Podcasts about transcript it

As the author of The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, the Cambridge University historian Gary Gerstle was one of first people to recognize the collapse of neoliberalism. But today, the real question is not about the death of neoliberalism, but what comes after it. And, of course, when I sat down with Gerstle, I began by asking him what the Trump victory tells us about what comes after neoliberalism.Gary Gerstle is Paul Mellon Professor of American History Emeritus at the University of Cambridge. Gerstle received his BA from Brown University and his MA and PhD from Harvard University. He is the author, editor, and coeditor of more than ten books.  He is currently the Joy Foundation Fellow at the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, where he is working on a new book, Politics in Our Time: Authoritarian Peril and Democratic Hope in the Twenty-First Century.  He resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts.Named as one of the "100 most pivoted men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's most pivotal broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the pivotal author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two cats, both called Pivot.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. TRANSCRIPT“It's important to recognize that the neoliberal triumph carried within it not just the triumph of capitalism, but the triumph of freedom. And I think the that image of the wall coming down captures both. It's people wanting to claim their freedom, but it also paves the way for an unregulated form of capitalism to spread to every corner of the world.” -Gary GerstleAK: Hello everybody. As we try to make sense of the aftermath of the US election this week, there was an interesting headline today in the Financial Times. Donald Trump apparently has asked, and I'm quoting the F.T. here, the arch-protectionist Robert Lighthizer, to run U.S. trade policy. You never know with Trump, he may change his mind tomorrow. But nonetheless, it suggests, and it's not a great surprise, that protectionism will define the Trump, presidency or certainly the second Trump presidency. And it speaks of the structural shift in the nature of politics and economics in the United States, particularly given this Trump victory. One man who got this, I think before anyone else, is the Cambridge historian Gary Gerstle. He's been on the show a couple of times before. He's the author of a wonderful book, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era. It's a profound book. It's had an enormous impact on everybody. And I'm thrilled and honored that Gary is back on the show. This is the third time he's been on the show. Gary, is that important news? Have we formally come to the end now of the neoliberal order? GARY GERSTLE: I think we have, although there's an element of neoliberalism which may revive in the Trump administration. But if we think of a political order as ordering political life so that all participants in that order have to accept its ideological principles, we have moved out of that order. I think we've been out of it for some time. The critical election in this case was 2016, and the critical move that both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders made in 2016, the two most dynamic presidential candidates in that year, was to break with the orthodoxy of free markets, the orthodoxy of globalization, the orthodoxy of a world without borders where everything was free to move and the market was supreme. And the only role of government in the state was to ensure as full access to markets as was possible in the belief that if governments got out of the way of a private capitalist economy, this would spur the greatest growth for the greatest number of people everywhere in the world. This was governing orthodoxy, really from the time of Reagan until 2016. Trump broke it. Sanders broke it. Very significant in this regard that when Biden came into office, he moderated some of the Trump tariffs but kept the tariffs on China substantially in place. So there's been continuity for some time, and now we're going to see an intensification of the protectionist regime. Protectionism used to be a dirty word in American politics. If you uttered that word, you were excluded from serious political discourse. There will be other terms that are used, fair trade, not just because protectionism has a negative connotation to it, but we are living in an era where governments assert the right to shape markets as they wish to in the interests of their nation. So, yes, we are living in a different era, although it must be said, and we may get into a discussion of this at some point, there are sectors of the Trump coalition that want to intensify deregulation in the domestic market, that want to rollback government. And so I expect in the new Trump administration, there is going to be tussles between the protectionists on the one hand and those who want to, at least domestically, restore free trade. And by that I mean the free operation of private capital without government regulation. That's an issue that bears watching.AK: Is that a contradiction though, Gary? Can one, in this post-neoliberal order, can governments be hostile to regulation, a la Elon Musk and his association with Trump, and also be in favor of tariffs? I mean, do the two—can the to go together, and is that the outline of this foggy new order coming into place in the second quarter of the 21st century?GARY GERSTLE: They can go together in the sense that they have historically in the past gone together in the United States. In the late 19th century, the US had very high tariffs against foreign goods. And domestically, it was trying to create as free a domestic market as possible. What was known as the period of laissez-faire domestically went along with a commitment to high tariffs and protection of American laissez-faire against what we might call global laissez-faire. So it has been tried. It did work at that time. But I think the Republican party and the constituencies behind Donald Trump are divided on this question. As you noted, Elon Musk represents one pole of this. He certainly wants protection against Chinese imports of electric cars and is probably going to get that because of all the assistance he gave Trump in this election. But domestically, he wants no government interfering with his right to conduct his capitalist enterprises as he sees fit. So that's going to be one wing. But there's another wing of the Republican Party under Trump that is much more serious about industrial policy that says we cannot leave the market to its own devices. It produces too many human casualties. It produces too many regions of America left behind, and that we must use the government to help those people left behind. We must structure free enterprise industry in a way that helps the ordinary working-class man. And I use the word “man” deliberately in this context. Interestingly, JD Vance, the vice president, embodies both these tendencies, sees, on the one hand, a creature of venture capital, Silicon Valley, close to the Musks and Peter Thiels of the world. On the other hand, he has talked explicitly, as in his vice-presidential acceptance speech, about putting Main Street over Wall Street. And if he's serious about putting Main Street over Wall Street, that's going to involve a lot of government intervention to displace the privileged position that finance and venture capital now has in the American economy.AK: Gary, you're a historian, one of the best around, you're deeply versed in the past, you bring up Vance. He presents himself as being original, even has a beard. But I wonder whether his—I don't know what you would call it—a Catholic or Christian socialism, or at least a concern with the working class. Is it in any way new, for you, historically? I mean, it certainly exists in Europe, and there must be analogies also in American history with him.GARY GERSTLE: Well, if he is a convert to Catholicism, I don't know how well-versed he is in the papal doctrines of years past. Or decades. Or even centuries passed. But there was a serious movement within the Catholic Church in the late 19th and early 20th century to humanize capitalism, to declare that free market capitalism produced too many human casualties. Too many ordinary Catholic workers and workers who are not Catholic were hurt by unemployment, poverty, being thrown out of work in the troughs of business cycles, having no social welfare to fall back on, as a result of injury or misfortune in life. And so there was a profound movement within Catholic churches, in the United States, and in Europe and other parts of the world as well, to humanize capitalism. Whether this very once important Catholic tradition is an active influence on Vance, I don't know, because he's a recent convert to Catholicism, and I don't know how deeply has imbibed its history or its doctrine. But there is a rich tradition there. And it's possible that this is one of the sources that he is drawing on to shape his contemporary politics.AK: We were talking before we ran live, Gary, I said to you, and I think you agreed, that this use of the word "fascism" to describe Trump isn't always particularly helpful. It reflects a general hysteria amongst progressives. But I wonder in this context, given the way in which European Catholicism flirted, sometimes quite openly, with fascism, whether the F-word actually makes a little more sense. Because after all, fascism, after the First World War, was a movement in the name of the people, which was very critical of the capitalism of that age and of the international market. So, when we use the word fascism now, could it have some value in that context as a kind of a socioeconomic critique of capitalism?GARY GERSTLE: You mean fascism offering a socioeconomic critique of U.S. capitalism?AK: Yes. For better or worse.GARY GERSTLE: I'm reluctant to deploy the term fascism, since I think most people who enter the conversation or who hear that word in the United States don't really know what it means, and that's partly the consequence of historians debating its meaning as long as they have, and also suggesting that fascism takes different forms at different times and in different places. I prefer the term authoritarianism. I think that tendency is clearly there and one can connect that to certain traditions within the church. The United States once had a intense anti-Catholic political tradition. It was unimaginable in the 19th century. AK: Yeah, it drove the KKK. I mean, that was the Klan hated the Catholics probably more than they hated the Jews.GARY GERSTLE: It drove the Klan. And the notion in the 19th century—I'm not remembering now whether there are 5 or 6 Catholics who sit on the Supreme Court—but the notion in the 19th century that 5 or 6 Catholics would be the chief custodians and interpreters of America's most sacred doctrine and document the Constitution was simply unthinkable. It could never have happened. There was a Catholic seat. As for a long time, there was a Jewish seat on the Supreme Court, but understood that this would be carefully cordoned off and limited and that, when push came to shove, Protestants had to be in charge of interpreting America's most sacred doctrine. And the charge against Catholics was that they were not democratic, that they vested ultimate power in God and through an honest messenger on Earth, who was the pope. John F. Kennedy, in 1960, became the first Catholic president of the United States. Biden is only the second. Vance is the first Catholic vice president. Before in the campaign that Kennedy was running in 1960, he had to go in front of thousands of Protestant ministers who had gathered in Houston so he could persuade them that if he became president, he would not be handing America over to the pope, who was seen as an authoritarian figure. So for a long time, Catholicism was seen as a carrier of authoritarianism, of a kind of executive power that should not be limited by a human or secular force. And this promoted, in the United States, intense anti-Catholic feeling, which took the country probably 200 years to conquer. Conquered it was, so the issue of so many Catholics on the Supreme Court is not an issue. Biden's Catholicism is not an issue. Vance's Catholicism is not an issue. But Vance himself has said, talking about his conversion, that of his granny—I forget the term he uses to describe his granny—were alive today, she would not be able to accept his conversion because she was so deeply Protestant, so evangelical, so—AK: A classic West Virginian evangelical. So for me, the other contradiction here is that Vance is unashamedly nationalist, unashamedly critical of globalization. And yet, by embracing Catholicism, which is the most international of face, I don't quite understand what that suggests about him, or Catholicism, or even history, that that these odd things happen.GARY GERSTLE: Well, one thing one can say in history is that odd things happen and odd couples get together. I don't know myself how fully Vance understands his Catholicism. I believe Peter Thiel led him to this. Vance is still a young man and has gone through a lot of conversions for a young man. He was—AK: Well, he's a conversion expert. That's the narrative of his life, isn't it?GARY GERSTLE: Yes. Yes. And he began as being a severe anti-Trumper, almost a Never-Trumper. Then he converted to Trumpism. Then he converted from Protestant to Catholicism. So a lot of major changes in his life. So, the question you just posed is a fascinating one. Does he understand that the church is a catholic church, meaning small c catholic in this case, that it's open to everyone in the world? Does he really understand that? But I would extend my puzzle about religion beyond Catholicism to ask, for all the evangelical supporters of Trump: where is Jesus's message of peace and love? Where did that go? So there are puzzles about the shape of Christian religion in America. And there's no doubt that for its most devout supporters in the United States that has taken a very hard nationalist turn. And this is true among Protestants, and it is true among many Catholics. And so, I think the question that you posed may be one that no one has really confronted Vance with.“What we have to think about in regard to Trump is, will they take on projects that will threaten the constitutional foundation of the United States in order to achieve their aims? What does Musk represent, and what does part of Trump represent? It represents unbounded executive power, unconstrained by Congress, to promote conditions of maximum freedom. And the freedom they have in mind is not necessarily your personal freedom or mine.” -Gary GerstleAK: And I would extend that, Gary. I think that the most persistent and credible critics of Trump also come from the religious community. Peter Wehner, for example, former—I don't know if you're familiar with his work. He writes a lot for the Times and The Atlantic. Very religious man, is horrified—worked in the Bush and the Reagan administrations. Let's go back to—I was looking at the cover of the book, and obviously authors don't pick the covers of their books—GARY GERSTLE: I did. I picked this.AK: Okay. Well, when you look at the—GARY GERSTLE: This is this is not the original cover.AK: Right, so, the book I'm looking at, and for people just listening, I'm going to describe. The dominant picture is of the Berlin Wall being knocked down in the evening of November 1989. It's odd, Gary, isn't it, that...for the rise and fall of the neoliberal order, which is an economic order in a free market era, you should have chosen the image of a political event, which, of course, Fukuyama so famously described as the end of history. And I guess, for you as an economic historian who is also deeply interested and aware of politics, is the challenge and opportunity to always try to disentangle the economics and politics of all this? Or are they so entangled that they're actually impossible to disentangle, to separate?GARY GERSTLE: Well, I think sometimes you need to disentangle them, sometimes they move in different directions, and sometimes they move in the same direction. I think to understand the triumph of the neoliberal order, we have to see that politics and economics move in tandem with each other. What makes possible the neoliberal triumph of the 90s is the fall of communism between 1989 and 1991. And no picture embodies that better than the taking down of the Berlin Wall. And that connotes a message of freedom and escape from Soviet and communist tyranny. But the other message there is that tearing down of those walls opens the world to capitalist penetration to a degree that had not been available to the capitalist world since prior to World War One, prior to the war, and most importantly, to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. And where communists came to power everywhere, they either completely excluded or sharply curtailed the ability of capitalist business to operate within their borders. Their message was expropriate private property, which meant expropriate all corporate property. Give it over to the state, let the state manage it in the interest of the proletariat. This was an extraordinary dream that turned into an awful tyrannical outcome. But it animated the world, as few other ideas did in the 20th century, and proposed a very, very serious challenge to capitalist prerogative, to capitalist industry, to free markets. And so the collapse of communism, which is both the collapse of a state—a communist state, the Soviet Union—but perhaps more importantly, the collapse of the belief that any governments could structure the private economy in ways that would be beneficial to humankind. It's what opened the way in the 1990s to the neoliberal triumph. And it's important to recognize that the neoliberal triumph carried within it not just the triumph of capitalism, but the triumph of freedom. And I think the that image of the wall coming down captures both. It's people wanting to claim their freedom, but it also paves the way for an unregulated form of capitalism to spread to every corner of the world. And in the long term—we're in the mid-term—that was going to create inequalities, vulnerabilities to the global financial and economic systems, that were going to bring the global economy down and set off a radically different form of politics than the world had seen for some time. And we're still living through that radically different form of politics set off by the financial crash of 2008/2009, which, in my way of thinking, was a product of untrammeled capitalism conquering the world in the aftermath of the Soviet Union's and communism's collapse.AK: Yeah, and that's the other thing, isn't it, Garry? I mean, it goes without saying that the bringing down of the war fundamentally changed the old Soviet economy, the East European economies, Poland, Hungary, eastern part of Germany. But what no one—I think very, very few people imagined in '89 was that perhaps the biggest consequence of this capitalist penetration wasn't in Warsaw or Moscow or the eastern part of Berlin, but back in West Virginia with guys like JD Vance. How did the bringing down of the wall change America, or at least the American economy? I've never really quite understood that.GARY GERSTLE: Through the mass exporting of manufacturing to other countries that—AK: Wasn't that before? Wasn't that also taking place before '89, or did it happen particularly in the '90s?GARY GERSTLE: It began before 1989. It began during the Great Recession of the 1970s, where the first districts of manufacturing in the U.S., places like Buffalo, New York steelmaking center, began to get hollowed out. But it dramatically intensified in the 1990s, and this had to do with China permitting itself to be a part of this global free market. And China was opened to capitalist penetration from the United States and Europe. And what you saw in that decade was a massive shift of manufacturing to China, a shift that even intensified in the first decade of the 21st century with the admission of China in 2001 to the World Trade Organization. So China was a big factor. Also, the passage of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, which rendered the northern half of the Western Hemisphere one common market, like the European Common Market. So, enormous flight of jobs to places like Mexico. And the labor costs in places like China and Mexico, and then East Asia already leaving Japan for Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, parts of the South Asian subcontinent. The flight of jobs there became so massive, and the labor costs there were so cheap, that American industry couldn't compete. And what you begin to see is the hollowing out of American industry, American manufacturing, and whole districts of America just beginning to rot. And no new industries or no new economies taking the place of the industries and the jobs that had left. And this America was being ignored, largely in the 1990s and first decade of the 21st century, in part because the ideology of neoliberalism said, we understand that this global free market is going to increase inequality in the world, it's going to increase the distance between rich and poor, but the distance between rich and poor is okay because all boats will rise. All people will benefit. This is not just an American story, this is also the story of other parts of the North Atlantic economy. Britain certainly, Germany was a partial exception, France, other places, and this was the ideology...growth would benefit everyone, and this was not the case. It was a fallacy. But the ideology was so strong that it held together until the financial crash of 2008/2009. After that crash, it became impossible to make the point that all boats were rising under the neoliberal regime. And this is when the forgotten Americans and the forgotten Brits of the northern part of the of Great Britain. This is when they began to make their voices heard. This is when they began to strike a very different note in politics. And this is where Donald Trump had his beginnings with these forgotten, angry people who felt ignored, left behind, and were suffering greatly, because by the early decades of the 21st century, it wasn't just jobs that were gone, but it was healthy marital life, divorce rates rising, rampant drug use. Two Cambridge economists wrote a book called Depths of Despair.AK: Yeah, that book comes up in almost every conversation. I once went down to Princeton to interview Angus Deaton. Like your book, it's become a classic. So let's fast forward, Gary, to the last election. I know you're writing a book now about politics in our time of authoritarianism, and you're scratching your head and asking whether the election last week was a normal or an apocryphal one, one that's just different or historical. And I wonder, in that sense, correct me if I'm wrong, there seems to have been two elections simultaneously. On the one hand, it was very normal, from the Democrats' point of view, who treated America as if it was normal. Harris behaves as if she was just another Democratic candidate. And, of course, Trump, who didn't. My interpretation, maybe it's a bit unfair, is that it's the progressives. It's certainly the coastal elites who have become, implicitly at least, the defenders of the old neoliberal order. For them, it kind of works. It's not ideal, but it works and they can't imagine anything else. And it's the conservatives who have attacked it, the so-called conservatives. Is there any truth to that in the last election?GARY GERSTLE: Well, I think the Democrats are certainly seen by vast sectors of the population as being the defenders of an old order, of established institutions controlling the media, although I think that's less and less true because the legacy media has less and less influence and shows like yours, podcasting and rogue Fox Television and all kinds of other outlets, are increasingly influential. But yes, the Democrats are seen as a party of the establishment. They are seen as the party of the educated elite. And one of the factors that determines who votes for who now is now deeply educational in the sense of, what is your level of educational achievement? If you are college educated, you're much more likely to vote Democratic, regardless of your income. And if you're high school educated or less, you're much more likely to vote Republican. I don't think it's fair to say that the Democrats are the last protectors of the neoliberal order, because Biden broke with the neoliberal order in major, consequential ways. If the defining characteristic of the neoliberal order is to free the market from constraints and to use the state only to free up market forces—this was true, to a large extent, of Obama and of Clinton—Biden broke with that, and he did it in alliance with Bernie Sanders, set of task forces they set up in 2020 to design a new administration. And his major pieces of legislation, reshoring CHIPS manufacture, the biggest investment in clean energy in the country's history. $1 trillion infrastructure bill, the biggest infrastructure project since the interstate highway system of the '50s, and arguably since Roosevelt's fabled New Deal. These are all about industrial policy. These are all about the government using its power and resources to direct industry in a certain way so that it will increase general happiness, general welfare, general employment. So this represents a profound change from what had come before. And in that way, the Biden administration can't be seen as the last defenders.