments and sing three-part harmony and I got used to from a very early age just being like and I say this to my students you need to get used to being a dancing monkey to a certain degree which is like hey time to dance. 02:54 Okay, yes, I can do that. Ta-da Be ready to just go. And I had training really early on for just taking direction, performing on call, being on stage, which was an incredibly valuable skill set to have at an early age before you get to that point where you're more self-conscious. 03:11 - Anne (Host) Yeah, I was going to ask you were you ever scared to be on stage or scared to perform, or was it just because it was so ingrained at a young age? Did it just happen? 03:20 - Cristina Milizia (Host) No, I was never scared again because it just happened. Since I was so small it just seemed like part of my family life, along with sound checks and winding cable and everything else we did. It actually just got embarrassing when I got to like nine or 10 and my parents are performing at the school and I'm up there and I'm like, oh my God, please, all my friends are here. This is so embarrassing. I don't want to be like you are, family is playing and I'm just like, oh my God. 03:46 So, yeah, around between eight and 12, I got embarrassed about it and then I wouldn't play with them anymore and then I wanted to do my own thing and I danced as well and I ended up dancing professionally for quite some time, before I had an accident when I was 25 that made that no longer possible. So, yeah, it was a very artistic upbringing, so that definitely prepped me for just being in the booth. And so when I started doing some voiceover, the very first audition I did I booked and it was with casting director Ned Lott, who went on to cast for Miyasaki and Disney character voices. And, yeah, he cast me my very first job ever and I still work with him, which is really cool. 04:22 - Anne (Host) That's awesome. That's really awesome. And so your transition. I guess, when did you transition full time into voiceover? 04:29 - Cristina Milizia (Host) Well, I was determined not to be an artist because my parents, you know, were very much like kind of starving musicians growing up and it's a very difficult lifestyle, it's a very difficult profession to really make a full time living in, and so I was determined not to do that. So I studied like statistics, I went to like the school of management and I was like, oh my God, no, I can't. 04:47 - Anne (Host) Not unlike being an entrepreneur right and having your own business. I mean, we're all kind of starving artists, aren't we In our own right? Yeah, so you studied statistics and said uh-uh. 04:56 - Cristina Milizia (Host) Yep, and then I went to the School of Management and actually that was very helpful because, even though I didn't stay there, I actually learned a lot about management and communication with teams and how to deliver messaging and communication and people management, and so that actually was very useful. Even though I didn't complete my education there, I ended up going back to transfer to UC Berkeley and then studied theater, but dipping my toe in the business world and management was actually something that was very useful later on when starting GVAA. 05:25 - Anne (Host) Absolutely, and so let's talk about your career then, kind of full-time and voiceover before the GVAA that would be GVAA. How long were you working and doing voiceover before you decided to start a business and what was it that led you to Actually want to start a business or an online school? 05:45 - Cristina Milizia (Host) Well, so I did voiceover from eight years old all the way through lower school, middle school, high school again. I just did it just here and there. It was never like a big deal, it was just something fun and a cool way to make some money, and we saved it, or my parents would use it for things that I needed. What type of jobs did you do at that age? Oh, that's a really great question. 06:02 The Bay Area they have a wonderful, a very robust toy and game industry up there and so all of my early work was toy work, toys and games. So leapfrog is up there in Oakland, so I did a lot of work for leapfrog. And then I worked for a company quite often called creativity and the music annex and they did a lot of work for just toy companies across the US. And I worked for another company called shoot the moon and they did like invention work where they would Create concepts and then present them to the big toy companies to purchase them. So I did a lot of invention work. 06:34 I did a lot of demo vocals as well, so like they'd want to have a product or a toy where they'd have like a celebrity doing, you know, the official voice of Barbie or whatever singing it. But I was like the guide vocal got, so I would do all the guide vocals and I would go through all the revisions of the song to get it to the final form and then they would give it to the celebrity and they would listen to my voice as their guide vocal before they did the final Things did they ever just pick you instead of the celebrity, or was it always the celebrity was because they wanted the marketing efforts, I guess, of the celebrity voice no, there were a few. 07:06 I actually did get cast and I got to do that, but it was actually fantastic training for animation, because a lot of these toy products are from animation Animation losses, you know, like Elmo and Barbie and Dora, and so I had to do a lot of voice matching, so it was actually great training because I had to mimic these characters and get as close as I could to have the client feel what the product was gonna be like. 07:28 So you got then into character then as well as yeah, I tell people all the time, toy work is fantastic training for animation in terms of just the level of skill required, in terms of what I kind of call vocal gymnastics, mimicry, really wide-ranging characters, really big characters that are very silly. I've been asked to do very, very silly things and again, just very like you know, singing a song in pig or in chicken. I did do a whole song, like it was a whole, like it was great, like we did all the notes were second and then they'd make music out of it and like it was wild, like it was just crazy stuff sometimes, and so there was just already a level of silliness that translated so well into animation later, because I was just not shy about You're gonna ask me to do some crazy thing. 08:17 I'm like yeah, sure. 08:17 - Anne (Host) All right, let's go. How do you embody the pig singing oh God, is that work? How do you get yourself into that character? Absolutely, I can totally see that as Helping you and also why you're so successful as a character actress today. 08:31 - Cristina Milizia (Host) Thank you. Actually, one of the areas of animation I've really started transferring in more lately in past year or two, has been creature work and it's been like gibberish, kind of sure, or emotive, like animals or like mystical pets or things that are just like you know just where it's just there's no words, but it's just an emotional performance where you can hear a message but there's no words to it. Sure, very freeing art form. That again, you have to be willing to just let whatever come out of your mouth, right. 09:04 - Anne (Host) Absolutely Come out of your mouth and that's been really cool, so I love that and I would imagine that that also allowed you to really delve into a lot of different ranges for your vocal Performances as well, because I know for a fact that you did a lot of little girl baby voices for the toys and so now, I guess, evolving into creature work, you get to do all sorts of ranges and I always think that vocal placement and understanding where sounds are coming from and where your Voice is coming from is so important in delivering different performances. 09:33 - Cristina Milizia (Host) Well, I originally started as little girl stuff that was on all this really cute. You know I gotta get my game down if I'm gonna do that. I started with just little girl stuff all the time, and then I just got younger and younger and younger. I Went into the baby stuff and that turned into you know, you know whatever, just really crazy. So yeah, I don't know, it just kind of evolved. People just kept asking me to go higher and higher and I was like, okay, now what about lower and lower? 10:10 Yeah, you know, we've done that too as my voice is matured, did get lower, yeah, like, so now I'll do stuff more, like down here yeah, you know, it's like my more big girl voice and then when to get really crazy, like we'll do weird stuff like that, that's awesome. 10:28 - Anne (Host) I know that I fully have to take advantage of my morning voice if somebody wants me at a lower register Right, and then also being able to get yourself down to that place if you can after you've been voicing for hours, that's another skill. That's another skill set. So tell us all about your claim to fame. League of Legends. Was that your first big gig as a character, as a major character? 10:49 - Cristina Milizia (Host) Yeah, I would absolutely say so. I think that was in 2009. There were two characters that were introduced in the very beginning, and one, I believe, was rise, and the other one was Annie, and that was me. So a lot of people have a lot of nostalgia for Annie. 