“The question is, will they be able to get further than past generations of Republicans have by their willingness to break things? And will they go so far as to break the Constitution in the pursuit of these aims?”AK: And let me jump in here, Gary, there's another really important question. There was a very interesting piece, I'm sure you saw it, by Nicholas Lemann in the New Yorker about Bidenomics and its achievements. You talked about the New Deal, the massive amount of investments—it was post COVID, they took advantage of the historical crisis. Trillions of dollars have been invested in new technologies. Is Bidenomics new in any way? Or is it basically just a return to the economics, or the political economy, of FDR?GARY GERSTLE: Well, it certainly draws inspiration from FDR, because at the core of the New Deal was the conviction that you could use government to direct industry to positive uses that would benefit not just the corporations, but the population as a whole. But there was nothing like the Green Energy Project in the New Deal. The New Deal, except for hydroelectric projects, was primarily about prospering on a cheap fossil fuel economy. The New Deal also was very comfortable with accepting prevailing gender and race conceptions of the proper place of women and African Americans in American life in a way that is unacceptable to Bidenomics. So there are redirections under Bidenomics in ways that modify the New Deal inspiration. But at its core, Bidenomics is modeled on the New Deal conviction that you need a strong federal government to point industry in the right direction. And so in that sense, there's a fundamental similarity in those two progressive projects. And I think people in the Biden administration have been quite conscious about that. Now, the particular challenges are different. The world economy is different. The climate crisis is upon us. So, it is going to take different forms, have different outcomes. But the inspiration clearly comes from Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his New Deal.AK: Well, let's go over to the other side and Trump. You scratching your head and figuring out whether this is unusual. And of course, it's the second time he's won an election. This time around, he seems to be overtly hostile to the state. He's associated with Musk, who's promised to essentially decimate the state. In historical terms, Gary, is there anything unusual about this? I mean, certainly the opponents of FDR were also very hostile to this emergent American state. As a historian, do you see this as something new, the pleasure in essentially blowing the state up, or at least the promise of blowing the state up?GARY GERSTLE: That impulse is not new. There have been members of the Republican party who have been talking this language since the New Deal arrived in America in the 1930s and '40s during the '50s and '60s and early '70s, they were marginal in American politics. And then with the neoliberal order coming into being in the '70s and with Reagan as president, their voice has gained enormous traction. One of Reagan's key advisors in the 1980s and 1990s, one of his favorite lines was, “I want to shrink the size of the federal government until we can drown it in the bathtub.” It's a wonderful image and metaphor, and captures the intensity with which conservative Republicans have wanted to eliminate the strong centralized state. But they have not been able to do it to a degree that makes that have satisfied them. It turns out that Americans, for all their possible ideological opposition to big government like big parts of it, like Social Security, like Medicare, like a strong military establishment that's gonna protect the country, like clean air, clean water. So it's proved much more difficult for this edifice to be taken down than the Reaganites had imagined it would be. So, the advocates have become more radical because of decades of frustration. And what we have to think about in regard to Trump is, will they take on projects that will threaten the constitutional foundation of the United States in order to achieve their aims? What does Musk represent, and what does part of Trump represent? It represents unbounded executive power, unconstrained by Congress, to promote conditions of maximum freedom. And the freedom they have in mind is not necessarily your personal freedom or mine, as the abortion issue signifies. What they have in mind is corporate freedom. The freedom of Elon Musk's companies to do whatever they want to do. The freedom of the social media companies to do whatever they want to do. The question is, will they be able to get further than past generations of Republicans have by their willingness to break things? And will they go so far as to break the Constitution in the pursuit of these aims? Peter Thiel has said, very forthrightly, that democracy no longer works as a system, and that America has to consider other systems in order to have the kind of prosperity and freedom it wants. And one thing that bears watching with this new Trump administration is how many supporters the Peter Thiel's and the Elon Musk's are going to have to be free to tear down the edifice and the institutions of the federal government and pursuit of a goal of a reconfigured, and what I would call rogue, laissez-faire. This is something to watch.AK: But Gary, I take your point. I mean, Thiel's been, on the West Coast, always been a convenient punchbag for the left for years now, I punched him many times myself. I wanted to. But all this seems to be just the wet dream of neoliberals. So you have Musk and Thiel doing away with government. Huge corporations, no laws. This is the neoliberal wet dream, isn't it?GARY GERSTLE: Well, partly it is. But neoliberalism always depended on a structure of law enforced by government that was necessary to allow free markets to operate in a truly free and transparent manner. In other words, you needed elements of a strong government to perfect markets, that markets were not perfect if they were left to their own devices. And one of the dangers of the Elon Musk phase of the Trump administration is that this edifice of law on which corporations and capitalism thrives will be damaged in the pursuit of a radical libertarianism. Now, there may very well be a sense that cooler heads prevail in the Trump administration, and that this scenario will not come to fruition. But one certainly has to be aware that this is one of the possible outcomes of a Trump administration. I should also say that there's another very important constituency in the Republican party that wants to continue, not dismantle, what Biden has done with industrial policies. This is the other half of JD Vance's brain. This is Tom Cotton. This is Marco Rubio, this is Josh Hawley, senator from Missouri. And they want to actively use the government to regulate industry in the public interest. And there's a very interesting intellectual convergence going on between left of center and right of center intellectuals and policymakers who are converging on the importance of having an industrial policy, because if Elon Musk is given his way, how is the abandoned heartland going to come back?AK: It's cheering me up, Gary, because what you're suggesting is that this is a fairly normal moment. You've got different wings of the Republican Party. You've got the Cottons and the Rubios, who were certainly not revolutionary. Why should we believe that this is a special moment then?GARY GERSTLE: January 6th, 2021. That's the reason. Trump remains the only president in American history to authorize an attack on the very seat of American democracy. That being: Congress sitting in the Capitol. And once he authorized the attack, he waited for three hours hoping that his attackers and his mob would conquer this building and compel the legislators inside to do—AK: And I take your perspective. I'm the last person to defend that. But we're talking about 2024 and not 2021. He won the election fairly. No one's debating that. So, why is 2024 a special election?GARY GERSTLE: Well, here's the key. Well, maybe it's a special election in two ways. It may signify the reconfiguration of a genuinely populist Republican party around the needs of ordinary working-class Americans. And we should say, in this regard, that Trump has brought into his coalition significant numbers of Latinos, young blacks. It has the beginning of a look of a multiracial coalition that the Democrats once had, but now appear to be losing. So it may be an epochal moment in that regard. The other way in which it may be an epochal moment is: what if Trump does not get his way in his term in office for something he really wants? Will he accept that he is bound by the Constitution, that he is bound by the courts? Or will he once again say, when he really wants something, no constitution, no law, will stand in my way? That's how January 6th, 2021, still matters. I'm not saying he's going to do that, but I think we have to understand that that is a possibility, especially since he has shown no remorse for the outcome of the last election. If I read into your comments, I hear you saying: he won this time. He doesn't have to worry about losing. But Trump is always worried about losing. And he is a man who doesn't really know the Constitution, and the parts that he knows and understands he doesn't especially like, because his dream, along with Elon Musk's dream, and this is one reason why I think they are melding so tightly, at the apex of American government should be unbounded executive power. This is not how the country was set up. And as Congress and as the courts begin to push back, will he accept those limits, that there must be bounds on executive power? Or will he try and break through them? I'm not saying that's going to happen, but it's something that we have to be concerned about.AK: I wonder, again, wearing your historical cap you're always doing, the more you talk, the more Trump and Trump's Republican party is Nixonian. This obsession with not being responsible for the law. The broadening of the Republican party. Certainly the Republican party under Nixon was less singularly white than it became later. Isn't, in some ways, Trump just a return to Nixon? And secondly, you're talking about the law and Trump ransacking the law. But on the other hand, everything he always does is always backed up by the law. So, he has a love hate relationship with the law himself. He could never have accomplished anything he's done without hiring all these expensive lawyers. I don't know if you saw the movie this year, The Apprentice, which is built on his relationship with what's with Roy Cohn, of course, who schooled him in American politics, who was McCarthy's lawyer. So, again, I'm not trying to defend Trump, but my point is: what's different here?GARY GERSTLE: Well, a key difference from Nixon is that when push came to shove, Nixon submitted to the rule of law, and Trump did not. Nixon did not unleash his people on Congress when a group of senators came to him and said you're going to be impeached if you stay in office, you should resign. He resigned. So the '70s was a moment of enormous assertion of the power of Congress, and assertion of the power and authority of the Constitution. That is not the story of Donald Trump. The story of Donald Trump is the story of the Constitution being pushed to the side. If you ask, is there anything new about Americans and politicians trying to manipulate the law in their favor? There's nothing new about that. And Trump, having made his fortune in New York real estate, knows there's no such thing as perfect markets, knows that judges can be bought and corrupted. And so, he has very little regard for the authority of courts. Everything's a transaction. Everything can be bought and sold. So, he understands that, and he has used the law to his advantage when he can. But let me bring you back to his first inauguration speech. There was no mention of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution in what he had to say that day. I think we'd be hard pressed to find another inaugural speech that makes no reference to the sacred documents having to do with the founding of the American Republic. And so I think in that way, he is something new and represents, potentially, a different kind of threat. I'm not saying that's going to happen, but it's certainly possible. And let me add one other element that we have to consider, because I'm suggesting that he has a fondness for forms of authoritarian rule, and we have to recognize that hard rights are on the march everywhere in the world right now. The social democratic government of Germany has just fallen. Britain may soon be alone in terms of having a left-center party in control and upholding the values of liberal democracy. The world is in a grip of an authoritarian surge. That is not an American phenomenon. It is an international phenomenon. It is not a phenomenon I understand well enough, but if we're to understand the kind of strongman tendencies that Trump is exhibiting, the appeal of the strongman tendencies to so many Americans, we have to understand the international context in which this is occurring. And these movements in these different countries are fully aware of each other. They draw strength from each other's victories, and they get despairing from each other's defeats. So this is an international movement and an international project, and it's important, in that regard, to set Trump in that historical context.AK: Final question, Gary, there's so much here, we'll have to get you back on the show again in the new year. There's certainly, as you suggested, a great deal of vitality to conservatives, to the Cottons, the JD Vances, the Steve Bannons of the world. But what about on the left? We talked earlier, you sort of pushed back a little bit on the idea that the progressive elites aren't defenders of the neoliberal order, but you kind of acknowledged there may be a little bit of truth in that. In response to this new conservatism, which, as you suggested, is in some ways quite old, what can and should progressives do, rather than just falling back on Bidenomics and reliance on a new deal—which isn't going to happen now given that they had the opportunity in the COVID crisis to spend lots of money, which didn't have any impact on this election, for better or worse. Is there a need to re-architect the progressive politics in our new age, the age of AI, a high-tech age? Or do we simply allow the Bernie Sanders of the world to fall back on 20th-century progressive ideas?GARY GERSTLE: Well, I'm not sure where AI is taking us. AI may be taking us out of democracy altogether. I think one of—AK: You're not giving it any chance, if that's the case.“What if Trump does not get his way in his term in office for something he really wants? Will he accept that he is bound by the Constitution, that he is bound by the courts? Or will he once again say, when he really wants something, no constitution, no law, will stand in my way?”GARY GERSTLE: Well, there are different versions of AI that will be coming. But the state of the world right now suggests that democracy is on the defensive, and authoritarianism is is on the march. Those who predict the death of democracy have been wrong in the past. So I'm not predicting it here, but we have to understand that there are elements of life, technology, power in in private hands today, that make democracy much harder to do effectively. And so, this is a period of reflection that groups who care about democracy at all points on the political spectrum have to be thinking very seriously about. As for the here and now, and politicians don't think in terms of 10 or 20 years—or you have to be a leader in China, where you can think in terms of 10 or 20-year projects, because you never have to face any election and being tossed out of office—but in the here and now, I think what Democrats have to be very aware of, that the party that they thought they were is the party that the Republican Party has become, or is becoming: a multiracial, working-class party. And if the Democrats are to flourish—and in that regard, it's very significant—AK: It's astonishing, really.GARY GERSTLE: It is astonishing. And it's important to to note that Trump is the first Republican nominee for president since George W. Bush in 2004 to get a majority of votes. And the only person to do it before him in the last 30 years was his father, George H.W. Bush, in 1988. Kamala Harris came within 200,000 votes of becoming president of the United States. That's not well enough understood yet. But if 200,000 votes had changed in three states, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, she would be the president elect of the United States. However, she would have been the president elect while losing the popular vote. And one has to go very far back in history to find the Democrats being the beneficiaries of the Electoral College while losing the popular vote. And I think the fact that they lost the popular vote for only the third time in the last 50 years, maybe? I mean, when they elected someone...has to suggest that they have to do some serious thinking about how to reclaim this. Now, Bernie Sanders is coming out and saying, they should have gotten me on the public stage rather than Liz Cheney, that going after suburban Republican women was the wrong route. You should have stuck with me. We had a left/center alliance that worked in 2020. We could have done it again. But that's not my reading of the situation. My reading of the situation is that Bernie-style politics is distinctly less popular in 2024 than it was in 2020. The Democrats have to figure that out, and they have to figure out what they have to do in order to reclaim majorities in American life. And in order to do that, I think their economic programs are actually on the right track, in that respect, under the Biden administration. I think they probably have to rethink some of their cultural policies. There were three issues in this election. The economy was number one. The immigration issue was number two. And then, the trans issue was number three. The Republicans ran an estimated 30,000 ads declaring that the Democratic party was going to take your children away by turning them from boys to girls or girls to boys. The Democratic party has to do some hard thinking about how to have a progressive policy on immigration and how to have a progressive policy on issues of trans matters without losing a majority of the American people, who clearly are, at this moment, not with them on those important issues.AK: It's an astonishing moment, Gary. And I'm not sure whether it's a revolutionary moment or just surreal.GARY GERSTLE: Well, you've been pressing me, on a number of occasions, as to whether this is just the normal course of American politics, and if we look in that direction, the place to look for normality is...incumbents always do badly in high-inflationary times. And Ford and Carter lost in the 1970s. Every incumbent during COVID and during the inflationary period in Europe seems to have lost a recent election. The most normal course of politics is to say, this is an exceptional moment having to do with the enormity of COVID and what was required to shut down the economy, saved people, and then getting started up again, and we will see something more normal, the Democrats will be back to what they normally do, in 2028. That's a possibility. I think the more plausible possibility is that we are in the midst of some pretty profound electoral realignment that is giving rise to a different kind of political order. And the Democrats have to figure out if that political order is going to be under their direction, what they have to do to pull that off. AK: And maybe rather than the neoliberal order, we're talking about, what, a neo-authoritarian order? Is that—GARY GERSTLE: Well, the Trump forces are maybe neo-authoritarian, but we don't have a name for it. Pete Buttigieg—AK: Well, that's why we got you on the show, Gary. Don't you have a name for it?GARY GERSTLE: No. You know—AK: We're relying on you. I hope it's going to be in your next book.GARY GERSTLE: Well, I have till January 20th, 2025, to come up with the name. Pete Buttigieg called it the Big Deal rather than the New Deal. I don't think that cuts it. And there's some other pundits who are arguing about building from the middle out. That doesn't cut it.AK: That sounds terrible. That sounds like—GARY GERSTLE: This is part of Biden's—AK: Designing political parties by committee. It's like an American car.GARY GERSTLE: This is part of Biden's problem. You can't name, effectively, in a positive way, what he's done. One thing that's going to happen—and this may be a sign that things will continue from Biden to Trump, in terms of industrial policy. Do you have any doubt that Trump is going to plaster his name on every computer chips plant, every battery factory? Trump brought this to you, he's got to be there for every opening. He's not going to miss a beat. He'll see this as a grand publicity tour. I think there's a good chance he will take credit for what Biden has started, and that's going to upset a lot of us. But it may also signify that he may be loath to abandon many of these industrial policies that Biden has put in place, especially since the Biden administration was very clever in putting most of these plants, and chip plants, and battery plants, in deep red Republican districts.AK: Well, Gary, I know you're not particularly cheerful. I don't suppose most of our audience are, but you actually cheered me up. I think things are a little bit more normal than some people think. But we will get you back on the show after January—what did you say—January 25th, when you'll have a word to describe the New World Order?GARY GERSTLE: Well, I said after January 20th, 2025, you can expect me to have a name. I probably should—AK: Gary, now, we'll have you back on the show. If you don't have a name, I'm going to report you to Trump.GARY GERSTLE: You'll have to bury me.AK: Yeah. Okay. Well, we're not burying you. We need you, Gary Gerstle, author of Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, a man who makes sense of our present with historical perspective. Gary, as always, a pleasure. Keep well and keep safe. And we'll talk again in the not-too-distant future. Thank you so much.GERSTLE: Thank you. A pleasure talking with you. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

After a dizzying week of economic and market activity, our Head of Corporate Credit Research breaks down the three top stories.----- Transcript -----It's been a whirlwind week of economic activity in the markets as we enter the dog days of summer. Our Head of Corporate Credits Research breaks down three top stories.Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Andrew Sheets, Head of Corporate Credit Research at Morgan Stanley. Along with my colleagues bringing you a variety of perspectives, today I'll be discussing what we've taken away from this eventful week.It's Friday, August 2nd at 2pm in London.For all its sophistication, financial activity is still seasonal. This is a business driven by people, and people like to take time off in the summer to rest and recharge. There's a reason that volumes in August tend to be low.And so this week felt like that pre-vacation rush to pack, find your keys, and remember your ticket before running out the door. Important earnings releases, central bank meetings and employment numbers all hit with quick succession. Some thoughts on all that whirlwind.The first story was earnings and continued equity rotation. Equity markets are seeing big shifts between which stocks are doing well and poorly, particularly in larger technology names. These shifts are a big deal for equity investors, but we think they remain much less material for credit.Technology is a much smaller sector of the bond market than the stock market, as these tech companies have generally issued relatively little debt – relative to their size. Credit actually tends to overlap much more with the average stock, which at the moment continues to do well. And while the Technology sector has been volatile, stocks in the US financial sector – the largest segment for credit – have been seeing much better, steadier gains.Next up this week was the Bank of Japan, which raised policy rates, a notable shift from many other central banks, which are starting to lower them. For credit, the worry from such a move was somewhat roundabout: that higher rates in Japan would strengthen its currency, the yen. That such strength would be painful for foreign exchange investors, who had positioned themselves the other way around – for yen weakness. And that losses from these investors in foreign exchange could lead them to lower exposure in other areas, potentially credit. But so far, things look manageable. While the yen did strengthen this week, it hasn't had the sort of knock-on impact to other markets that some had feared. We think that might be evidence that investor positioning in credit was not nearly as concentrated, or as large, as in certain foreign exchange strategies, and we think that remains the case.But the biggest story this week was the Federal Reserve on Wednesday, followed by the US Jobs number today. These two events need to be taken together.On Wednesday, the Fed chose to maintain its high current policy rate, while also hinting it's open to a cut. But with inflation falling rapidly in recent months, and already at the Fed's target on market-based measures, the question is whether the Fed should already be cutting rates to even out that policy. After all, lowering rates too late has often been a problem for the Fed in the past.Today's weak jobs report brings these fears front-and-center, as highly restrictive monetary policy may start to look out-of-line with labor market weakness. And not cutting this week makes it more awkward for the Fed to now adjust. If they move at the next meeting, later in September; well, that means waiting more than a month and a half. But acting before that time, in an unusual intra-bank meeting cut; well, that could look reactive. The market will understandably worry that the Fed, once again, may be reacting too late. That is a bad outcome for the balance of economic risks and for credit.Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, please leave us a review wherever you listen and share Thoughts on the Market with a friend or colleague today.

2023 Mindful Moments: Week 48 – Episode 162– Transcript – It feels good to let go. Tap into the power of this mantra with Megan Weigel, Nurse Practitioner and MS-Certified Nurse, and discover a mindful moment for yourself.

Listen to ASCO's Journal of Clinical Oncology essay, “The Gift of Truth” by Dr. Ilana Hellmann, an Attending Physician in the Hematology Department at Meir Medical Center in Israel. The essay is followed by an interview with Hellmann and host Dr. Lidia Schapira. Hellmann shares how it is an immense privilege and grave responsibility for physicians to give bad news to patients who have a terminal disease. TRANSCRIPT It was a hot and humid Tuesday in July, and I distinctly remember being grateful for the air conditioning in the pastel-shaded waiting room of the oncology outpatient clinic. My father sat silently beside me. We knew this room well, as we did the doctor we had arrived to see. He had been my late mother's oncologist until she had passed away just over a year previously from metastatic breast cancer. Dad remembered him being kind yet direct and had requested that he be his oncologist now that he needed one. I watched his hands fidget with the slip of paper bearing the number that would be called over the loud speaker. My father was 84 and a retired university professor of statistics. He spoke seven languages and his friends called him the encyclopedia as he was an endless fountain of knowledge in history, politics, literature, art, etc.…. His number was called, directing us to a room we had been in many times before. After greetings and some small talk about my late mother, Dr Cohen addressed my dad and slowly went through the history.  He had had surgery for a squamous cell carcinoma on his scalp along with skin graft 6 months earlier. Two or 3 months later, he complained of pain in his right hip which seemed to worsen by the day. After some imaging and assessment by an orthopedic surgeon, a diagnosis of osteoarthritis was declared, and the treatment recommended was a total hip replacement. The surgery was performed and my dad, who had been suffering from extreme pain, felt immediate relief. He was delighted with the results of the procedure, delight that dissipated in an instant when the pathology report came back: metastatic squamous cell carcinoma. He had been quickly referred for a course of radiation which had been completed. This meeting was intended to discuss further treatment. Dr Cohen gently explained that my father's cancer was not curable and that there was no good treatment available for him at that time. I do not really remember much of what was said after that. I found myself thanking him for his time and helping my father to the car. The drive home was awful, with awkward silence broken only by a discussion about what he was going to have for lunch. We both pointedly avoided talking about the meaning behind Dr Cohen's explanations. I was stunned. I felt like my father had been fired by his doctor and that I had been left to deal with the consequences. I felt alone, abandoned, and betrayed. The next few days passed quickly as I juggled my busy hospital schedule with family dinners, school runs, and the sporting activities of my three boys—the oldest of whom was 11 years old at the time. The weekend came, and on Saturday morning, my husband and I planned to meet friends at the local swimming pool as we so often did in the hot summer months. Leaving him to clean up honey and pancakes, I went across to the apartment opposite ours to say good morning to my father and tell him we would be gone for the better part of the day. He was sitting up in bed and said: “Before you go, please bring me my phone book.” He still used an alphabetized phone book, mostly in my late mother's hand writing. I found the book and held it out to him. “Find David Green's number” he said, which I did. “Dial it please” he said while looking for his glasses on the bedside table. I dialed and handed him the phone. I then listened as he greeted David—an old colleague from his years in academia. Dad had not spoken to David in many years. He explained that he had cancer, and that he did not have much time, but that he wanted David to know how much he had enjoyed working with him and to thank him particularly for his contribution to an article they had published together. I got up to go and, seeming not to notice, he asked me to dial the number of another friend. Realizing this was going to take some time, I called my husband and told him to take our boys to the swimming pool without me. I sat down next to Dad on his bed and dialed number after number. My parents had lived in a few countries, and my father's academic career had connected him with people all over the world. Over the course of almost 6 hours, he spoke to friends, relatives, old neighbors, and many work colleagues. He had a personal message for every one of them and started each conversation with a clear and brief explanation of the circumstances of his call. There were some people who were not home for his call, and he left long messages on answering machines. Those 6 hours were cathartic for the both of us. It was sad but also terribly beautiful and filled with my dad's signature black humor. Once we had contacted everyone in the phonebook, he continued his mission and gave me a list of people he wanted to be present at his funeral, as well as a second list of those he would prefer not to be there. Then, he handed me an envelope which contained a substantial sum of money. “This” he explained “is for the gentlemen who come to take my body.” My mother had died at home, and he remembered the two ambulance men who had come to take her body to the morgue after she had passed. He had been struck by the difficulty of such thankless work and wanted to make sure they were appropriately compensated. Very soon after that Saturday, my father had a seizure and was diagnosed with brain metastases. As dad had made it very clear that he wanted palliative care and no admissions to the hospital, Dr Cohen connected us with the services of home hospice care. He deteriorated rapidly and died at home, as he had wished, 3 months later. The money in the envelope was duly delivered to its intended recipients, and there are some people who were not at his funeral.  I have often gone back to the conversation in the oncologist's office on that July morning. Oncologists conduct end-of-life discussions with their patients every day. How does one tell the patient the truth without taking away every ounce of hope? Does every patient have to know that he is dying? I had never thought about the immediate consequences of what I say to my patients and their loved ones until I had to get my dad to the car and spend those eternal 20 minutes with him on the drive home. Bad news is difficult for those on the receiving end but no less so for those given the task of delivering it, especially when it concerns a terminal illness. There are some physicians who avoid telling their patients that their disease is terminal altogether. In not telling patients of the terminal nature of their cancer, are we protecting them or ourselves? And are we preventing them from being able to use the time they have left in a way they would wish with the knowledge that time is limited? There are those patients who cannot or will not talk about death. Knowing how much to say to each of our patients, and choosing the appropriate words, is an art. The task entrusted to physicians of giving bad news is both an immense privilege and a grave responsibility. My father received a brutal gift that day. But brutal as it was, it was a gift that enabled him to part, to make peace, and to prepare for his coming death. I have since had countless conversations with my own patients about their imminent demise. I constantly remember my father and that special Saturday. My memories are of tears, and of laughter, and most of all, of a sense of closure for the both of us. I hope that I am able to give my patients their truth in a way that will make it as much a gift for them, as it was for him. Dr. Lidia Schapira: Hello and welcome to JCO's Cancer Stories: The Art of Oncology, which features essays and personal reflections from authors exploring their experience in the field of oncology. I'm your host, Dr. Lidia Schapira, Associate Editor for Art of Oncology and a Professor of Medicine at Stanford University. Today we are joined by Dr. Ilana Hellmann, who is an Attending Physician in the Hematology Department at Meir Medical Center in Israel. In this episode, we will be discussing her Art of Oncology article, “The Gift of Truth.”  At the time of recording, our guest has no disclosures.  Ilana, welcome to our podcast, and thank you for joining us. Dr. Ilana Hellmann: Thank you for inviting me. It's wonderful to be here. Dr. Lidia Schapira: You've been on our show before, so let me just start by diving right into your beautiful article. It honors the memory of your father, a Professor of Statistics, who had an encyclopedic knowledge of the world and spoke seven languages and was known by so many different people. And you start by bringing us to the moment in the waiting room of the oncology department that was familiar to both of you because your mother had been a patient and you had very carefully selected the oncologist for your father. You say it was a July humid day, and his number is called. And then what happened? Dr. Ilana Hellmann: Well, as I wrote, all the moments that you've just repeated from the article are things that are imprinted in my mind as if it happened yesterday. My father passed away in 2014, and there are those moments and many others that I remember very, very clearly. It's something I hear from my patients also all the time. They remember exactly the day they received the diagnosis, the time of day, they tell me what I was wearing when I told them whatever it was I told them. And it's something that struck me that when I went back to that day and many other things that happened afterwards, I remembered every second. I think I knew what the oncologist was going to say in retrospect, but at the time, maybe I didn't think about it.  It's very interesting that we as physicians, especially oncologists, we know exactly, but when it comes to family members, we're a little blind. And I've had this experience a few times since my mother passed away from cancer. My father and my father in law passed away just over a year ago, also from metastatic pancreatic cancer. So we know it very well.  Dr. Lidia Schapira: Sorry.  Dr. Ilana Hellmann: As I wrote in the article, I remember going in with my father. I remember the conversation, or at least the beginning part of it, but once the message hit home that, “This is what we have, the bottom line is there's not a lot we can do. We certainly can't cure your disease.” I don't remember anything else that happened after that. Dr. Lidia Schapira: And you described the ride home after that. You mentioned that you felt your father had been fired, had been fired from anything that was perhaps curative or offered sort of some optimism, perhaps the conversation was a little deeper and supportive and offered some palliation. But what you took away was that this was awful. He was fired. Then you say the ride home was really difficult.  Tell us a little bit about that. What was it like to leave the oncologist office as the sort of informed knowledgeable daughter who had just received this message? Dr. Ilana Hellmann: Exactly that. And I kept thinking in my mind, “How much do I say, what is he thinking? How much does he understand?” I was almost jealous, a little of people who have no medical knowledge. So much easier. Maybe it's not, but I think it's really tough for physicians as family members of patients who are unwell. But my father was, as I described, an exceptionally intelligent person, a real intellectual. He was enormous, not physically, but there was nothing he didn't know. You could ask him anything. He read the dictionary for fun. These are things that he liked to compare languages and cancer made him very small. And it was awful. It was just awful, awful to see. And that moment, it was very emphasized how small he was. He was just silent. There was just nothing, and I didn't know what to say. I felt absolutely helpless. And as I described, that drive is 20 minutes, maybe even a little less. It was endless.  And I remember that I went home with him. It was lunchtime, and I dropped him at home and I went back to work. I think I had taken the day off, to- I didn't know what was going to happen with the oncologist, and I went back to work because it was easier to go back to work than to stay at home. And he was silent. He said nothing. And the next time I understood what he was going through was on that Saturday with everything that happened.  Dr. Lidia Schapira: So fast forward to that Saturday, I imagine that you were busy with your children and your work, and it was easy to– I'm going to use the old fashioned word compartmentalize, put this aside for a little bit. And then on Saturday you're going in to say, “Hey, I'm going to take the children to the pool. How are you?” And he had a completely different idea of how you were going to find yourself spending the day. And I think that's such a powerful scene in the essay when you say that he started one by one asking you to dial his contacts, his friends, his colleagues and give a message. Tell us a little bit about how that felt and bring us to the bedside or to the scene if you can.   Dr. Ilana Hellmann: So there's dad. He's in bed. He's got his morning cup of coffee. He lived with a full-time carer at that stage, who brought him some breakfast and a cup of coffee. At some stage, she brought me a cup of coffee. He was very, very focused. It was like I was an assistant, just doing what he needed so that he could talk to all the people he wanted to talk to. It was crazy. It was like watching something surreal. There were people he hadn't spoken to in 20 years that he called. He had no concept of what time it was in various parts of the world, so he woke people in the middle of the night. It was really quite something. People didn't believe me afterwards when I told them the story, and as I say, some of the conversations were very, very humorous. My father had a wicked sense of humor; very black sense of humor. So, there was lots of laughter mixed in with, “I'm dying, and I have cancer.” Lots of humor, and there were a lot of tears, mostly on my part because my father was not a tearful type. He was emotional, but he didn't cry. But I remember being very tearful. I didn't know all the people. Some of the people were people I'd heard of when I was a child, all sorts of neighbors, people we'd lived next door to years before when I grew up in South Africa.  And when he'd finished, he had this sense of- he was satisfied, “I've done what I had to do.” And then he moved on. He had his list of things he had to do, the money he wanted to give to the ambulance workers, the people he wanted at his funeral, he didn't want to go to his funeral. It was typical of my father to do something like that. He planned everything. And it was like he'd had a box that he had to seal and tie a ribbon and it was done. And then he was finished and he was ready and he let go. It was amazing. It was beautiful. Dr. Lidia Schapira: When I read your essay, I felt that that was the gift he gave you. You have the word ‘gift' in the title. But it's such an amazing scene for a father to be able to do, sort of a review of his life while he's still living. Instead of leaving you a box with all of his memories, he basically showed you and gave you this loving and exhaustive, comprehensive demonstration of what his life had been about. Dr. Ilana Hellmann: Absolutely. Dr. Lidia Schapira: And in some ways, some of the dimensions that he touched were the professional dimensions that perhaps as a child or a young adult he would not have been able to access. But you saw how big he was. What an amazing thing. Did you and he ever talk about that? What it was that led him to do that? Or was that just something that happened and you sort of both understood and just walked on? Dr. Ilana Hellmann: It was beautiful and it's certainly a gift I've been left with. There was the gift he got and the gift I got. It was a little intense. Six hours of calls was exhausting. I remember when my husband came home and I told him, he immediately poured me a glass of wine. It was very, very difficult and it took me a long time to go through. I had no time to recover from one conversation to the next conversation. And he just kept going. He had very little breaks during the day. There were a lot of people he had to talk to, and he wanted to finish it today. He thought he was dying next week. That's not what happened. He never spoke about it again. And that was quite typical of him. He was like, “What's done is done. I've said what I had to say.” There were a lot of things that he said that I heard from the conversations that he had. And as you say, there were various gifts during the day that were told to other people but intended for me and for my younger brother who was not there at the time because he lived in England. But we never discussed it again. That was the way my father was. Dr. Lidia Schapira: You know when we, as physicians, tell patients who are sort of nearing the end of their life to say what they need to say to be prepared, this is exactly why, right? Because very soon after that, he had a seizure. He had brain metastasis. He might not have had the stamina or the ability to do what he did. So that is a very important lesson. I was incredibly moved by that scene, and I've probably read it a dozen times. You've probably thought about it a million times, but certainly this reader took a lot from that very beautifully described scene and so nicely told.  So for the last few minutes, tell us a little bit about how this personal experience has impacted your delivery of news and your relationship with the patients. You start by telling us that often, as oncologists, we give bad news but then we just move on. But people live with this, people go home like this. How has that experience as a daughter impacted your delivery of news?  Dr. Ilana Hellmann: Absolutely. There are a few parts of how it's influenced me. Somebody who read the article when I was writing it had said to me, "Wow, do all physicians have to go through these things to be able to identify with their patients or their family members?" Well, I hope not. It's a terrible thing to think of that each of us– On the other hand, there's no question that when you've been through something, you identify with the person in front of you if you know what they're talking about, you know what it's like to be a mother, you know what it's like to be a daughter. You know or you don't know what it's like to lose a parent or somebody else and the experiences that I had and I imagine anybody else have had with interactions with the medical community, with doctors, with the emergency room, with all sorts of things are things that influence the way I approach patients. So one of the things is true. I'm guilty of the fact that it didn't occur to me that I sit in my room, I see a patient and his daughter, his wife, his whatever, and I give them this news, and then I leave the wife to deal with him outside. Or the fact that when the oncologist said, “We haven't got curative treatment for you,” and I didn't hear anything else after that. Well, we know that when we tell patients something not good, there's often no point in carrying on the conversation and talking about treatment and side effects and whatever because they're not there anymore. And that's something that I remember very clearly from that.   You can't go with the patient, you can't go home with them, you can't get in the car with them, but you can remember it, think about it, choose your words carefully, maybe have a word with the spouse or the family member, whoever it is, as they're leaving outside the door, “If you need anything, call me.” Maybe call them. Sometimes, I've seen that it's difficult, and I've called them the next day. That definitely has influenced me. I'm not sure there's a lot you can do about it, but I think about it. In terms of telling patients that time is limited, that you're not going to live forever, it's hard, and we want to give patients good news. It's so much easier to tell a patient that their PET CT is clear than that it's all come back and the prognosis is not good.  So I try to understand where the patient is and how much they want to go. Most patients will lead the conversation. Most patients know to tell you how far they want you to go. And I've never been sorry about telling the patient that their prognosis is bad and that their disease is terminal. And I've had lots of return conversations from families after patients have passed on about the conversations they had, about the things that they did, about the fact that the patient decided maybe not to have more intensive treatment, went on a holiday, decided not to come to the emergency room with a fever or whatever it was, and elected to stay at home with hospice.  I found that that side of oncology is no less rewarding when you have to accompany a patient on their lost journey. I've found over the years that it's actually no less rewarding than the patients who are cured. And then you see them once a year and they come and they say everything's good.  Dr. Lidia Schapira: And that perhaps is part of what we call the art of oncology, which is the being in relationship, connecting with somebody, being a rock or a source of guidance for them when they're going through incredibly vulnerable times. I think that's not something that perhaps others recognize as being rewarding, but for those of us who are drawn to it, it can be incredibly rewarding.  Thank you, Ilana. This is a beautiful conversation and such a lovely essay. I imagine there's a reason for this taking about ten years to process and write, because the impact is so deep, but you managed to do that. For that, all of the readers of JCO are grateful to you. So I thank you very much.  Dr. Ilana Hellmann: Thank you. Thank you for taking it and publishing it.  Dr. Lidia Schapira: So until next time, thank you for listening to JCO's Cancer Stories: The Art of Oncology. Don't forget to give us a rating or review and be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. You can find all of the ASCO shows at asco.org/podcasts. The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions.   Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience, and conclusions. Guest statements on the podcast do not express the opinions of ASCO. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity, or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement. Show Notes Like, share and subscribe so you never miss an episode and leave a rating or review.  Guest Bio:  Dr. Ilana Hellmann is an Attending Physician in the Hematology Department at Meir Medical Center in Israel.

2023 Mindful Moments: Week 45 – Episode 158– Transcript – It's okay that I can't make sense of things right now. Tap into the power of this mantra with Megan Weigel, Nurse Practitioner and MS-Certified Nurse, and discover a mindful moment for yourself.