11:01 Sure she's also one of the very first characters that you get when you play, and so she's again nostalgia. She's one of the first characters that you get to play with, so a lot of people have a very attachment to her, and there's also an enormous statue of Annie and a moomoo at Riot Games, which is amazing. That blew my mind the first time I saw, but, yes, that was definitely the first big thing, but when it was done, it was nothing, it was not a known game. 11:24 It was an unknown game. I was one of the first two people to do it and so, wow, I did it and promptly forgot about it, never heard anything about it again. Yeah, because I didn't know that it had become anything. And they give us code names. I didn't even know the name of the game. 11:37 - Anne (Host) Oh, okay, yes, so you didn't even know what game, and so when it came out, did you know that had to come out? 11:42 - Cristina Milizia (Host) No idea, no idea. I didn't know until I met my husband and that was in 2012, so it was like three years later, and he actually worked at Riot Games at the time, working on League of Legends, and we were on our first date. And I laughed and he said your voice sounds really familiar. Oh my gosh, how do I? 12:00 - Anne (Host) not know this story, Cristina, I should know this story. 12:04 - Cristina Milizia (Host) It was part of the magic of our first date. And he was like your voice sounds really familiar If you've heard anything for Riot Games. And I was like I don't know, let me check my resume. And I'm like looked and I was like yeah, I'm some character named Annie and a moomoo, and I pronounced it and he was like your Annie and I was like yeah, and then he told me he's like your voice is famous all over the world and I was like that character really didn't. 12:27 - Intro (Announcement) Wow, you really didn't know. 12:29 - Cristina Milizia (Host) No, and I thought he was just like blowing smoke. 12:31 - Anne (Host) Yeah, I thought he was just trying to like Cause first date. 12:32 - Cristina Milizia (Host) Yeah, yeah, I thought he was like trying to butter me up. 12:35 - Anne (Host) Or like. 12:36 - Cristina Milizia (Host) I thought maybe he had a small cult following somewhere like you know something? And he was like no, go, look it up. 12:42 - Anne (Host) And I was like and so it never occurred to you to look it up, because you weren't necessarily, let's say, a gamer at the time or you were on to other roles or what happened, just probably forgot about it. 12:53 - Cristina Milizia (Host) I didn't even know the name of the game, right. 12:55 - Intro (Announcement) So I didn't even know what to look for. 12:57 - Cristina Milizia (Host) Yeah, like they didn't tell you later. So I knew I was someone called Annie, and a Moomoo is more specific. But again, there are so many games that you do and then they just either don't become anything or they're small. And you know I wasn't doing big big games at that time. You know I would get and I was doing smaller more mobile games, toys. I wasn't used to anything going on a very large scale. So that was, yes, definitely my very first big thing that I didn't even know had become a big thing until I met my husband. And that's been. The funniest part is that my laugh is Annie's laugh, just higher pitched. 13:27 And one of my favorite moments ever is that I was at the airport getting off a flight. I was just in the airport and I laughed about something and then all of a sudden I hear this person and they're all Annie, annie. I love it, annie. And they just are running around the airport Like we see this person running trying to find her. Like Annie. 13:48 - Anne (Host) Like I was like. Did you answer yes? 13:51 - Cristina Milizia (Host) I said legal legends, annie. They were like yes, and they were like you're Annie. And then we had to like sit down and have a conversation and I had never been recognized by my laugh at an airport. It just blew my mind and so that was like how you knew you were kind of famous, but it's fun because it's just the voice, like if I hadn't laughed no one would know, and that was like my big, like celebrity moment, right, it felt like I felt important. 14:14 - Anne (Host) Well, that was the beginning of them, right, and I know how hard you've worked. I mean, having known you like literally I met you, I think, right after you got married, like maybe a year after you got married, and so we have known each other for 10 years and I know how hard you have worked to just make a space and to really claim your talents, which I always knew were amazing in the animation space, and you've gone on to these amazing roles. What was your evolution for that? Like, talk about your ethic, because one thing before I talk about your entrepreneurial ethic and getting into GVAA was you were focused. I remember you saying you were just focused on wanting to really do well in animation, so talk to us a little bit about that. 14:58 - Cristina Milizia (Host) I think I had been doing toys for so many years. At that point I had literally done toy work for every company in the US and the skill set was so close to animation. But the truth of the matter is that toy work doesn't pay very well and it's completely non-union. I believe and it was then as well A lot of it was non-union and it's not a robust industry. They don't make a lot of money and that's why you see a lot of toy companies branching into animation in order to survive. You know, like Mattel, having to go into animation now even live action films that was a big change in the industry is because kids didn't want toys anymore. 