What fuels your entrepreneurial spirit? The key lies in having a robust support system. This week, Anne & Lau talk about the indispensable role of support in the journey of entrepreneurship. They explore how the encouragement from our loved ones serves as a pillar of strength during challenging times, and discuss ways to navigate situations where support is shaky or absent. They also dive into the essence of financial independence and the peace it can infuse into relationships. Unraveling the secret to keeping your business finances organized and the wonders of a dedicated workspace, they guide you on a path of entrepreneurial success. Entrepreneurship can often feel like a lonely journey, but remember Bosses, you're not alone!   Transcript   It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere 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.   Anne Ganguzza: Hey everyone, welcome to the VO BOSS Podcast. I'm your host, Anne Gangusa, and I am here with the one and only, most beautiful, Lau Lapides.   Lau Lapides: Oh, thank you Anne. Hey   Anne Ganguzza: Hey, Lau.   Lau Lapides: everyone. Wonderful to see ya.   Anne Ganguzza: Law, I've been very reflective this week.   Lau Lapides: Oh,   Anne Ganguzza: Yes.   Lau Lapides: I love that chair.   Anne Ganguzza: Very reflective because I was thinking about, oh gosh, I've just been reading. There's so much chaos out there in social media and stuff, and I was thinking to myself, I feel so lucky to have my supportive group that supports me in my business. I know that not everybody has that.   Lau Lapides: Mmm.   Anne Ganguzza: And I thought we should talk about your VO support group, people that support you, and especially people close to you and your family. I don't know where I would be if my husband did not support this endeavor of mine, because it really does, it really takes, I think it takes courage because... Being an entrepreneur, running your own business, it's so much different than the corporate life that I used to lead where   Lau Lapides: Mm-hmm.   Anne Ganguzza: I just got paid every other week and I could depend on that paycheck. And I know that the way that this industry just kind of is up and down and crazy, it takes a lot for   Lau Lapides: Yeah, yeah.   Anne Ganguzza: someone to support that.   Lau Lapides: And gratitude is great. And   Anne Ganguzza: Mmm.   Lau Lapides: we really have to have, honestly, we have to have gratitude. It's so important to just celebrate the moments that we do share with our loved ones, our family, our friends, our colleagues, our really our circle, you know, our inner circle, our   Anne Ganguzza: Mm.   Lau Lapides: outer circle that really helps support us. And like reflect as you said, where would we be? without these people would we be where we are? And I'm going to be even non-PC for a moment and say, where would we be without these people simply tolerating us? Like think about that. Like what person slash woman you know would even say such a thing. But the truth is it's hard. It's a hard life in a lot of ways.   Anne Ganguzza: Mmm, so   Lau Lapides: And   Anne Ganguzza: many   Lau Lapides: it's   Anne Ganguzza: ways.   Lau Lapides: difficult. And we show the stress of it at times.   Anne Ganguzza: Sure.   Lau Lapides: We show the impatience, we show the fast moving, we show the exhaustion. And to have that group, that circle, not only support it, but tolerate it,   Anne Ganguzza: Mm-hmm.   Lau Lapides: when they may not be experiencing that, they may not live that kind of lifestyle, they may not even understand it, but yet they're tolerating it, they're welcoming it, and then they're building you up. That is unbelievable when you have that on your   Anne Ganguzza: Yeah,   Lau Lapides: side.   Anne Ganguzza: yeah. And I think there's so much that as bosses, right, that we don't anticipate having to experience or know or, I guess, go through when you own your own company. There's just so many things that I think, I don't know if you can prepare yourself. Do you know what I mean? You can prepare yourself for, you know, I guess technically, right? You   Lau Lapides: Mm-hmm.   Anne Ganguzza: know, oh, it takes, these are the steps that you need to, you know, create a business entity. These are the steps you need to market your business. These are the steps. So there's these technical steps that we follow, but then if things don't go the way that we hope them to go, right,   Lau Lapides: Mm-hmm.   Anne Ganguzza: that can just throw a whole wrench into... the business and in your mental outlook. And that is something that I think I was unprepared for, the uncertainties of it and handling the uncertainties of that. And then of course, anybody that supports me   Lau Lapides: Mmm.   Anne Ganguzza: has to go through all these emotions with me. And that is asking a lot. So again, I'm very, very grateful that I do have that support. And bosses, I mean, I know this is difficult, and you may not even know, right? Down the road, what sort of things could happen that might, I don't know, change the way that your support system feels about voiceover or being a voiceover entrepreneur, and especially these days with the disruptive technologies that are out there. I can't imagine, I do know that there's a lot of people that are... uncertain about what's happening in the future. And so I think their support system is also like seeing that, reading that. How do you, what would you say for people that aren't experiencing support from their family? What can they do?   Lau Lapides: Gosh, I was just about to ask you, this is the rhetorical question of the day is like, what do we do when we don't have the support or when we feel completely alone or when we have a partner or a spouse   Anne Ganguzza: Mm-hmm.   Lau Lapides: or even a child or even a best friend that is sabotaging your dreams   Anne Ganguzza: Mm.   Lau Lapides: or   Anne Ganguzza: Yeah.   Lau Lapides: getting in the way, maybe they're sucking all the time. the energy from you. Maybe they're dragging you down in the   Anne Ganguzza: Mmm.   Lau Lapides: mud with their own problems, maybe, right? And you think,   Anne Ganguzza: Yeah?   Lau Lapides: wow, who is there with me to go on this journey and really help me through, support me through this? I don't really have that many   Anne Ganguzza: Mm-hmm.   Lau Lapides: people to do that. And I think there are a couple things that we can do to sort of band-aid that situation. I'm not   Anne Ganguzza: Mm-mm.   Lau Lapides: so sure you can ever totally fix it, but the one thing I would like to suggest, and I have a few clients like this too, sneaking around the bushes so that their husband doesn't find out   Anne Ganguzza: Mm.   Lau Lapides: that they're spending the little bit of tertiary income on   Anne Ganguzza: Yeah,   Lau Lapides: on lessons.   Anne Ganguzza: coaching or yeah.   Lau Lapides: I say listen you know um it's easy for me to say listen just be brave and just tell them and just   Anne Ganguzza: Mm-hmm.   Lau Lapides: you know stand up to it but I'm not in that relationship and   Anne Ganguzza: Sure.   Lau Lapides: I don't know the the dynamics of what's going on so in essence I don't really have the right to say that one thing I can say that has worked for me in many times of my life is If there is someone that is not working out, they're not positive minded, they don't have the forward thinking, upward mobility energy   Anne Ganguzza: Mm-hmm.   Lau Lapides: that   Anne Ganguzza: Mm-hmm.   Lau Lapides: I crave and that I want in my connections, I simply cut them loose. Not in a bad way,   Anne Ganguzza: way,   Lau Lapides: not   Anne Ganguzza: not   Lau Lapides: in a   Anne Ganguzza: in   Lau Lapides: toxic   Anne Ganguzza: a toxic   Lau Lapides: way,   Anne Ganguzza: way,   Lau Lapides: not in   Anne Ganguzza: not in   Lau Lapides: an   Anne Ganguzza: an   Lau Lapides: angry   Anne Ganguzza: angry   Lau Lapides: way,   Anne Ganguzza: way,   Lau Lapides: but in   Anne Ganguzza: but   Lau Lapides: a   Anne Ganguzza: in   Lau Lapides: way   Anne Ganguzza: a way   Lau Lapides: where   Anne Ganguzza: where   Lau Lapides: I sort   Anne Ganguzza: I sort   Lau Lapides: of prioritize   Anne Ganguzza: of prioritize that   Lau Lapides: that   Anne Ganguzza: they're   Lau Lapides: they're not   Anne Ganguzza: not   Lau Lapides: going   Anne Ganguzza: going   Lau Lapides: to   Anne Ganguzza: to   Lau Lapides: be   Anne Ganguzza: be   Lau Lapides: taking   Anne Ganguzza: taking   Lau Lapides: a lot   Anne Ganguzza: a lot   Lau Lapides: of my   Anne Ganguzza: of my   Lau Lapides: time.   Anne Ganguzza: time.   Lau Lapides: They're not going to be. forefront in my life because I have to keep my goals alive. And finding those, we talked about this once before, those growth people. Where are   Anne Ganguzza: Mm-hmm.   Lau Lapides: those growth people   Anne Ganguzza: Mm-hmm.   Lau Lapides: that can help me through that I can soundboard to, that I can vent to, that I can learn from, that can help me grow and also validate me? Like   Anne Ganguzza: Sure.   Lau Lapides: really validate the choices. So finding whether it's an accountability group or self-help group   Anne Ganguzza: Mm-hmm.   Lau Lapides: or just a friend that is also working on a career where they're   Anne Ganguzza: where they're   Lau Lapides: moving   Anne Ganguzza: moving   Lau Lapides: up,   Anne Ganguzza: up   Lau Lapides: but   Anne Ganguzza: but   Lau Lapides: others   Anne Ganguzza: others   Lau Lapides: are   Anne Ganguzza: are. Mm-hmm.   Lau Lapides: holding them down, is to help each other grow and get to the next step.   Anne Ganguzza: Right, right.   Lau Lapides: Get a buddy.   Anne Ganguzza: And I, well, I'll tell you what, and I think that that's absolutely something that if you are not getting support, let's say from your spouse or significant other, that I think is almost critical for you to, you know, to survive in the industry. Because I know I've had a few people that I know where their spouses were not in support and consistently   Lau Lapides: Yeah,   Anne Ganguzza: were dragging them down.   Lau Lapides: I have two.   Anne Ganguzza: consistently demanding, you know, where's the money going? Why are you not making any money? You know, you need to help support the family, get a real income, or whatever it is, right? It's hard enough to run your own business and to deal with the uncertainties that you face with your own, maybe, insecurities, in maybe, I'm not familiar with this territory, and I need to learn more, and I need to, you know, what do I need to do to make it? to make it successful, let alone having the people around you, right, trying to bring you down or sabotage you, as you mentioned. So   Lau Lapides: Mm-hmm.   Anne Ganguzza: that's   Lau Lapides: Mm-hmm.   Anne Ganguzza: very difficult. So it's super important to have that support somewhere to keep you lifted up and to keep your momentum going forward   Lau Lapides: Mm-hmm.   Anne Ganguzza: in that situation.   Lau Lapides: And you know what I've seen too, more often than not, that the family or the close people to this   Anne Ganguzza: Mm-hmm.   Lau Lapides: person, it's not that they're unsupportive or they're against them. It's just they're not actively or proactively doing things to make their path easier. So   Anne Ganguzza: Mmm.   Lau Lapides: I'll give you an example. A mom who's got children, whether they're young children or whether they're teenage children, whatever. I've heard this from several of my clients, like it took forever. And like, don't you have a setup? Where's your studio? Where's your   Anne Ganguzza: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.   Lau Lapides: desk? Are you setting up a mic? Months and months and months and months would go by. I'd say, what's going on? It's not a money issue. No, it's just, you know, I can't find space in my house. You know, my   Anne Ganguzza: Mmm.   Lau Lapides: kid needs the space for football and my other kid needs the space for this. Then my husband wants the space for his disc. And then   Anne Ganguzza: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.   Lau Lapides: and I said, well, wait a second. Where's your space? Where's your studio?   Anne Ganguzza: Mm-hmm.   Lau Lapides: Where's   Anne Ganguzza: Mm-hmm.   Lau Lapides: your identity? So it's that idea of that liberation and that freedom and that courage to say, I count too, I matter too. This is not the only role I play   Anne Ganguzza: Mm-hmm,   Lau Lapides: as mom   Anne Ganguzza: mm-hmm.   Lau Lapides: or dad,   Anne Ganguzza: Mm-hmm. Mom or,   Lau Lapides: since   Anne Ganguzza: do   Lau Lapides: we have   Anne Ganguzza: you have   Lau Lapides: a lot   Anne Ganguzza: a spouse?   Lau Lapides: of dads   Anne Ganguzza: Yep,   Lau Lapides: at   Anne Ganguzza: mm-hmm,   Lau Lapides: home too.   Anne Ganguzza: yep.   Lau Lapides: Dad, I'm not only dad, I'm not only a breadwinner. I'm someone who's a creative, I'm an   Anne Ganguzza: Mm-hmm.   Lau Lapides: artist, and I wanna be a talent, and I'm moving towards this. So I have to have the respect zone   Anne Ganguzza: Mm-hmm.   Lau Lapides: of   Anne Ganguzza: Mm-hmm.   Lau Lapides: my   Anne Ganguzza: Mm-hmm.   Lau Lapides: space and really claim that. That's actually, I've seen that a lot, Ann.   Anne Ganguzza: Yeah,   Lau Lapides: I've seen   Anne Ganguzza: yeah.   Lau Lapides: that more often than not.   Anne Ganguzza: Oh, absolutely. And it makes it doubly hard or triple difficult for, I think, these people to gain traction in the industry because it's almost like they have to prove themselves before they'll get any support.   Lau Lapides: Mm-hmm.   Anne Ganguzza: You know, well, when are you going to get a voice-over job? I mean, when are you going to book something? That kind of a thing. And so it's always an uphill climb to get that space, that recording space, to get that that, you know, they have to either go out and get a part-time job so they can make money so they can pay for coaching, so they can get a demo. But I'll tell you what, I would say that the majority of my clients who I have found that have done that and have persevered. through that have been some of the most successful   Lau Lapides: Yes.   Anne Ganguzza: voiceover businesses that I know now because they have the resilience   Lau Lapides: Mm-hmm.   Anne Ganguzza: and they had the commitment and through it all they persevered. and were   Lau Lapides: Yeah.   Anne Ganguzza: able to finally, you know, and not only prove to themselves, but end up proving to any of the members of the family that we're not necessarily as supportive as they could have been, that this is a viable career. It is a viable, you know, it is a viable thing for me to do and to make money at it.   Lau Lapides: Mm-hmm. And you just said it earlier, you know, don't just ask, ask. You got to give too. So don't just ask for space and what you need. Be willing to work a little harder. Be willing to work   Anne Ganguzza: Mmm.   Lau Lapides: extra.   Anne Ganguzza: Yeah.   Lau Lapides: One suggestion I'd like to make too that seems kind of like, oh, but isn't that like a 1952 thing? No, it's not. I'm not suggesting to separate all of your finances in your life. That's how   Anne Ganguzza: Mm.   Lau Lapides: whatever you're gonna do with your spouse, with your partner is what you're gonna do. But I'm just talking about our career, your career, your space as a talent, have separate finances. And that way, not only can   Anne Ganguzza: Mm-hmm.   Lau Lapides: you track for your tax purposes and your studio expenses, and it keeps it really clean for your bookkeeper and your accountants at the   Anne Ganguzza: Yep,   Lau Lapides: end of   Anne Ganguzza: absolutely.   Lau Lapides: the year, but it also keeps this anonymity or privacy about not having to ask permission of the other all the time   Anne Ganguzza: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.   Lau Lapides: to get what you need or what you want for your career. Like   Anne Ganguzza: Yeah.   Lau Lapides: that should be your choice and your independent choice and if it comes down to money, well maybe you do need to get another   Anne Ganguzza: Sure.   Lau Lapides: side job or another   Anne Ganguzza: Yeah.   Lau Lapides: hustle or   Anne Ganguzza: Yeah.   Lau Lapides: another whatever so that you can have that privacy ready to go when you need it rather than depending on allowances   Anne Ganguzza: Yeah.   Lau Lapides: from others.   Anne Ganguzza: And I love that you said that. And I think honestly, if you want to talk about the single biggest thing that I think that is lacking from the clients who don't get the support from their significant other spouse, it is the financial aspect of it. And so yeah, and I always look before there was even voiceover.   Lau Lapides: Hmm?   Anne Ganguzza: I don't know what it was, but personally when I got married, I always had my own account. I had my account, you know, I was on my own before I met my husband. We met each other late in life. And so I, you know, I had my own account. I owned a house and that kind of thing. And what I love about that is it made me financially independent.   Lau Lapides: Mm-hmm.   Anne Ganguzza: And I was able to, when my husband and I got married, I just said, well, I'm keeping my account and you keep your account and we'll just have a joint account that we both will   Lau Lapides: Yeah,   Anne Ganguzza: put   Lau Lapides: yeah,   Anne Ganguzza: in.   Lau Lapides: yeah.   Anne Ganguzza: But nothing has to go into the main account unless we decide to put it in. We both kept separate accounts. And I was able to keep track. And first of all, it makes it super easy when you are creating a business, right, to keep your   Lau Lapides: Yes.   Anne Ganguzza: business finances separate.   Lau Lapides: Yeah.   Anne Ganguzza: And that's kind of cool because any of you that might have trouble explaining, Why do you need a separate account? Well, it's a business, right? So therefore   Lau Lapides: Mm-hmm.   Anne Ganguzza: you have a separate account. You can do whatever you need to do to put money in that account so that you can make investments, take the money out of that account for coaching, demos, studio space, whatever it is that you need to grow your business. And I think that that has really been something that for me, I mean... They say that a lot of couples argue, and money is the number one thing that they might argue about. I can't say that I've ever argued about money   Lau Lapides: Mm-hmm.   Anne Ganguzza: since having an independent account. And   Lau Lapides: Mm-hmm.   Anne Ganguzza: having the respect that I have one, my spouse has one, and we also have a joint account that we throw money in, if we want to take a vacation, or we want to landscape the backyard, or whatever it might be,   Lau Lapides: Mm-hmm.   Anne Ganguzza: we... put into that account, but there's   Lau Lapides: That's   Anne Ganguzza: no expectations.   Lau Lapides: right.   Anne Ganguzza: And I think   Lau Lapides: That's   Anne Ganguzza: that's   Lau Lapides: right.   Anne Ganguzza: such a great suggestion law for anybody that might be experiencing difficulties or lack of support from a significant other, is just go and open that business account, right? Because you need one anyways, in order to incorporate or run that business efficiently and effectively.   Lau Lapides: Mm-hmm. And then this was a running joke between one of my colleagues and myself at my studio. It was like, well, I literally, law, literally could not find any space in my house for my studio. I   Anne Ganguzza: Mm-hmm.   Lau Lapides: couldn't, it either had a technical issue or my kids were there or the   Anne Ganguzza: Mm-hmm.   Lau Lapides: TV was on or the dogs were there. I said, great. Now you need to get a she shed.   Anne Ganguzza: Yes, absolutely, as   Lau Lapides: Or   Anne Ganguzza: she   Lau Lapides: a   Anne Ganguzza: said.   Lau Lapides: he shed   Anne Ganguzza: Yeah.   Lau Lapides: or a they   Anne Ganguzza: Uh,   Lau Lapides: shed. I   Anne Ganguzza: yep.   Lau Lapides: don't care what pronoun   Anne Ganguzza: Yep.   Lau Lapides: you use, but you need   Anne Ganguzza: Yep.   Lau Lapides: a shed.   Anne Ganguzza: You need a pronoun shed.   Lau Lapides: Yes, you need a pronoun shed that is an independent structure that stands on its own separate from your dwelling   Anne Ganguzza: Mm-hmm.   Lau Lapides: Because I am a person of no excuses. I just don't think there's an excuse for not being able to work I think   Anne Ganguzza: Yeah,   Lau Lapides: like if you   Anne Ganguzza: yeah.   Lau Lapides: have a problem fix it like   Anne Ganguzza: Yeah.   Lau Lapides: make it into this well, but it's expensive Well, it's an investment. It's   Anne Ganguzza: Yeah,   Lau Lapides: a write-off.   Anne Ganguzza: right.   Lau Lapides: It's not a cost, it's a write-off. And it's your private space.   Anne Ganguzza: Mm-hmm,   Lau Lapides: You can decorate   Anne Ganguzza: absolutely.   Lau Lapides: it. You can put up whatever you need to put up. You can scream. You can do   Anne Ganguzza: Mm-hmm.   Lau Lapides: yourself tapes. You can do your MP3s. And it's freedom for you. And I think that if you can't find anything in your apartment or anything anywhere, they say, wait a second, I don't own the land law. I'm in an apartment. What do I do there? Well,   Anne Ganguzza: Mm-hmm.   Lau Lapides: think about that. Where can you go? that you can either build something   Anne Ganguzza: Mm-hmm.   Lau Lapides: or you can rent something by the hour. Now   Anne Ganguzza: Yeah.   Lau Lapides: people are dying to get you into their podcast spaces and their audio spaces to rent by the hour because so many people are at home that   Anne Ganguzza: that   Lau Lapides: they   Anne Ganguzza: they   Lau Lapides: can't even   Anne Ganguzza: can't   Lau Lapides: rent.   Anne Ganguzza: even rent.   Lau Lapides: You can   Anne Ganguzza: Yeah.   Lau Lapides: go to places like workspaces and staples   Anne Ganguzza: Mm-hmm.   Lau Lapides: and   Anne Ganguzza: Mm-hmm.   Lau Lapides: all sorts of places really cheaply. and rent by the hour. I mean, is   Anne Ganguzza: Is   Lau Lapides: it a fix forever? No, but   Anne Ganguzza: it a fix forever?   Lau Lapides: it's   Anne Ganguzza: No. Yeah.   Lau Lapides: in the interim,   Anne Ganguzza: Mm-hmm.   Lau Lapides: it's good   Anne Ganguzza: Mm-hmm.   Lau Lapides: now until you figure out your next move. Like   Anne Ganguzza: Absolutely.   Lau Lapides: there's always an answer to   Anne Ganguzza: Yeah.   Lau Lapides: that.   Anne Ganguzza: Yeah, there's always a solution. I truly believe there is always a solution, if you want it bad enough, right? I mean,   Lau Lapides: Hehe,   Anne Ganguzza: gosh,   Lau Lapides: yeah.   Anne Ganguzza: we travel and we record in hotels. So   Lau Lapides: Yeah.   Anne Ganguzza: pillow forts. I mean, there is a solution, pillow forts. Uh. and the right mic and the right interface will get you, you know, a place, your car.   Lau Lapides: Mm-hmm.   Anne Ganguzza: If you can go to the car, that can be a studio. So I think where there's a will, there's a way. And I will say that, you know, having that, definitely having that independent financial account that allows you to, you know. draw upon that for investment into your she shed, into your renting of a studio, or your rig that allows you to go to the car to record and do your auditions. Whatever that might be, I think that there is a solution for it. And in the interim, I think it just, the tenacity and just keeping through it, making sure that you have support somewhere. that can keep you lifted up, going towards, heading towards your goal. I think that's just very, very important. There's a lot of wonderful supportive communities here. At VOBoss here, we're here to support you. Accountability groups are amazing.   Lau Lapides: Mm-hmm.   Anne Ganguzza: Community groups are amazing. Lots of great Facebook groups out there. I've got my VOP's group and Law, you've got your group   Lau Lapides: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.   Anne Ganguzza: as well. And, you know... And Bev Stani has the water cooler group, which is just kind of fun if you want to get together with other voice of artists. I know there's so many wonderful accountability groups that can really help in that situation. And yeah, I mean, I   Lau Lapides: I   Anne Ganguzza: think   Lau Lapides: think   Anne Ganguzza: there's...   Lau Lapides: too, Ann, along with that, like hand in hand, depending on what your belief system is, sometimes you need spiritual groups as well.   Anne Ganguzza: Mmm, mm-hmm.   Lau Lapides: Sometimes you need people that are going to lift your spirit, whether you're religious or not   Anne Ganguzza: Mm-hmm.   Lau Lapides: religious, whether you wanna talk mystical or not, but you find the right match for yourself that helps you build the courage up, that if you are   Anne Ganguzza: Mm-hmm.   Lau Lapides: alone and on your own and you're   Anne Ganguzza: Sure.   Lau Lapides: isolated and you're not accepted in the family, your friends circle, that there are groups out there that are going to help lift you up as a person, not   Anne Ganguzza: Yeah.   Lau Lapides: just as a talent, but as a human being in the world to give you courage. And one more tip I got for you too is, and we will all want to do this, we have to be really guarded about it, like don't overshare. Be careful.   Anne Ganguzza: Mmm.   Lau Lapides: Don't overshare with people   Anne Ganguzza: Yeah.   Lau Lapides: that you know are going to tear you down.   Anne Ganguzza: Yeah.   Lau Lapides: They're going to put up the walls as to why you can't, shouldn't.   Anne Ganguzza: Yeah.   Lau Lapides: not supposed to do things,   Anne Ganguzza: Mm-hmm.   Lau Lapides: don't share too much with those people. Let the sharing go to the people who are like-minded, people who are going   Anne Ganguzza: Sure.   Lau Lapides: to raise your spirit,   Anne Ganguzza: Absolutely.   Lau Lapides: raise your vibration, and get you excited about it versus   Anne Ganguzza: Mm.   Lau Lapides: the people who are going to give you every reason in the book why not to do it.   Anne Ganguzza: Yeah, yeah, exactly, and why you can't and why you won't succeed. Absolutely.   Lau Lapides: Yeah. Yeah.   Anne Ganguzza: So, yeah, absolutely. What's the wonderful advice law?   Lau Lapides: So exciting, right? Like where there's a will, there's a way, but it's really true, there   Anne Ganguzza: Yeah.   Lau Lapides: is. There's   Anne Ganguzza: Yeah.   Lau Lapides: always a way to do things that you love to and want to and deserve to do. And just having the knowledge of like, write down your mantras, write down   Anne Ganguzza: Mm-hmm.   Lau Lapides: your affirmations every morning, stick them on your fridge or wherever you stick them and say, I deserve this. I need this. I want this. I matter. And just believe it.   Anne Ganguzza: Absolutely.   Lau Lapides: And then you'll get it if you believe it.   Anne Ganguzza: And guys, I'm going to say, like, this just transcends even just voiceover industry. This is for anything that you want to do,   Lau Lapides: Yeah.   Anne Ganguzza: right? As entrepreneurs, as bosses, I mean, whether it's voiceover or something else that is aligned with voiceover or acting or whatever it may be, I truly believe that you can... you can get the support where there's a will, there's a way. And I love that you brought up the spiritual aspect of it too, because it is so personal, right? It does affect us being an entrepreneur, and not just a voiceover actor, not just an actor, but being an entrepreneur and running your own business and having a dream and pursuing that dream. It is something so personal to us that, you know, it- It transcends just voiceover groups or voiceover, you know, accountability groups or Facebook groups. It really, you just need to have the people that can help lift you up no matter where.   Lau Lapides: Yeah.   Anne Ganguzza: No matter where you get that. And, you know, spiritually is amazing, is an amazing source   Lau Lapides: Mm-hmm.   Anne Ganguzza: of being able to have a group of people that can lift you up and support you when you need.   Lau Lapides: Yeah, and give yourself that little bit of extra self-care   Anne Ganguzza: Mm-hmm.   Lau Lapides: that you may need, that you may   Anne Ganguzza: Mm-hmm.   Lau Lapides: be missing in your life, whether it's a massage treatment or   Anne Ganguzza: Mm-hmm.   Lau Lapides: an extra whatever, so that you've got that extra bit of health, of mindset, of balance that you need to get stronger and find the right people to get on your side. And you'll absolutely do it. People have come from really, really challenging backgrounds   Anne Ganguzza: Oh yeah.   Lau Lapides: with nothing and have become everything.   Anne Ganguzza: Mm-hmm.   Lau Lapides: So it really is mind over matter for sure.   Anne Ganguzza: Yeah, yeah. What a great discussion, Law.   Lau Lapides: Beautiful.   Anne Ganguzza: Yeah,   Lau Lapides: I loved   Anne Ganguzza: we have   Lau Lapides: it.   Anne Ganguzza: the faith in you, bosses. We definitely,   Lau Lapides: We do.   Anne Ganguzza: we have faith in you. And again, VOBoss, we're here for you guys. And, you know, go out there and believe in yourself. Find people that will help support and lift you up. And yeah, I love it. I love it. And   Lau Lapides: You can do it.   Anne Ganguzza: guys, as individuals, it may seem difficult to make a huge impact, but as a group, We can certainly contribute to the growth of our communities in ways that we never thought possible. Visit 100VoicesWhoCare.org to learn how. Also a big shout out to our sponsor, IPDTL. You too can network and connect like bosses using amazing technology. Find out more at IPDTL.com. You guys have a great week and we'll see you next week. Bye.   Lau Lapides: See you next week.

Please visit breakerwhiskey.com for more information or to send a message to Whiskey's radio. Breaker Whiskey is an Atypical Artists production created by Lauren Shippen. If you'd like to support the show, please visit patreon.com/breakerwhiskey. ------ [TRANSCRIPT] It's occurring to me now that you may not even be actively transmitting. This could be some kind of emergency alert system that's been going out for years, sent from a station manned by no one.  [click, static] If that station is here in Kentucky, I don't have a clue where. I drove forty miles in each direction and the clarity of the code didn't change in any way that made any kind of sense. It would get clearer or it'd disappear into static without any rhyme or reason. I don't know, maybe it's the hills, messing things up.  [click, static] Or…maybe… [click, static] Maybe this is all…skip. Picking up signals from far away. It has something to do with solar flares, I think. I don't know, my dad used to talk about back in the day. He always got so excited when he picked someone up from, say, Alabama or something. Somewhere really different. He mostly drove the northern east-west route—the route I set off on more than a week ago—so anything from the south felt exotic.  I don't know if I mentioned that. That my dad was a truck driver. He loved his CB. I wish I'd kept it. But I already had the car he'd fixed up for me, and needed to sell the truck and didn't know how to get the CB out of the truck, so…yeah.  I wish I'd paid more attention to him when he talked about how to use it too.  Anyway. If you are a real person, somewhere, anywhere, and you're listening, now you know a little more about me.  I wish I knew something about you. Anything. I was never the most social growing up. I don't know if its because I was a tomboy or because I was so used to it being just me and my dad, but I had a hard time fitting in with new groups. Other girls thought I was weird and the boys didn't know what to think of me, so I mostly kept to myself. That's the reason I fell in love with tinkering with things, I guess. Or part of it anyway.  And even as an adult, it's not like I had a bustling social calendar. But I was always surrounded by interesting people. Always meeting new folks. And then when I got into a rhythm with work, I ended up being on crews with the same people over and over and they…sort of become your friends.  [click, static] Though that's not how I would've characterized Harry back then. I'm not sure I would call her a friend now. I'm not sure there's a word for two people who are relying on each other to survive but who hate each other's guts. A…symbiotic relationship of sorts, I suppose.  All this to say, it's been a very long time since I've met someone new. And despite never seeking out reams and reams of friends, I didn't realize just how hard it would be to never meet anyone new. I don't think people are supposed to only talk to one other person their whole lives. And that's what it was starting to look like—that we'd be talking to each other and only each other for the rest of our lives.  [click, static] Maybe there's people out there who have some kind of romantic notion that one person is all you need if that person is the one. Obviously, my situation does not apply, but I really think even in a romantic, soulmate style scenario, those two people would drive each other crazy.  I'm guessing, if you exist, you're equally in need of some variety. So, please, tell me where you are if you can. And I'll…try and figure out what the hell you're saying so that if you do tell me through morse code, I'll actually be able to understand it.  Whiskey out.  [click, static]

In this episode, Anne & Lau delve into the energizing power of generosity + how integrating it into your personal and professional life can be incredibly rewarding. They explore various ways to incorporate acts of kindness into your daily routine, emphasizing that giving doesn't always have to be monetary – it could be a service, a skill, or even just a few minutes of your time each day. They also discuss the importance of giving without seeking recognition, and how simple gestures can strengthen connections and relationships. Listen in as they share their own experiences, provide insights on how businesses can contribute to organizations like 100 Voices Who Care, and inspire you to unleash the transformative impact of giving in your life and the lives of those around you.   Transcript   It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere 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. Anne: 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 ah, the one and only Lau Lapides.  Lau: Hey, Anne. Happy Saturday.  Anne: Happy Saturday, Lau. How you feeling this Saturday?  Lau: Awesome. As always. Excited to be here with you.  Anne: Me too. Me too. And you know why? I was gonna tell you before I asked you -- Lau: I have a feeling. Anne: -- do you know why?  Lau: I know what's coming up. I think you're gonna talk about giving today, giving, giving. Anne: I am. I wanna talk about giving. Yes. And I've mentioned this before, purpose beyond profit for your businesses. So, I mean, it's awesome to be BOSSes, right? It's awesome to be a business superpower and to be a BOSS. And I think a big part of being a BOSS is also understanding the power and the power and the grace of giving back. And I think that there are a lot of people who, if they had the opportunity, would really get a lot out of giving back.  I mean, anybody who's given to a charitable organization knows how good that can feel. And I truly believe that today people want to align themselves with businesses who are about more than just profit. You know? That they stand for something, they believe in something, they do good, they give back. I just think it's a good thing to do in your business. And I know it's hard if we're just starting out, trying to get our careers going. And I know there's a lot of people who are like, well, I don't know if I have the money to be able to donate at this time, but I'm going to ask you guys to think about your purpose. Think about the positive outcomes that can come from giving back. Lau, what are your thoughts about? Lau: I am so into that, and I have to say, this isn't an elitist sort of thought process of, oh, I've made it to this amount of money. I'm grossing in my business, then I can give, or this or that. It really is not contingent upon how much you're taking in or how much you're making. Really, I think the truth is, as a business owner and as a human being, a citizen of the earth, I like to say, you should always take a very small percentage of anything that you're bringing in and give it away to the charity of your choice. And I always say to people who haven't done it yet, who don't know what it is, and it's a little scary to do that, just start really small.  Like if you're going through a coffee line, like let's say you're going through the drive-through, pay it forward once a month and just pay for the car behind you, and see what that feels like. What does that do for you for that day? For me, it's very energizing, very inspiring, and very anonymous, which I also like too. It's really coming from the heart, not for recognition. Anne: I actually love that you said that. And there's a couple of different ways when you're giving, and I love the anonymous because I feel like when you're anonymously donating, you're really giving for the reasons coming from your heart. Now, of course, there are a lot of businesses who support different charities or support different organizations, and it becomes a public part of who they are as a business. And I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with that, especially if it's to the point of they're able to contribute, and it's not a thing where it's front and center, where it becomes like, this is who we are and this is what we're doing for so and so. But it becomes just a side part of what they do on a daily basis.  And I love that you said start small because it doesn't have to be big. As a matter of fact, Lau, our sponsor 100 Voices Who Care has a really cool idea on how you can give and really make an impact. And basically it's a community effort where you can donate $100 a quarter. So that means $100 a quarter, four times a year, $400 total for the year. And essentially, if you can get 100 people together in that organization, they'll be 100 people, that can be a total of $10,000 a year -- Lau: Ooh, that's a lot  Anne: — that can be given away. And so actually that's a large amount. So for you, making your $100 contribution four times a year, and then doing that just minimally, together with however many members that are contributing, can actually make a real difference. And then essentially these members get together, and they do their pitch for their favorite charity, and they say, well, I really like to give to this charity because I feel strongly about how they're helping animals, or they're helping needy people in other countries, or they're -- whatever they might be doing. And you'll be within this group making your pitch. And at the end, everybody votes on what charity that will ultimately win that money. And then what's so great about it is that, even if it doesn't go to the charity of your choice, it's going to a charity.  Lau: Exactly. It's giving back to the world, to the people, the animals, the children, the environment, whatever your causes are, it's going in all of those directions. So in essence, you are personally involved with the giving to all of those different worlds. And to me, I'm about to actually join that organization, 100 Voices Who Care, and I'm very excited about that. Because I'll tell you, I'll be perfectly honest, I've been trying to find organizations to work with, and it's so hard to give money. It sounds ridiculous. But it's hard to get people to call you back. It's hard to find point people. It's hard to find anyone who has information about the organization. And I was very relieved to see this particular outfit at our conference recently that we attended. And I was like, wow, this answered all of my prayers as a business and also as a human being. Like, you're gonna take care of a lot of this for me, but I also have a voice and I can pitch an organization that I'm interested in giving a voice to.  Anne: It's wonderful. Lau: That's exciting.  Anne: And who's leading the organization, who was there at the conference, if you guys were there and didn't get a chance to stop by and see her, is Claire Dinsdale, who is a voice actor herself, and who is fronting that organization to help be able to give to charities. And it's just wonderful because it's something where I wanna feel like I can make a big impact, but I don't necessarily have a lot of money to give. But together we can really make a huge impact. And I think one of the things I thought long ago was the fact that if I was able to have an organization, let's say like my VO Peeps and my VO BOSSes, that now that I've formed this organization, there is this segment of it that I do want to be able to give back if I'm able to give back.  