15:35 - Anne (Host) They wanted iPhones they wanted all of them and technology Right exactly To survive they had to evolve with technology. That makes a lot of sense actually. 15:42 - Cristina Milizia (Host) Yeah. So toy work really just it was not high paying work, even though it was fun. Also, toy work is not, in terms of acting, nearly as demanding or deep. It's fun, it's great, it's educational, it's cute, but you really have most like can you find the red ball? Great job, you know, it's not like meteor rolls with deep acting, in-depth acting, yeah, yeah. And so I knew that vocally I could do it, and so I just made this resolution that I was going to work for Disney, cartoon Network and Nickelodeon and I was like and your overnight success took how long? 16:16 - Anne (Host) Because I'm always about the, my overnight success took at least 10 years. 16:19 - Cristina Milizia (Host) Right, well, I arrived in LA in 2012. And I don't think I booked my first animation job until probably 2016, 2015, 2016. And that was the beginning. 16:31 - Anne (Host) So it took a good three years three or four years before I really actually started working in and you had a great agent at the time which I think had a lot of faith and belief in you and I think I would say fairly significant in terms of your growth in that area. Would you say that? 16:47 - Cristina Milizia (Host) Yeah, no, I had a wonderful agent who believed in me and actually went with him from one agency to another agency that had more animation connections and we had an honest conversation and he told me. He said you know, honestly, at the other agency you weren't making me any money, he said. But he said I feel like it's because you weren't getting the animation shots that you should be getting. 17:05 - Intro (Announcement) You got it the opportunities. 17:06 - Cristina Milizia (Host) Yeah, and that has to do with the relationship that the agents have with the animation studios, and so when he took me to AVO with him, he said I think you and Sandy are going to do really well and Sandy is one of the best animation agents in the country, and that's when things just exploded for me. 17:23 - Anne (Host) But what a credit to what we're always telling voice actors and voice talent is to really develop those relationships with your agents and how they can really help you to blossom, and that two of you working together can really help to move careers forward. And it's so important because maybe had you not had that good of a relationship, you wouldn't have sat down and had that talk and you wouldn't have moved over to a different agency. That gave you different opportunities. So I love that you said that, so let's continue to talk around. That time you probably also had the idea for the GVAA. So your little entrepreneurial mind was like, okay, I don't have enough on my plate, but let's do something else, right? 18:03 - Cristina Milizia (Host) Well, I think I actually started GVAA sooner than that. 18:05 - Anne (Host) I started GVAA. 18:07 - Cristina Milizia (Host) Was it 2010? No, it was like 2013, I think. Okay, okay, 2013, 2014,. It was before I started booking a lot in animation. I was coaching because I had coached for many years at Voice One in San Francisco Toys and Games and that's because I had also worked as a casting director for a production company for Toys and Games, and so I was not only an actor for it, I did casting. So I taught classes for Elaine Clark at Voice One, and so I was taking some private students and I was getting these students who had just been put through well, I don't know how to call it, but a demo mill or these weekends where they're like become a voice actor in a weekend and make your demo and people who had invested large amounts of money and were completely unprepared and they didn't understand why they weren't booking. 18:51 And I was seeing it more and more and it was so devastating to me. And I remember one man in particular. He had come to me, had spent like $5,000 or something on all his demos in a new website and he was like I don't know why I'm not booking. And I listened to his stuff and he had a list. He had a speech impediment nothing that's gonna ruin everything that can be corrected and things can be worked on. But nobody said anything to him, you know, and I had a list growing up and it's something I had to work on. It's not like the end of your life if that happens, but it does need to be addressed because you will book more if you don't have one in certain areas you know, for your own narration and that's just what it is. 19:28 And he was so devastated he had no idea that he had a lisp and he was so sad at the end of that call and then I was so angry that somebody had done this. And that's when I was like I'm going to start. You know, I knew all these wonderful coaches from Voice One. I knew Elaine Clark and David Rosenthal and Doug Honoroff again, fantastic coaches and I said there are great coaches out there. There needs to be a resource, there needs to be a place where people can access quality coaches that are not going to lie to them, that are going to give them, you know, the real information they need to succeed. And that's when I started that and David Rosenthal reached out to me and said you wanted to be a part of it and we shared the same dream and then we just took off together and he was wonderful because, again, I was only like 28 at the time You're like 12?. 