And so it's one of the reasons I formed the VO Peeps Scholarship Fund and have been giving scholarships away for, gosh, close to 11 years. And again, it really is a matter of the community because I accept donations from the community as well as in-kind gifts. So it doesn't always have to be money either. It can be your time, it can be coaching time, it can be equipment, it can be all sorts of different things that you can donate that can really mean something to a person's career. And so that became a very integral part of the VO Peeps business model. And so I really encourage all of you BOSSes out there that if it is possible to either join an organization and get that feeling of being able to contribute to that organization, to give back, I truly believe it makes the world go round. Right? I mean… Lau: It's huge.  Anne: Even if you're giving anonymously, I think it's just, everything comes back. I believe in good karma. I truly believe that it helps in the growth and positive reinforcement of the world and our humanness to each other.  Lau: Hmm. So true. I mean, the karma of that, if you believe in karma, if you believe in that boomerang energy that what you put out into the world will come back to you — I mean, we wouldn't do it for that reason. But I do deeply believe in that. I absolutely believe in that. And I did wanna just give a super quicky anecdote, Anne, about a moment in time that's running through my head right now, where my daughter — and I hope she's not listening because she likes to be anonymous in everything she does — my daughter, about a year ago or two years ago, young kid, she was a young kid, teenager, she saw that one of the customers that came into a store she was working at desperately needed a walker and did not have the funds to get a walker, and was really, really struggling. And on her birthday, I -- this kind of blew me away — on her birthday, on my daughter's birthday, she decided to take the money that we gave her on her birthday and buy her a walker, which was a very expensive walker in the store.  Anne: Yeah. Wow.    Lau: And give it to her. And her and my son delivered it to their door. And I said, that's amazing. Are you sure you wanna do that? They didn't have any money saved, and that was good money for her to do something with. She said, yeah, I can't think of anything I really want or need, but this woman Sarah, needs to walk. And I would feel better giving it to her. Anne, she did that. Long story short, I was amazed. I'm trying not, not to get verklempt about it.    Anne: What a wonderful story.  Lau: I drive up the street now, Anne, and I see this woman, she lives in the area, crossing the street with the walker. And every time I see her, I just quietly, she doesn't know me, she doesn't know I'm the the mother.      Anne: Yeah. Yeah.      Lau: I think my daughter gave her that.    Anne: Yeah. Yeah.      Lau: And it's not about the walker, it's about freedom. And so I always think it's not about the money. If you give a dollar, if you give a million dollars, it's kind of the same, because symbolically what it's really giving to a person, confidence --     Anne: Sure.      Lau: — energy, freedom, all sorts of things that you have to think of it in that way. Don't whittle it down to just monetary. It could be service you do, right?      Anne: Absolutely.     Lau: It could be absolutely something you own that's precious to you that you give to someone else. It could be anything. Right?     Anne: Yeah. I love that story. That's such a beautiful story.      Lau: Amazing story, right?      Anne: Yeah.      Lau: It's amazing. And that taught me a lesson.      Anne: Yeah. And there's so much to be said for when you see someone in need, just being able to help them out, what it can do for you internally, mentally. And I think that of course, as we, again, we say over and over and over again, as we run our businesses, I mean, we are all human, and our businesses are very personal. It's a very personal and proud of our brand. So whatever we do outside of our job, right, outside of our business, affects our business in a lot of ways indirectly. And so I think being able to feel good about what you're doing and feeling good — and again, we're always talking about in our business, let's charge what we're worth. And I still believe in that. But I also believe that if you can help another talent out, or if you can help someone else out around you, then that is just going to contribute to the overall good of your business and of you personally.      Lau: And I do think some of the best times to give, Anne, are not in dire times. I think we always connote that, oh, if someone's starving or they're in war, whatever, of course they need help in assistance. And of course we should assist them. But it's not the only time. Maybe there's a zoo or an animal farm that needs maintenance, constant daily maintenance to feed the animals, clean the animals, keep them, whatever. Or maybe there's the trees in the forest that need-- you know, we are big in terms of Israeli trees being planted every year.      Anne: Sure.    Lau: And we give money to plant new trees every year. so that we can grow that new forest. So thinking about what am I doing to maintain, what am I doing to provide a future for populations or for the environment? It's not absolutely only in dire, dire circumstances. Sometimes it's in good circumstances in order to keep it maintained and keep it healthy.    Anne: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that really it is, it's something that I would say, if you haven't already put it into your business plan or into your daily life, really take some time to consider what can I do? What can I do to help give back? And again, as Lau mentions, it doesn't have to be monetary. I mean, it could be your time, it could be some other service that you can provide. If you don't have the money to donate, it could be your service. And that could mean just as much, if not even more. I mean, be a tutor for a child that might need help reading or there's just so many, so many things that we can do.    I have to say, take a part of your workday. I wouldn't feel bad. You know what I mean? If we're busy and we're like, okay, we're focused on our work -- I think you should set aside a part of your workday to consider what am I gonna do to help give back? Maybe even it's something as simple as contributing to, I'm gonna say a Facebook forum in a positive way where you might be helping other talent. Gosh, I know, Lau, this has been going back and forth about people who ask questions in the forums. And some people get really angry about having to answer the same question multiple times. They're trying to pick my brain. And yes, I get that whole thing. But I do believe that as a good service towards people coming into the industry, you can give a little bit and give some helpful advice without sacrificing, giving away the farm. I mean, gosh, the VO BOSS podcast over and over I've said, it was something that I wanted to do to give back to the community, to just have a resource that people could go to.    Lau: Exactly. Right.    Anne: And so, a lot of my stuff that I do, I have that whole series on teachable moments that I put on YouTube. 'cause I love teaching, I love sharing. And yes, I will be the first person to say that. Yes. Some people, when they come to me for coaching, they say, well, I saw you on your videos, or I listened to your VO BOSS podcast. Gosh, Lau. I'm sure people talk to you about that too. I am so grateful for the people that come to me that say, I listen to your podcast religiously, or thank you for what you're doing. And yes, I wanna work together. So that's the bonus.    Lau: I'm blown away. Bonus, bonus, bonus.    Anne: That's just a bonus. Yeah. It wasn't the original intent. And I think that that is obvious too. Right?    Lau: I'm blown away by that. Yeah. We get comments all the time about this wonderful podcast and it's like, woo! I feel like superheroes, we're spending our time together on a Saturday and doing our thing. But then when you hear and you see how it lands, how it affects people, how it has the potential to change someone's life — well, in essence, I mean, that's giving too. You're not giving physical money, but you're giving time. Time is energy. Time is value. Time is money. Right?    And I do wanna mention too, another thing I tend to do, which is hard, I'm not gonna say it's easy. I take as many surveys as I can. And that's the thing that everyone hates and doesn't wanna do. And they get the survey from every hotel and every whatever. And I literally sit there and I think, okay, I have to do this for them. I have to do this. And then if it goes too many windows, too many pages, I can lose my patience. But if it can be done in five minutes, I will do it for them. Because I say, I know they need that feedback, and I'm the person to give it to them in a really constructive way. And that's giving of yourself too.    Anne: And you know what? That's so funny cause you just reminded me because of VO Atlanta -- I'm just gonna say VO Atlanta is one example where the staff, I'm going to say the staff just ran their tushes off and bent over backwards trying to help me. And Lau, if you remember, you were a part of that one night when I was starving to death. And so the staff really went above and beyond. And I said to them, give me the email address of your manager. I will write an email saying how wonderful you were for me tonight. Please, I want to do that for you. And I'm --   Lau: I love that. I love that.   Anne: — very much willing to do that because it helps. It does.    Lau: It totally helps. You don't see it. You don't hear it, but you have to believe it's there. It's like if the tree's falling, do you hear it? Is it happening? Yes, it's happening. Yes, it makes impact. And yes, you don't always need the accolades, you just need the knowledge of knowing it's happening. And I noticed you neglected to mention that I had to threaten the whole staff at that Marriott to get you like some turkey sticks or whatever we got you. And that was my charity for that night.    Anne: Yeah, you had to threaten everybody. But the person that came through, the person that came through for me, they bent over backwards.    Lau: They did. They sure did.    Anne: To help me. Yeah. They really did.    Lau: They did.    Anne: To get me that turkey sandwich.    Lau: They went beyond, they went beyond customer service, beyond hotel service. That happened to me one time up in the Berkshires and it was a hotel, I think it was a Marriott. It was great. It was super great. And I needed baby powder one night. You know, maybe they thought I had a baby, which I didn't, but I needed baby powder. And my husband goes to the front desk and it's like 11 at night. Do you happen to have any baby powder? And the woman who has babies, young children who works at the desks said, we don't sell it here, but hold on, let me run to my car. She runs to her car and gets it from her baby in the car. This is a hotel rep.    Anne: Yeah.    Lau: And gives it to my husband and said, here, give it to your wife. I know sometimes when you need certain things, it's just good to have them. And I never forgot that.    Anne: Yeah.    Lau: I never forgot. That was so above and beyond to me.    Anne: Yeah.    Lau: Was so personal, so personalized --   Anne: Right.    Lau: — to do something like that, you know, whether it's shoe polish or a toothbrush, or baby powder, whatever it is, it's the humanness of the connection and relationships we have together. Was that an extreme need for me? No, I could've lived without it. But the humanity of the honest connection between people is what builds the good juju in the world. Not always, here, let me give you physical cash. Let me help you and do something to make your life easier and it'll connect us for a moment. To me, that's worth everything. I love that. I love those moments.    Anne: And it makes me think of our clients, right?    Lau: Yeah.    Anne: Sometimes can we extend a little bit to our clients once in a while? Do you know what I mean? Like if they need a favor or you know, gosh, they need a pickup like yesterday and is it three words, and they're ready and willing and able to pay, and you're like, you know what? No, it's okay. Like you're just building that good relationship. As a matter of fact, I'm the type of person, oh gosh, I don't even charge. I mean, unless they have completely new scripts, I don't charge. I embed in my price, I embed a certain amount of pickups to it. And if it's a company that I've worked with for a while and I've got a good relationship with them, I'm happy to extend a freebie here and there in a pinch for them, absolutely. Because honestly, the time it would take me to draw up the invoice and charge them and worry about all that, just, it  wasn't even worth the time. So I do think that also in your businesses, you can extend goodwill towards your clients as well and not be threatened that you're not charging what you're worth.    Lau: We used to call that in the olden days, don't nickel and dime people.    Anne: Yes.    Lau: And that means not just getting the pennies from someone, but also the bother, the energy, the exhaustion, the stress.    Anne: Yes. That's what it is.    Lau: Everything that surrounds that transaction. And you have to know intuitively, is it worth it quickly to do that or not? Is it better to just say, hey, let's not worry about that right now. Let's worry about the bigger picture right now of things, versus --   Anne: Let me get you your job on time. Yeah.     Lau: That's a huge gift.   Anne: Let me give this job to you on time. And I think -- yeah, absolutely. And I think that it's something that you can consider every once in a while. Especially if you've developed a great relationship with a client. Now, clients that nickel and dime you, well that's a different story.    Lau: That's a different story.    Anne: Yeah. That's a different story. So I think we have to make wise decisions, but I think for the most part, if you know your client, you're gonna know what the right decision is. You're gonna know if they're nickel and diming you, but I truly believe that a little goodwill can really, really go a long way. And that's personally in your business all the way around. And so, yeah. I like how you associate it with the stress that's wrapped around the request or the stress that's wrapped around the transaction. And I think alleviating as much stress as possible, I'll tell you that's my goal lately, Lau (laughs).    Lau: And that's a great goal to have.   Anne: I don't want stress. I don't want stress in my business.    Lau: No, no one does.    Anne: And I think stress or pain or -- I don't want any of that. I just want joy. I want joy surrounding my job. And sometimes that's tough to do, but I'll tell you what, it's so much easier when you are a BOSS yourself and you're in control of it, because you realize that you have control of those things. You have control over your goodwill towards your clients, your goodwill towards humankind, how you feel on a daily basis and how that translates into your performance, and how it translates into your business. It is absolutely up to you. And it's one of the things that I'm so grateful. I just love the fact that I'm working for myself. And I mentioned this to you just recently, Lau, that I don't wanna go through the stress of if I'm working for someone, why did I work so hard to build my own business? If I wanna experience stress like that? I don't. So anything that causes stress like that, basically I've gotta figure out what I can do to wipe that stress away.    Lau: That's right. And to circle that back with that idea of giving -- and by the way, we have a great term. Most people know that I'm Jewish. We have a great Yiddish term called mitzvah. When you do  a mitzvah, when a boy or girl turns 13, we have a bar or bat mitzvah. it means they are now an adult, and they really need to start thinking about giving, give, give, give, give back. Don't take, take, take, take, give, give, give, give. And that's the whole purpose of a bar or bat mitzvah. So the mitzvah of the giving is to de-stress, to relax, rejuvenate. Give someone the joy, the pleasure, the peace of mind that what they're doing is a life worth living, is goals worth having, and that you're there in their community to support them. I mean, I'd love to see that in the world at large. We'd have a better world if everyone could think in the way in which you are thinking. And as like, to de-stress someone is to give them a huge gift, whether it's a smile. It could be an emoji. It could even be like --   Anne: A compliment.    Lau: A compliment. Like pay attention to someone else for a moment and call attention to something that they're doing really well or something that impresses you or something that delights you. 'Cause a lot of times someone might be thinking it and not articulate it.    Anne: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.    Lau: So kind of motivate yourself to articulate those positives. And when you feel the negatives coming on, and you wanna criticize, and you wanna judge, just stop for a second. Like stop and think and say, do I really need to give that out to this person? Is it really necessary? Yep. Or would it be better to build them up? That's a mitzvah.    Anne: Do I need to put that out? Do I need to put that? I love that. Do I need to put that out into the world?    Lau: That's better than money. Honestly. Sometimes that's better than money to say, I recognize you, you matter. You're someone and you're doing something really awesome today. Thanks for doing that. Ooh. Oh my gosh. No one ever, no one tells me that. You need to tell people that.    Anne: And I say, bring that into the booth. We'll just keep going. Lau, every time you mention something that's great. Now I'm like, (laughs). Okay, so, so can we bring that feeling into the booth? And I'm always talking to my students and I've found, I say it more and more is that copy, you need to serve the copy. You need to serve the person you're speaking to. Your delivery needs to come from the heart. It needs to come from a place of service. It's not about how good you sound doing it. It's a place of service. You're helping someone.    And I think if you can take any script that you're doing, commercial, corporate, medical, whatever that is, and you have that place of service, that place of heart where what you are saying is going to benefit and help someone in the end, I really believe that that can be a major impact on your performance. And a good one, a good one at that. Because I believe that the connection that is formed when it comes from that place, right, that place in you really makes a difference in the read. It makes difference on the people listening to it as well.   Lau: I just know personally for myself, when I'm able to give something whatever form it's in, I feel so good. Like right now, I just got a little hot in my like skin and I thought, ooh, am I having a hot flash? No, it's, I'm thinking with about all the ways in which we give, and I'm literally sweating right now because it's so fun to me, it's so exciting because it's not just about giving, it's about seeing how it ripples into the world and into their universe and ultimately your universe too is like seeing the water. Like when you throw the stone, it's the ripple effect of giving.    Anne: Absolutely.    Lau: I love that. That's so cool. To me, it's like a little artistic venture. You don't know where it's gonna go and how it's gonna land, but you just know you threw the rock out there, and you got the ripples going. And so it kind of got me all hot and bothered. (laughs) Fun stuff.    Anne: What a great conversation. What a wonderful — so yeah. BOSSes, one more time, we're gonna talk about the 100voiceswhocare.org. Big impact. Simple mission, big impact, 100 Voices, one hour, $10,000 four times a year. So if you wanna find out more about how this all works, make sure you visit 100voiceswhocare.org and find out more. And tell Claire we said hello and we love her, and we love her as a sponsor of this show. So make sure you check out 100voiceswhocare.org. And of course, as always our sponsor ipDTL, we love them. Find out more at ipdtl.com. So everybody, have an amazing week and we'll see you next week, mwah. Love you, BOSSes.   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.com 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. 