20:18 I'm sorry she was so young, I was little. I mean, you know, it's not that little, I was 28, maybe 29. 20:26 - Anne (Host) I just jest, but you were very young and very ambitious and I remember when I met you. Do you remember how we met, how we got connected? Oh my gosh, I don't. Somehow the name Dave Kovosie, right? Oh yeah, doesn't that just like, comes to mind. I believe that he introduced us via email and we met probably 2013 somewhere along, when you first began GVAA and bosses out there, if you did not know, I was a coach for GVAA in the very beginning and loved, loved, loved my experience, worked with amazing people Cristina, of course, and David and really I saw the whole online school blossom, and so I love Cristina. 21:05 When we would work together I mean you in the true spirit of entrepreneurship, right, you were willing to learn as you went, you were willing to try things, you were willing to listen to the people that you believed in that worked for you and would ask advice and literally built that from the ground up yourself. I'm going to say you know, along with, probably, david, but I think in the very beginning, it was all you really trying to create something for the good of the community, which is something that I love, and I was very proud to work for GVAA and it was my honor to. Whenever you would ask me a question, you know like, hey, what do you think about this? Or what do you think about this? And I also remember the rate guide, which is so instrumental. I mean, we're talking, you're a pioneer woman. I was considered, elaine Clark, a pioneer woman as well. 21:54 - Cristina Milizia (Host) She was really one of my biggest inspirations for doing it. 21:57 - Anne (Host) She's wonderful. She's absolutely wonderful, and I like to consider myself a bit of a pioneer myself. 22:01 but also just for you to be able to say, look, this is what's needed in the community, this is a resource that's needed, and then to evolve that into a school where you hired. I mean, literally, you were still a voice actor and you literally were running a business. You were hiring people, you were paying people, you established an online school, which, at the time, was not something that existed, and there was coaches that were out there, but there was no real website out there. I remember where you could actually go and say, oh, I want this coach or I want to learn this and let me pay for it here, or let me do this here. And so everything was advanced for its age in 2013, just because it didn't exist before. And so you I consider to be one of the pioneers of those technologies, of having online schools and having them be successful, something that people can trust, and then I mean, let alone, the rate guide. Let's talk about, first of all, what were your challenges in building GVAA, and then what was it that led to the evolution? 23:05 - Cristina Milizia (Host) of the rate guide. I think in the very beginning it was actually Jonah Rosenthal. David Rosenthal's son was one of the very first people who helped me put together, and a wonderful woman as well who was an assistant to me, just putting in just all the content, building the website, building, you know, all of that stuff, and then David Rosenthal, of course, as well, through every aspect of it, and that was just getting again all the content in there, organizing everything. How were we going to do all of it? And again, the biggest motivation was just I felt like there was just this tremendous social injustice, you know, and I wanted to protect people Because, again, I'd also grown up very poor and it really bothers me when people are being taken advantage of. It's so wrong. So, yes, and we definitely were one of the very first, and David actually had something called online voiceover coach. 23:49 He had also started going in that direction, which was one of the reasons why, when we kind of merged our ideas, he already was right there with the mentality of how we're going to do this and having you and bringing on all these people that had so much more experience, because I had the original vision but there were so many people that were aligned with that vision and had more life experience, more experience, coaching. 