What you'll learn in this episode: Why Charon cares more about quality of content than whether something is defined as art, jewelry or craft Why social pressures can make it difficult for people, especially men, to wear art jewelry, and how education can change that Why so many people choose to spend money on traditional jewelry, even if they are intrigued by an art jewelry piece Why Charon believes every artist has a uniqueness that can be developed How the relationship between artist and gallery is changing About Charon Kransen Charon Kransen established Charon Kransen Arts in New York City in 1993, in order to promote exciting jewelry from around the world in North America. The work is presented annually at various American art fairs, such as SOFA New York, SOFA Chicago, SOFA Santa Fe and Art Palm Beach and the Int. Art and Design Fair in New York and at select galleries specializing in contemporary crafts and design. As a private dealer, Charon Kransen Arts welcomes individuals, collectors and museums to the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The collection consists of jewelry, hollowware and accessories by both renowned and emerging artists, whose work may be found in museum and private collections around the world. The focus is on the artists' personal vision and on an innovative approach, characterized by the use of a wide spectrum of materials from paper to precious. The educational branch of Charon Kransen Arts includes lectures and seminars throughout the USA, Europe, Australia and South America and the distribution of books and exhibition catalogs on all aspects of jewelry, metal and design Additional Resources: Website: www.charonkransenarts.com Photos Available on TheJeweleryJourney.com Transcript: It takes a certain type of person to appreciate art jewelry, and it's even rarer for someone to wear it unabashedly. Charon Kransen proudly considers himself the latter. As the founder of Charon Kransen Arts, he is a gallerist and educator who hopes that more people embrace and express their differences through jewelry. He joined the Jewelry Journey Podcast to talk about the challenges that galleries are facing today; why people wrongly assume that traditional jewelry is a better investment; and how education can help people find the confidence to wear art jewelry. Read the episode transcript here. Sharon: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Jewelry Journey Podcast. This is the second part of a two-part episode. If you haven't heard part one, please head to The JewelryJourney.com.    My guest today is Charon Kransen, and he's truly a man of the art jewelry world. He studied in several countries and speaks several languages, and he teaches and lectures about art jewelry globally. Welcome back.    I was rereading the transcript from last time, and you had described this market as being somewhat elitist. I was surprised to reread that. I think of it as more of a mass market thing because it's more affordable and you can change it more.    Charon: What I mean by elitist is, in general, you have to have a certain sophistication. You have to have educated yourself. You have to have a certain courage. You have to have a certain emotional intelligence to be able to appreciate this work and look at it not like—what do people say?—“This is different.” That's what I mean by elitist. Most people couldn't care less. In general, they want to wear something really small; you barely see it. I don't mean elitist in a pretentious way, but yes, you have to have a level of sophistication in order to appreciate it, right?   Sharon: Yes, if you want to think of elitism being that. There is only a certain segment of a population that's going to understand it or even stop to think about it for a minute.    Charon: For many years, I've done the art fairs in Florida in Palm Beach, and I was the only contemporary jewelry dealer in that fair. There was a lot of high-end jewelry and estate jewelry, and so many times I heard people walking into my booth saying, “Oh, this is so inspiring. This is so refreshing,” and then I saw them across the aisle buying something high end and very expensive because that is, in the end, where their decision lies. “Oh, this is too much fun. I'd better put my money in something that is made of precious metal,” or whatever. I've seen that happen so many times. That is what gives people the kind of certainty that they're not throwing their money away by buying something very out of the ordinary. This is generalizing, of course, but I've seen that for so many years. That's just the reality of this field.   Sharon: Do you think that it is trending toward the lighter, the more fun, the jewelry that's interchangeable, or that you can afford to have some choices?   Charon: I think it brings up the issue of listening more closely to who you are, what your mood is. If you want to use the word fun, it's how to embrace fun in your life and not try to be somebody who, from the outside, is all together and all blah, blah, whatever. Yeah, it brings a certain lightness and a certain freshness and a certain leaving your comfort zone energy.   Sharon: Has the way you've sold this jewelry, your jewelry, changed over the years? Have you emphasized the lightness of it or the affordability or anything because something changed?   Charon: There are definitely people—and I'm not just talking about since the pandemic, but even before that—who'd say, “Charon, you need to sell more traditional jewelry, more commercial jewelry, more low end,” meaning very low end. I thought about it many times, but that is not something that has my passion. That's just not the kind of work I want to present. In the end, I have to live with me; I have to be surrounded by work that I find inspiring and energetic. You've known me long enough that I have always shown work that, for a large part, is very colorful. The format of certain jewelry might be a bit traditional sometimes, but in terms of color and material and content, this is the kind of work I want to represent. It's pretty obvious.   Sharon: Can something that's made out of a material you've seen before and thought was innovative, and now you see it in a different format, can that be considered innovative, or is it only the first time?   Charon: Essentially what I think makes a work innovative has a lot to do with a certain uniqueness. When I lecture or do seminars, I talk a lot about what it is that makes a piece of jewelry so special and unique. I think that is something that has a lot to do with how you as a maker infuse your uniqueness into this piece. It could be how you infuse it by manipulating a certain material, but in a way only you can do. I really believe deep down that everybody has a uniqueness. It might be totally underdeveloped, but I do believe people have that. That, to me, is what makes a work unique and even innovative. It's a combination.    Maybe the best way to describe it is this. I get packages for artists, several every week, and you open a package and think, “O.K., Charon, in all the years you've seen it all. You're probably a bit jaded.” Then I open it and I jump, like, “Wow! I thought I had seen all of it.” In many ways, my opinion is often the thing that needs to be developed more than anything. You can call it the voice of an artist. That makes me jump, like, “I thought I'd seen it all. Wow!” It's seeing something I've never seen before, and I don't even know how to describe it. It's not about analyzing how it's made, but more of the energy that it expresses. It's interesting that after all these years, I can still have that sensation. It just is what it is.   Sharon: I'm surprised. Is there anything left that would surprise you? That's my thought.    Charon: Absolutely, yeah.   Sharon: Yes?   Charon: The mind is endless. There is no limit to the mind, and people come up with things. That's why I'm still doing what I'm doing. I'm far from retiring.    Sharon: How did you make it through Covid? Did that affect your business?   Charon: It was basically dead the first half-year, and then—you're talking to somebody who in many ways is kind of old-fashioned. I've never done social media. I've developed clientele on a very personal level. But this time, it was just horrendous. I kept thinking, “Well, no art fairs. Galleries are closed. No exhibitions, no nothing. How are these artists going to survive?” I'm part of the system that pays them money so they can live and work. So, I forced myself to start with Instagram, which was a big stretch for me because I don't really like it.    Then I approached a lot of people describing the situation, how it really is for artists. I wasn't that concerned about my own survival, but I thought about all these artists who do not have any income. How can I expect them to be motivated to sit in their studios and make work and say, “O.K., this is difficult and challenging situation. We just have to sit it out”? I felt a lot of their financial pressure, their stress. I approached so many people for help understanding the situation, and of course offering them a bigger discount so I would be able to send checks to artists. Many wonderful, loyal people responded.   I would say it's still kind of problematic because to develop new clients, you have to do the art fairs, but the art fairs are extremely expensive. You end up paying so much for the whole thing. Financially, I really question whether that is still the way to go, especially in jewelry. When you do these fairs and see artwork, sculptures and paintings that sell for $100,000, yeah, O.K. We're talking jewelry here. What is the price range? You have to sell a shitload of work in order to break even. So, I'm rethinking that whole art fair model. Everybody also says the market has changed big time. The 90s and the early 2000s, they were golden years. It's amazing what people would spend. That has changed big time. I hear it from other colleagues also, not even in our field, but in other fields, too.    Sharon: There have been a lot of changes, yes. I can see that in what people buy and how much they're willing to spend.   Charon: We're talking here about work that is worn on the body. When you just look at images, you miss the three dimensionality. You can't imagine it, really. You miss the tactile aspect, the sound aspect. We're constantly looking at two-dimensional images, and not everybody is able to translate that. I'm trained as an artist so I can do that, but most people can't. It's different than looking at an object. How is this going to be on my body? That is a big issue. If you look at commercial jewelry that's sold over the internet, it's simple; it's accessible; it's understandable; you can totally figure it out, but this kind of work is a completely different story.   Sharon: That's true.   Charon: That is where we are. We're looking at images. I send things on approval because I want people to see them and try them on. With this kind of jewelry, I think it's very difficult to sell on the internet. I really do.   Sharon: I think you're right. When I think of the images I see when I'm scrolling through Instagram, most of them are things you don't have to imagine. You know how it's going to look.   Charon: Right.   Sharon: In your mind, do you have some art fairs you think you'll still go to that are reasonably priced?   Charon: None of them are reasonably priced. I had several meetings with the director of SOFA Chicago. SOFA Chicago is not happening again this year, and they're rethinking the whole idea. We've been talking about a much smaller fair with exquisite objects. When I think of SOFA Chicago as it was at Navy Pier—   Sharon: SOFA being Sculpture, Objects, Functional Art and Design?   Charon: Yeah, it's huge. People go there to be entertained without any intention of buying anything. I think there is definitely a market for people who are interested in exquisite objects in glass, in wood, in ceramic jewelry and textiles that would attract them. I might be talking to them about developing something in that different format. I think that would totally work. Right now, I'm focusing on New York Jewelry Week. I'm going to do something I've wanted to do for a long time but never did, and I'm very excited about it.   Sharon: I hope to be there. I think that's the place if you want to experiment.   Charon: I've now had two years to focus on the Far East with five or six countries, Korea, Japan, China, Taiwan, Thailand—what am I missing? That was great because this is the aesthetic we mostly don't see.   Sharon: We don't.   Charon: It was great, but it was a lot of work for us. I showed the work of like 45 artists. Anyway, I have a theme in mind, and I think it could be great.   Sharon: I'll keep my eyes open. I'll wait for round three until after New York Jewelry Week, and I'll ask you what you've done next year post-Covid. I think everybody is changing the way they operate with Covid.   Charon: Quite frankly, I think we're all in survival mode and reinventing ourselves, and we're understanding also that somehow it has to make sense. Many years ago, I heard this term which was new to me, “I need to spend money in order to make it.” But the past three years have been horrendous, and not just for me but for so many people, I think. But I'm still here; I'm still getting excited about it.    I am involved in something that unfortunately I cannot quite talk about. Well, I can say this much: I was invited to be a judge of a major international competition. It's interesting to go through all these submissions and see where we are as a field. This is not just jewelry. There are so many artists. I remember in one of your questions you sent me, you wrote something about education, like “Who needs to be educated most?” I might get a lot of reaction to this, but I think artists need to be educated mostly.   Sharon: On what will sell?   Charon: No, most artists are incredible. They're talented in what they make, but once the work leaves the studio, there's a whole world out there that is foreign to them. I think especially during the pandemic, artists started to sell themselves individually, whether they had a relationship with a gallery or not. It is a problem. It's an issue, but what do you do as an artist when you're desperate financially and you can barely survive? It brings up a lot of new issues. I won't bore you with examples, but there are lots of examples where I feel like, “Well, maybe galleries are obsolete. Maybe the relationship between artist and gallery is changing because everybody has been going through a very difficult time.” It's going to be interesting to see how that continues, but it does bring up a lot of issues and a lot of problems.   Sharon: When that's developed more, that's something I'd like to talk with you about. It sounds very interesting. Thank you for being with us today. I look forward to the next time.    Charon: When we meet.   Sharon: It was great. Thank you for being here.   Charon: Thank you for the invitation, and like I said, to be continued. Thank you for having me.   Sharon: We will have photos posted on the website. Please head to TheJewelryJourney.com to check them out.   Thank you again for listening. Please leave us a rating and review so we can help others start their own jewelry journey.

What you'll learn in this episode: Why Charon cares more about quality of content than whether something is defined as art, jewelry or craft Why social pressures can make it difficult for people, especially men, to wear art jewelry, and how education can change that Why so many people choose to spend money on traditional jewelry, even if they are intrigued by an art jewelry piece Why Charon believes every artist has a uniqueness that can be developed How the relationship between artist and gallery is changing About Charon Kransen Charon Kransen established Charon Kransen Arts in New York City in 1993, in order to promote exciting jewelry from around the world in North America. The work is presented annually at various American art fairs, such as SOFA New York, SOFA Chicago, SOFA Santa Fe and Art Palm Beach and the Int. Art and Design Fair in New York and at select galleries specializing in contemporary crafts and design. As a private dealer, Charon Kransen Arts welcomes individuals, collectors and museums to the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The collection consists of jewelry, hollowware and accessories by both renowned and emerging artists, whose work may be found in museum and private collections around the world. The focus is on the artists' personal vision and on an innovative approach, characterized by the use of a wide spectrum of materials from paper to precious. The educational branch of Charon Kransen Arts includes lectures and seminars throughout the USA, Europe, Australia and South America and the distribution of books and exhibition catalogs on all aspects of jewelry, metal and design Additional Resources: Website: www.charonkransenarts.com Photos Available on TheJeweleryJourney.com Transcript: It takes a certain type of person to appreciate art jewelry, and it's even rarer for someone to wear it unabashedly. Charon Kransen proudly considers himself the latter. As the founder of Charon Kransen Arts, he is a gallerist and educator who hopes that more people embrace and express their differences through jewelry. He joined the Jewelry Journey Podcast to talk about the challenges that galleries are facing today; why people wrongly assume that traditional jewelry is a better investment; and how education can help people find the confidence to wear art jewelry. Read the episode transcript here. Sharon: Hello, everyone. Welcome to The Jewelry Journey Podcast. This is the first part of a two-part episode. Please make sure you subscribe so you can hear part two as soon as it's released later this week. My guest today is Charon Kransen. Even if you think you don't know him, you've probably already bumped into him. He was familiar to me years before I met him. I asked a lot of people, “Do you know Charon?” and they would show me what they had bought from him. He's truly a man of the art jewelry world. He studied in several countries and speaks several languages, and he teaches and lectures about art jewelry globally. There are few book fairs where he is not present with his books and jewelry. He talks to those making art jewelry everywhere. If you're on his mailing list, he keeps well-apprised of the new things coming out. He was one of the first guests we had on the podcast. We called that episode “Having the Confidence to Create and Wear Contemporary Jewelry.” I read that title and thought, “That says a lot.” I'm looking forward to hearing about the ups and downs of the intervening years. I know some of them have been very, very hard and some of them have been O.K. Charon, thank you for coming back for round two of the podcast. Charon: Glad to be here. Sharon: First, is there a difference between art jewelry and contemporary jewelry in your mind? Charon: I've always tried to avoid the term art jewelry. It's a very strange term. When you talk about contemporary jewelry, the definitions that people understand are so varied. People call modern jewelry contemporary jewelry or studio jewelry. As a matter of fact, I'm not really interested in what to call it. It feels like a very contrived term. Two weeks ago or so, I was invited to the preview and award ceremony of the Loewe Craft Competition, which showed the work of 30 finalists. Three of the artists I represent were included in that show. Anyway, the big winner was Eriko Inazaki from Japan. She was Japanese, totally overwhelmed when that was announced, and with the help of a translator, she had to improvise and say something. You can Google the winner. It is just an incredible piece. It's a porcelain object. But the way she talked about it was, “I don't really care how you call it, whether it's art or whether it's craft,” and I totally related to it. For many years, when people asked me those kinds of questions, like, “What is it, craft or art?” I don't think that way. All I can say is all these people have graduated from an art academy somewhere in the world. They're trained as artists, and the best way to describe how art jewelry is different from commercial jewelry, estate jewelry, fashion jewelry, you name it, is these are artists who have chosen the medium of jewelry to express what any artist wants to express in his or her medium. So, when I think about the word “art jewelry,” it is about something. It is content based. There is a story to it. I'm not talking about a literal story, but it has something to do with—I'm using my own invented words or description when I talk about art jewelry. There is something about the quality of content and learning to see that. In the 54 years I've been in this field, I've obviously seen a lot of jewelry. There is room for every option in the jewelry field, but the more I see—and there's a lot that I see—I'm just not interested. What I'm more and more interested in is, “I don't know what I'm looking at, but there is a quality of content.” It's mysterious. It's not literal, and it brings up a lot of questions. It's not about elegance, necessarily; it's not about beauty; it's maybe about a different definition of beauty, but it's very content based. You know what I'm saying? You walk past things that are beautifully made, but what is it about, and what do I get to receive from the artist's mind? Sharon: Would you say that is what attracts you to art jewelry? You're saying, “What do I see? What do I understand from the piece? I don't know what the piece is.” Charon: I would say that is what touches me. Of course, one can be touched in many different ways. When you go to the Hermitage in St. Petersburg and go to the treasure room, you see the most incredible jewelry and objects made with craftsmanship that is just amazing. I can appreciate it for that reason, but does it touch me personally? No, not really. At this point of life, all that matters to me is that I want to be engaged with it; I want it to bring up questions. That's where I am right now. Sharon: That's interesting. As you were talking, I thought that while contemporary jewelry is fashion, it's commercial, it's not the kind of thing that would attract you, I would guess. I think all of that is pretty or I might want it, but I do have questions. What does it mean, what did the artist want to say, that sort of thing. Charon: Right. What does it do to me? What does it trigger in me, and which part of whoever I am does it resonate with? I want that connection. Sharon: Do you think that's how you grow the field? By educating people, the makers and the buyers, that there is a connection? Charon: After I graduated in 1975 in Germany, I went back to Holland. This was a time where things were just starting to happen in terms of a different kind of jewelry we didn't have a name for. I'm talking about the environment. There were no galleries; there were no museums that collected jewelry; there were hardly any publications. There was nothing, really. So, you can then say, “Well, if we want to make a living at some point, we need to educate the public. We can't just put it out and say, ‘O.K., you people have to understand it and appreciate it and put money towards it.' No, this is all about education.” I'm probably more of an educator than anything else because the things I do constantly require education, because we're talking about work that is more or less foreign to most people. Most people want and wear what already exists, right? Sharon: Right. Charon: That is their comfort level; that's their comfort zone. Who am I to say that's wrong? No, it's not wrong. But in order to find the connection to this different kind of work, let's call it, it requires education and, I would almost say, emotional and psychological education. Am I going to wear something so people will look at me like, “Where are you from? What planet are you from?” because they have no reference whatsoever? Am I able to withstand that? Am I able to ignore that and say, “Hey, this is what I want to wear”? It involves a lot of things that certainly have an emotional and psychological component. Do I have enough courage? Do I need to be seen? No, I don't need to be seen, but this expresses something in a nonverbal way about who I am, and thank God there is this. Do you know what I mean? Sharon: Yes. Charon: It's essential. It still is in many ways because we're a relatively small field compared to the global, bigger jewelry fields. That's just the reality of this separate option in the bigger jewelry field. It's complicated. It's challenging. I've always known that. This is not going to be a big market. If you compare it with the market for estate jewelry, for high-end jewelry, for commercial jewelry, it's tiny. Sharon: Why did you choose it? The things I've seen you wear are different. Is it because they are expressing who you are? I've mainly seen you wear brooches at fairs and things. Charon: It expresses who I am. It expresses my mood, and that can change from one day to the other, obviously. It can feel like protection. That's how I wear jewelry. Of course, sitting here, I'm not wearing jewelry. I'm not always wearing jewelry by any means, but yes, it does speak a language I use because I want the world to know this part of me. Sharon: Do people come up to you—women especially—and say, “Gee, I wish my husband had the courage to wear a brooch or something besides cufflinks. Do you think my husband could do that?” Charon: That's an interesting question. It's not just women who talk about their husbands. It's also women who say, “You can wear it because—” fill in the blank. “You're tall. You have a long neck. You have the right personality,” etc. It's always something in comparison. When I hear something like this, I always think this is just a way to say, “I'm not really interested.” Fine, but to always put it on the other, like, “You can do it. You can wear it. You can get away with it. You, you, you, not me.” Well, why not me? Why not? And that, of course, brings up a lot of questions. I don't have issues wearing jewelry; I don't care what people say, but we live in a pretty traditional society. I have certain couple clients where the husband has slowly ventured out to wearing small lapel pins, and he's becoming a little more courageous under the constant education of the wife. But let's face it: most men do not wear it. They're afraid of color. They won't wear anything that draws attention, because God forbid what that would do. That would open up a discussion that a lot of people just don't want to have. Sharon: What do you think the difference is? Karen Rotenberg from Gallery Loupe talks about how women come in and say, “Oh, I could never wear that,” and then they leave wearing something that's contemporary or really out there or something they thought they couldn't wear. Why does that happen? Charon: In the past few months, I've had some rotator cuff problems. I'm going to PT two to three times a week, and there are two physical therapists, both men, and me being me, I comment on the fact that the colors they are wearing are so boring. It's almost as if I'm back in the 50s in Holland, in a Calvinist country where we wouldn't see colors. It was gray, beige, dark blue, black, basically. My apartment is full of color. I wear a lot of color. So, we talk about it sort of jokingly, and it's like, “Oh no, you can't do that. That is not very manly to wear color.” I've been going there now for a few months. Last week—and I kind of tease them also—one of them said, “You know what? I bought four very colored T-shirts.” That is education, but in a light way. I think there are all kinds of traditional attitudes attached to it. God knows what they are. “Men don't wear color.” Well, look in nature. I lived for a year in Lapland. If you see how the men dress in Lapland, their whole chest is full of jewelry. There are so many different cultures where men wear jewelry. Look in nature. So, what have we done to the man? Sharon: That's a good point. Most physical therapists who are male wear dark colors, whereas the women might wear peach scrubs or something like that. Charon: Why is that? Is it that you're afraid to show who you are? What is that all about? Sharon: That's a good question. People think that's male. Charon: Right. Adornment belongs to women, or whatever is in your mind. I think all these people miss out on a lot of pleasure, a lot of leaving your comfort zone. Yeah, it might be a little scary, but in the end, it's great, especially when you hear comments from people. A lot of it is fear-based, I think. What will other people think? Sharon: You must get a lot of comments on a piece of jewelry, a brooch or something. It opens the door. Charon: It does. At the opening of the Loewe preview, I wore a big brooch and saw people looking. There were very few people who actually commented on it. I think it was just too awkward for most people. Can you believe it in the New York crowd? I think it brings up a certain confusion. They see a man wearing something very colorful, a brooch or whatever. Maybe that's the confusion. They don't know how to approach it. They don't know how to respond to it, instead of saying, “Wow, that looks great. I don't know what I'm looking at, but it looks great, and it has great energy.” You know what I mean? Sharon: Yes. Like you said in the title of the last time you were on, you have to have confidence to create it and to wear this kind of jewelry. You have to be confident in yourself. There must be a piece of yourself that's confident about it. Charon: It doesn't just apply to jewelry. It applies to anything in life. How do you want to be in life? Who do you want to be? How do you want to dress? How do you want to develop friendships? It's anything. There's a lot of talk about how we can develop younger collectors. I'm generalizing of course, but the problem with younger collectors is that they haven't really grown into their own. There are a lot of things that will guide them towards Cartier or Tiffany because that's recognizable, and that tells the viewer, “I belong to a certain status; I wear Tiffany or I drive a Mercedes.” I think it comes with age that at a certain point, you look back and say, “Now, who's going to determine what I do, what I say, what I wear, what I eat? Is there somebody like me who says, ‘It makes me feel a certain way, and that is why I'm doing it this way. That's why I'm wearing it'?” There are so many phases in life where you're preoccupied with all these questions. You look at adolescents and teenagers, and thank God I'm not in that phase anymore, because it's so much about blending in and being like the group. You're talking to somebody who has, in many ways, always has been an outsider, so maybe you need to embrace that in yourself, whatever way you are different than other people. Sharon: That's interesting. I've never heard anybody talk about the issues of having collectors be younger or nurturing them. I've never heard anybody explain it that way, in that you have to grow into it in a sense. Charon: Right, it's being different or an outsider. Maybe this is way too philosophical, but I think we spend a lot of time coming to terms with that and viewing it as, “What's wrong with me?” versus saying, “I embrace the difference in me. I embrace it. I don't judge it. It's not a negative thing. On the contrary, it's inspiring, and this is how I want to live.” I think time and experience help you get to that point, and then you can start living your life and wear whatever you want. In Western Europe, we call it Calvinism. In Scandinavia, you call it Janteloven, but it all comes down to, “Don't think you're anybody special. Try to blend in as much as possible. Don't draw attention to yourself.” Well, if you want to live that way, be my guest. Sharon: That's not my image of New York, blending in, but I suppose. We will have photos posted on the website. Please head to The JewelryJourney.com to check them out.