24:10 - Anne (Host) And I had run VOPEAPs as well. So I had run some online things educationally based, and I had also worked for some other institutions, some other coaching institutions, but nothing as large as the GBA, really trying to bring together all different genres and all different coaches. 24:25 - Cristina Milizia (Host) Right. So I got a lot of advice from you, from David, and I think one of the biggest lessons I learned. I think people have this idea of what leadership is you have power and whatever else, and the truth is that leaders eat last. Your job is to serve. Your job is to serve everyone else. You come last, putting their ideas first, listening, staying calm, being humble, trying to keep a cool head and having a larger vision of things. It is not easy to be a leader. 24:53 - Anne (Host) And I think at that point it's very hard and you really have 24:56 to have self-control in terms of emotionally and sorting through everything and you have to have courage, and I love that. You said that it's not about the leader, it's about who they're serving, and you read any good book on leadership and that's like, first and foremost really is the best things you can do as a leader is to put together a team that supports you and that is amazing at what they do and can even be better than you in all those areas, and working together that's what creates a successful business and a successful team together. 25:27 - Cristina Milizia (Host) Yep and I asked questions of Elaine. She was very, very helpful. In the beginning I looked up to her very much you, david, a number of our other coaches and because I knew that I had a lot to learn. And again, I had the passion, I had the drive, I had the vision, I had the desire to create this. But you have to reach out to the people to fill in those holes and you can't just try to assume you know how to do it all yourself, because you have to take advantage of the resources around you. So it was a very humbling experience and in the process, you know, it started to do really well. 25:57 We started going to conferences and presenting, which was wonderful, and then at one of the conferences or I remember if it was at the conference or perhaps before, but I had connected with David Tobak and I was mentoring him. He had come to me for some advice. I was either coaching him or mentoring him and he had decided that he wanted to make a little rate card for himself for his website, to kind of just establish his rates, which I thought was very smart. And he showed it to me. And Tobak is excellent with organization, he's very detail-oriented and it was just beautiful, like it was just beautifully laid out and I was like this is fantastic. 26:30 I was like this is great and I was just like I suddenly had this vision of doing this on a much larger scale. And there was a reason for this too. And I had actually just had an experience, not long before this happened, where I had been hired for an animation show, where I found out later that they had let go of their cast, that they were paying, I think. It was like I can't remember the exact number but normal animation rate, but non-union and then they had decided to hire all new actors at half the rate and I was one of those actors and this was through an agency. 27:03 - Anne (Host) Wow. 27:04 - Cristina Milizia (Host) And I was just. You know, I was like, oh, that's one of my first animation jobs. I'm so excited, you know, I've been doing this for so long. 27:08 I'm just excited. And then I found out later what had happened, and I didn't even understand really the dynamics of any of this, and that even though I had been hired to be a different character, it was still the fact that they were trying to hold the line of no, this is the rate that we're going to ask for, we're going to walk, and the company was just like well, bye, I'm going to recast. 27:29 And then me being, I had a lot of experience as a voice actor, but I was hired and again I'm just all starry-eyed because it's my first animation job, which just happens to every voice actor. Everybody, you're starry-eyed. Oh my God, it's my first job. That's absolutely what happens. 27:43 - Anne (Host) Yep, and I remember that at the time happening a lot and there being at least the starting of some discussions, because even Facebook groups at that time hadn't really materialized. I know I had one for VOPs, but there weren't like there are today. There weren't groups that could discuss those things, but it was one of the things that people were starting to discuss, including rates. It's one of the reasons why people would say do we publish our rate guides online on our website? That was a big question of the day and I remember there was a discussion about that. But I also then remember, just at the touch, in the beginning of it, when people would talk about oh my gosh, like here are actors trying to stand their ground and get paid a fair rate, and the company just saying, well, that's okay, see ya, and then hiring starry-eyed voice actors half the rate, and I remember that being an issue. And here you go wanting to take a stand about that, and I think that's wonderful. 28:36 - Cristina Milizia (Host) And this was also the time my husband reminded me we were discussing this before I came on today that this was also the time that this was really the rise of the pay to plays. Yes, this was the time when Voicescom and Voice 123, they were just taking over. 28:51 The rates were just plummeting, plummeting, plummeting. 28:56 And so in the midst of all this and I was just watching more and more work go non-union because I'm FICOR, so I see union and non-union work. 29:05 Toy work is exclusively non-union, so I wasn't going to go full union, I was going to be FICOR, so I didn't lose my toy work that I needed at the time, which was my only income aside from my one or two animation jobs which I was starting to get, and I just felt like I was watching my industry fall apart and everything that I had worked hard to try to get out of which was just these little tiny non-union job rates and being taken advantage of many times in my career up until this point. 29:31 And I was like, no, I don't want this to happen to any other talented people that are coming in this, where maybe they have a strong performance background, strong acting background, they're trained opera singer, whatever, and so they do a great job, but they have no idea what they should be paid for that skill set and they're just excited to be on a show, and it happens every day. And so when he showed me this little guide, I was like you know what? This is what we need. We need this for the non-union world. Yeah, absolutely. 30:01 - Anne (Host) And you know, what's funny is that when there was all the discussion about the rate cards like, do we publish our rate cards Everybody at the time was saying, well, okay, what's the benchmark? Is there a benchmark? What should I charge? And especially for all of the non-union stuff that I was doing corporate work, explainer work, e-learning work everybody would say, well, what do you charge? What do you charge? And they'd say, how do we even know what's the benchmark? 30:22 And when we were all back in the day before there was a big band and there was the GVAA rate guide, there was a bunch of us that used to talk to one another and say, well, here is what I charge, but I'm not going to publish it on my website because every job is different. However, it's always good, especially for anybody new, and they still find this to be the case whenever I have a new student and they're like, oh my God, somebody just asked me what I would charge for this e-learning job or for this corporate job and what do I do? And you get into that panic and you have no reference, you have nothing to look at, to even benchmark your pricing on. And I'm so glad that the GVAA rate guard was started because it gave us something other than SAG-AFTRA okay, because SAG-AFTRA is what we were looking at, but SAG-AFTRA didn't have rates for e-learning. Really, it was one of those things where it was just a bunch of us who did a bunch of it and we would talk amongst each other and you were actually asking all those people, including myself, like what do you charge? 31:16 And so it was great. You were able to bring together everybody at the time to really get a good set of data for this rate guide and it literally is iconic now in the industry. I mean, I say this over and over again how many times do people reference the GVAA rate guide? And I am so proud to know you, christine, I'm so proud that you did this back then, knowing it would be a good resource for the community, and it's really just become legendary today. It's epic, it's the GVAA rate guide. I mean, it's literally it's its own entity. Now you know it should have its own website just for the usefulness and functionality. 31:55 - Cristina Milizia (Host) And we have more plans for it. 31:56 And first of all, I just want to say like, too, that a lot of people don't know the original story of the rape guide, and so I was really excited to talk about it with you today, because what happened after Toback showed me that little card, as I said hey, toback, will you please come work with me, work for GVAA. I want to build this for every area of voiceover, because exactly what you said that the union didn't talk about no, I don't think they talk about telephony. They don't know about all of these other areas. And I knew a lot of people. I knew a lot of coaches and I just started making phone calls and I spent a lot of time with you. I spent a lot of time with Josh at GoVoices, eric Shepard at Shepard Agency, wonderful agents and I did actually spend some time with union workers as well who explained their rape structures and I tried to translate it kind of in a non-union format for different areas, and all those people generously gave their time to build this, because we all believed in it. 32:51 - Anne (Host) I remember at the time, we all believed in it and we all said, yes, this is exactly what's needed. This is what's needed in the industry. 32:58 - Cristina Milizia (Host) And there were so many areas, we were like what do we do? If I'm doing an airport announcement, I'm like I have no idea Let me go look. 33:05 I'm being played in a lobby of a dentist's office. I'm like, let me go research that. What if I'm a voice in a card that opens up and sings something? A hallmark card? Right, that's okay. And so we got this barrage of people just asking, and so it was built, and it was so much, so quickly that, unfortunately, I burned out a little bit. Well, I burned out because I was getting emails and messages and messenger notices at all times of day. 33:32 - Anne (Host) Well, at this point, I know as a coach before the GBA rape guide, I know as a coach oh my goodness, when you set your students out into the world of working in voiceover and they've got their coaching, they've got a demo, and then all of a sudden that first job request comes in or how much would it cost they flock to the people like insane and just panic, panic, panic. Oh my God, what do I charge? Oh my God, what do I charge? Oh my God, what do I charge? What do I charge for this? So I know you, on a grand scale, were being barraged, because I was being barraged before the GBA rape guide existed and it became like one of those things where it's like I'd love to help you but I cannot answer you in this next second, right At two in the morning. 34:14 - Cristina Milizia (Host) Yeah, exactly. 34:16 - Anne (Host) And so that's what is so wonderful about having that as a resource and congratulations on that. I mean, really, it's a wonderful, wonderful resource for the community and I'm just so proud to have been a small part of it back in the day and so proud of you and so proud of GVAA and just guys, bosses, this is a bad ass entrepreneur right here. She's a VO boss and you may not even have known that, but I am bringing that to light now and shouting it from the rooftop. So, Cristina, it's been amazing. How can people, if people need to get in touch with you because I know you're coaching a lot now and you're high in demand but how can people get in touch with you if they need to? 34:53 - Cristina Milizia (Host) So I am very excited to be coaching again. I took a long break to focus on animation, but now I am back and I feel like I have so much more information to share, which is really exciting. You can find me at globalvoiceacademycom. That's the website. If you look up GVAA rape guide, it's all connected on there too. If that's already in your normal search engine, it's all connected. You'll see under one-on-one coaching that I'm there. 35:16 I focus on animation, character work in general, toys, video games and career strategy things of that nature, and now that I'm back from my break also, you can expect some really cool stuff that we're going to be doing the rape guide. 35:29 We have plans for adding a whole, much larger non-union animation section very soon, doing research right now on audio description as well, which is a new area that's really exploding as well, and if people do have other areas that they would like to see on the rape guide, you can also reach out to us at globalvoiceacademycom. Let us know if there's stuff missing on there that you'd like to see, because we definitely have big plans to continue growing it. And, as I think it was Tim Friedland who told me or maybe it was at the Navigala that 80% of voiceover work is now non-union. I believe that is yeah, absolutely so. I am as dedicated to this project as ever. I took my little break and now I'm back and I'm here for the community and I want us all to rise and support each other and be able to fight for what we're worth. 36:15 - Anne (Host) So thank you, Cristina, so much for that. It's been an absolute pleasure. I can only hope to have many more conversations with you in the future Me too, for the podcast. And so, bosses, here's your chance to use your voice to make an immediate difference in our world and give back to the communities, just like GVAA and Cristina Malizia have done. Give back to the communities that give to you. Visit 100voiceswhocareorg to commit. And also a big shout out to our sponsor, ipdtl. You, too, can connect a network like bosses, like Cristina and myself. Find out more at IPDTLcom. You guys have an amazing week. I love you, Cristina, and we will see you next week. I love you. 36:53 - Cristina Milizia (Host) Bye. 36:56 - Intro (Announcement) Join us next week for another edition of VO Boss with your host and Ganguzza, and take your business to the next level. Sign up for our mailing list at vobosscom and receive exclusive content, industry revolutionizing tips and strategies and new ways to rock your business like a boss. Redistribution with permission. Coast to coast connectivity via IPDTL.