  Are past mistakes holding you back from achieving voice over success? Join Anne & Lau on this episode of VO BOSS, where they discuss how to turn missteps into valuable learning experiences. From investing in a voiceover demo to navigating social media mishaps, discover the importance of apologies, accountability, and self-compassion in personal and professional relationships. Learn how admitting to our mistakes can elevate connections with others and avoid the pitfalls of impulsive responses on social media. Tune in to embrace growth, mindfulness, and self-compassion on the journey towards success. Bosses, don't let past mistakes hold you back.   Transcript    It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere 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.   Anne: Hey, hey everyone. (audio blip) VO BOSS podcast and the BOSS Superpower series. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzza, and I'm here with my BOSS co-host, Lau Lapiedes. Hey, Lau.    Lau: Hey everyone.    Anne: Yay!    Lau: So good to see you, An Happy Saturday.    Anne: Yes, Lau, happy S-- (audio blip) Lau, guess what happened to me this week?    Lau: What happened, Anne?   Anne: Lau, I made a mistake.    Lau: Oh no. You never make mistakes.    Anne: Well, no Lau, actually, I make mistakes all the time. (laughs)    Lau: Don't believe her --   Anne: (audio blip) Do. And you know what? Of course, nobody wants to make mistakes, but I'm glad I made this mistake because I learned a whole lot, Lau about how I can maybe not make that mistake again, or take (audio blip) when I was making the mistake and make it better and improve it. And I get students that come to me, new students that come to me quite a bit, that say, gosh, I wish I knew then what I know now. And I would never have done that.    I'd like to address that because let's take one example. One example is students that come to me and say, I never should have made that demo. And I had somebody listen to it and they said, no, no, you were not ready to make that demo. And they just come to me with all (audio blip) shame and remorse, and I get that, but I don't think it's worth anyone beating themselves up over, because honestly, we learn, you know, if we always take a look at what we do in life, and we learn and we made a mistake, (audio blip) so you know, so much better (laughs). And you can then progress and move forward.    And so I want all of those students who ever, ever came to me or ever came to Lau and said, oh God, I wish I hadn't have done that. I spent all this money and it was just a waste of my time. And (audio blip) don't beat yourself up over it. Because honestly, I think that there is such a value of information, just such a value in it. And consider it, like we were talking before, Lau, consider it an investment in the real grand scheme of things. (audio blip) been a few thousand dollars. But if I were to sit back and look at where have I spent a few thousand dollars in my lifetime, house, car, those kinds of things, I mean, honestly, consider an investment. Lau, what are your thoughts?    Lau: I couldn't agree (audio blip). I would even argue is there such a thing as a mistake? Because when you really think about that, we give a name and label to something that happens from us, to us, with us that is superbly uncomfortable and then (audio blip) toward us in our perception, it punishes us. But was that thing an actual mistake?    Anne: Sure.    Lau: I don't know how to answer that because I do feel there's lessons to be learned in the process of the, I'll give it air quotes, the mistake (audio blip) more painful than others, but really, really necessary as we journey through life. Like if we didn't do that, we wouldn't know what rewards really are.    Anne: Right.    Lau: We wouldn't know how to really build our business. We wouldn't really know that. Right? So comparatively speaking, (audio blip) and oftentimes as you know, when you make those mistakes, they're fantastic. Like you're hired for them, you're celebrated for them. It's like, whoops, I did that in my business. How could I have thought that? Oh my, wow. People love that. They want that. Right? (audio blip) I would venture to say, take a step back and really say what is a mistake and what are the mistakes in the mistake that make it a mistake? That's really important. But getting back to your investment on demo, I'm with you all the way. I do not (audio blip) corner and cry over a demo.    Anne: Yeah.    Lau: Process, process, process. Your first demo, your first demos --    Anne: Yes. We all started somewhere.    Lau: They're never gonna be super, super high level pro because guess what? You don't have the experience yet. You're moving towards getting that experience. (audio blip) Like if you went to college or grad school or trade school or you were an apprentice, you are working on working. So the working to get the working is never a waste of time. It's always, what are you putting into it? What are you getting out of it? How has that (audio blip) work for you? Rather than saying, oh, everything's got to be about that one demo. It just isn't. It's like a work in progress. Your whole life, your whole business is a work in progress.    Anne: Right? And it's very much like you don't know what you don't know. And so you cannot (audio blip) blame yourself for something that you didn't know. Now, maybe if you're just starting out and you're lucky and you're listening to our podcast, the BOSS podcast, you'll hear this discussion and you'll say, oh, okay, so maybe I'll wait a little bit before I make that demo. (audio blip) truly believe that sometimes when you make an expensive mistake, it's a mistake that you are not apt to repeat ever again or quickly. That is for sure.    I know sometimes, like I used to pay money to a personal trainer, right? Because it was the only way I knew (audio blip) go and work out right and do the things that I really needed to do to move forward and to progress forward and to really improve myself. So in a way I was like, yes, I'm gonna pay to kind of get a little beaten up. So, it's okay. It's okay. And I just don't (audio blip) into this to, to ever feel regret about anything because there's always those lessons as you mentioned that you learned. Maybe you learned about a process that did not work for you. Right?    And so now you'll move forward and you will (audio blip) to work with longer so that you can improve upon your performance before you go ahead and record another demo. And again, like I said, when it comes to demos on our performances, we're always improving. We're like those continuous students, like the never-ending student (audio blip) learning our craft and enhancing and improving it. And so at any point, you're never quite as good as you'll be today. So unless you're gonna make a demo every single day to keep yourself refreshed on that, I would say take it with a grain of salt. Take it as a lesson. And (audio blip) also maybe it was a demo that did not represent the genre very well, or it was maybe a, a demo that didn't have today's standards or current relevant scripts. Or it just might have been something (audioblip) done it and had somebody listen to it and they commented on it. Guess what? That's another learning experience. So.    Lau: And guess what? Doing a demo as one example is like a little work of art. It's a vocal portfolio.    Anne: Yeah.    Lau: So there is artistic vision. There's (audio blip) no matter who you're working with, whoever your team is of engineers and coaches, some care, some don't care. Some are experts, some are not experts, and there's everything in between. It's like working with an expert painter or working with an expert dancer. There's all (audio blip) that go into unlocking your potential, unlocking your talent. Maybe they're great at that, maybe they're not great at it.    Anne: Yeah.    Lau: Maybe they're mediocre. Whatever the case may be, it really is on us you meaning you to put (audio blip) to your process. Because when you walk away, it's your process. It's not really theirs.    Anne: Right.    Lau: They're not gonna claim it anymore. It's your process to say, what did I do? Did I put it in time?    Anne: Sure.    Lau: Did I rehearse? Did I practice? Did I take it serious (audio blip)? Did I do all the due diligence boxes and check that off to bring out the best outcome? Or was I learning how to do that? I wasn't quite there yet. As a lot of people in school, in college, in grad school; sometimes they don't show up. Sometimes they fail tests. Some (audio blip) and they're learning how to discipline themselves, how to commit to a process and who they're identifying as a talent. What is a talent, what is a business person, what is a VO? I mean, they're learning all of that. So you gotta give your (audio blip) to learn.    Anne: Yeah.    Lau: You can't be perfect. You can't know everything. There's gotta be space. And as you said, we're students over a lifetime.    Anne: Yeah.    Lau: We're not just students for a first demo. We're students. And if those of us who own a business, and I know many listeners own a business, you are always learn (audio blip) that one. Just when you think you know as much as you need to know, then the whole script flips on you.    Anne: Yeah. And you know, I don't mean to make light of people's investments, so I don't want any of the BOSSes out there to think that I'm making light of a few (audio blip). But I will say that when you compare that to, you've beaten yourself up over and over and over again. And maybe it even deters you from getting into what it is that you've always wanted to do in your lifetime (audio blip) that's a higher price in a lot of ways. And I think that of course, before you make any investment in anything, not just voiceover, I think that you have to come at it with an educated point of view. You have to educate yourself as much as possible before you make that inve- (audio blip). Just, I think if we all kind of take that lesson, right, with anything, I think it at least helps us, so that we know that we've investigated what other common mistakes in voiceover.    Maybe people buy the wrong equipment, right? Or they (audio blip) doesn't suit their voice. Well, this is why you can return a lot of things. So if you made the smart investment, if you've educated yourself and purchased with a vendor that allows you to return within a certain amount of time, then you have that option. If it does not work (audio blip) that you can then return it to get your money back.    And there's always selling. I mean, I made many mistakes with my equipment, especially my travel equipment. I tell this story over and over again. I bought every new gadget that there was that was tiny and small so that (audio blip) I could have a convenient, tiny little mic. And whenever I would go, I could never get it to sound worth anything. I could not do that. And I spent so much money. But here's the deal. I spent the money, but then I was able to sell the equipment that if you (audio blip) I was then able to sell it or donate it. And so lesson learned.   Lau: Lesson learned. And there are even much more sophisticated mistakes that we think we're making. And that is in human communication. Now, I won't even say the business of it. I'll say the com- (audio blip), that's in the emails you're sending and receiving.    Anne: Oh yes.    Lau: That's in your invoicing, that's in your sales, you're building of rapport when you're live at a conference. All of that stuff has layers of nuance and layers of sophistication to it. (audio blip) if you are present and focused, when you've said something that just doesn't land right on someone. Doesn't mean you're offending them. It doesn't mean it's inappropriate. It just means you're not tracking, you're not on the same track. And how do I fix that? How do I --   Anne: Yeah.    Lau: — turn around and pivot from that. I don't believe it's a mistake, but in your perception, it feels uncomfortable. Like, why did I say that? Or why did I respond in that way? Or how come I didn't get back to them in seven days when they wanted me to get back to them in a day?    Anne: Right.    Lau: You know what I like to do, Anne? Very uncomfortable. And then I learned how to do it. Just fix it right away.    Anne: Yes.    Lau: Just like you're gonna gimme a shot at the doctor's, you're gonna do whatever that's uncom- — just do it. Just do it. Don't hold off and think about it. Right?   Anne: And when you do it, be human about it. Something you said didn't land right. Say, for me, I'm always like, you're human. Right? I'm sorry.   Lau: Yeah.    Anne: Maybe I should have said it this way.    Lau: Yeah. And you know what? When I apologize like that, which I do a lot because I perceive that I did something wrong --   Anne: Yeah.    Lau: Oftentimes the response is, please (audio blip) sorry, Lau. You were busy and rightly so, and I'm not first on the list. And sometimes it brings out the humanity in other people, when you're, you're not lowering yourself. You're actually hiring your vibration by saying, I am a (audio blip) I'm a person that is far from perfect.    Anne: Yes.    Lau: But I'm a person that wants to connect with you authentically. So if you can understand and forgive that perception of something that wasn't done that was comfortable for you, then we can continue on. And nine times outta 10, they're not(audio blip) of it. They love you for it because if you're being real with them. You're not saying, well, I didn't know, I didn't do anything wrong. I'm taking accountability. I'm not a -- no. I want them to feel like I'm like you. I'm not better than you. I'm like you in a lot of ways. And that means (audio blip) oh.   Anne: Right.    Lau: Like what the right thing is right now. Could that be a mistake? I don't know. That's all in the perception, I think, is that a mistake or am I learning from that? Are they learning from that?    Anne Right, right.    Lau: Are we deepening the relationship and communication? I'd like to think we (audio blip) really a mistake. It's more of a mishap.    Anne: Yeah. And if there is a mistake that has been made like that, and you have offered an apology or an explanation, or your attempts to fix it did not fix it, then I think sitting back and then just trying to take a deep breath, and (audio blip) maybe that wasn't meant to be in this particular timeframe, or maybe it just wasn't meant to be. I mean, I've had relationships where I don't know what happened. I've tried to go and be human and apologize and just work (audio blip) just didn't work out.    Lau: And that's okay.    Anne: And that's okay. I mean, that's going to happen. And I think what we need to really focus on is not necessarily the fact that it happened, but how can we move forward? How can we grow? How can we feel okay? I think (audio blip) oh, I either feel bad or I feel ashamed, or I feel stupid for a lot of that type of emotional baggage and beating up, that's where I want to feel better about myself. What do we do then?    Lau: Well, I'm a big fan of express. I think expression is so, so important. It sounds a little silly to say that because our whole field is about expression, but so much of the time, especially as performers, will mask up who we really (audioblip) official thing versus say, let me quickly get in touch with how I'm really feeling, and maybe have a sounding board. So if I have a few safe people that I can talk to about it, that can sound me out quickly. Like, get me in my right mind again, so to speak. (audio blip) move on from it quickly rather than holding onto it and letting it fester. And I find solving it relieves the stress. It relieves the heaviness. Like, why did that go wrong? I was terrible. It was a -- no, let's just fix it and let me talk about it and express it to the right (audio blip) who can offer me sound advice, no pun intended. Sound advice.    Anne: Yeah, yeah. And I think also, when we're talking about perceived mistakes in either face-to-face networking or relationships, but also on social media, did I post something? Oh my gosh, that was (audio blip). I can't erase it. I can't take it back. I, I can't delete it.    Lau: Yep.    Anne: How do I backpedal, or how do I recover from that? I think that the written word, we've all been using it long enough that we have to approach that type of communication with a little bit (audio blip) forethought. Right?    Lau: Yeah.    Anne: A little more thoughtfulness before we type, before we press that enter key, just stop, take a breath. I've had to really learn to do that in the last 10 years, I would say. Because there have been times on social media where I've been triggered (audio blip) to like type something is a fast response and, and I literally have to just get up and walk away. And I find that that is the best cure for me is to get up and walk away. Take a big deep breath. And a lot of people, as you know, have chosen, they, they get off the platform for (audio blip), and I think sometimes that's a very smart thing to do in terms of before you type something that you might not feel good about later on.    Lau: Agreed.   Anne: And there are ways though too, if you have to try to type your way back into good graces, I (audio blip) ways that you can do that. But you have to be careful. And sometimes it's best to just get up and walk away. And then give it a few hours, a few days, whatever, take a breath and then go from there. Really.    Lau: I agree. I think the time that we spend beating ourselves up (audio blip) mistakes is time not well spent. It's really, if you wanna reflect, if you wanna say, I'm gonna journal about this, I'm gonna express this, and work it through, and come to something that's meaningful, something that's useful, and something that is potentially fixable, that's (audio blip) versus sitting there and stewing in, oh, I'm upset, I'm uncomfortable. It was awful. And they don't feel -- and oftentimes, here's the funny thing, you and I spoke about this recently.    Oftentimes that thing, that circumstance is turned around quicker than you think (audio blip) together again. All of a sudden they're asking you about whatever is, if it never happened, and you think, wow, did we have that conflict? Wow. Were they upset about this? Because all of a sudden they're coming to me for something else. So sometimes our perception as creatives is (audio blip) proportion. It's very histrionic, it's dramatic. It's larger than life. And someone on the other end does not perceive it that way oftentimes.    Anne: Sure. Absolutely. Absolutely.    Lau: It's much lighter and less to them. Now if they go over the top, and they're crazy in histri- (audio blip), you're noticing that you're saying, okay, there's a lesson in that this may not be the right client relationship, colleague or friend.    Anne: Sure.    Lau: Because this circumstance does not warrant that response.    Anne: And I think you bring up such a good point, especially when we are dealing with (audio blip) to us in our voiceover bubble, right?    Lau: Yes.    Anne: We have certain things that are very important to us, right? Things that like I need to hear back. When will I get paid? All of those. There's lots of those things. When in fact, a lot of times your client (audio blip) things on their plate. And so if you're not hearing back any feedback, if you're not getting paid within a certain amount of time, there are usually things that are going on that we are very unaware of. And I know that a lot of times, I'll have to even sit back and just (audio blip) -- there are some clients, believe it or not, that you think you didn't get paid and that was a mistake, and you wanna make sure that that is made right. But in reality, they have a 90-day net terms. And so really I think that it's one of those things that if you can (audio blip) and communicative, that will absolutely help anything that might lead to a mistake, or you just saying something that, or accusing that they haven't paid you and it's unjust. I think that that is something that we all need to just sit back, take a break (audio blip) and communicate.    Lau: Thank you for saying that one, Anne. That's brilliant. Don't assume the worst in people.    Anne: Yes.    Lau: Assume the best in people.    Anne: Yeah.    Lau: And even if it is the worst, live in that great river that in Egypt we all love. And that's “de Nile,” a little bit in denial. Willie Wonka land and Wizard of Oz teaches us something. It's like, assume people are good. They're not evil, they're not out to get you. They're busy, they're crazy, they're forgetting, they're this or that. Now what if they are pulling something into (audio blip) what? It's okay. Forgive them, move on. It taught you something. It taught you don't work with them. That's what it taught you.    It taught you to look for signs in others that they taught you what those signs are of danger, of unsafety (audio blip) ever. God forbid, nothing serious happens to your person, if they're cheating you outta money or whatever. It's a bad thing. It's not to lessen or lighten that. And it's a terrible feeling to feel victimized in that way. But move ahead of it and say, okay, that made me feel bad (audio blip) and unethical, but what did I learn in that, that I can then install in my business, in my tactics, in my profession, and teach others so that that doesn't happen as much as possible? It happens once in a while, but we can alleviate it (audio blip) in the signs of it.    Anne: And you know what, Lau, in my over 15 years of working in voiceover, I have never not gotten paid. And so always trusting the good in people. And also, when I vet my clients, I do have a, a certain set of standards that I (audioblip) make sure that there is somebody at the other end that I'm communicating with. And it's not just a person through email that is inquired, how much will this job cost? Or can you do this job by tomorrow? Here it is. I have policies that I have in place where I demand payment upfront (audio blip) clients that are new.    And what's so interesting is when I have that in my terms of services, that I demand full payment upfront, I get it. (laughs)I've gotten paid within the first five minutes of securing a job before I've even recorded it. (audio blip) I've been very fortunate, I would say, but I also have been what I consider to be, well, I've taught myself to be savvy in terms of who my clients are, in making sure that I'm gonna be working with someone that is going to reciprocate. If I provide (audio blip) they will reciprocate and give me payment. And so thankfully and gratefully, I can say that I've not encountered any mistakes because I think I've always been open with my communication, and I think that's an important thing. And had I not been open (audio blip) communication, I would've found out right away things might be different.    Lau: And that's experience. That's time. It's being seasoned, it's experience. And it takes most people, including myself, time to work through that, learn that, (audio blip), see what the best practices are for you. See if you can be a psychologist and really listen to people, watch people, watch for cues. Focus in on it. Don't just get lost in your own head or your own services, your (audio blip). Listen, because oftentimes you can pick up these cues before something bad actually happens.    Anne: Yes.    Lau: And oftentimes the mistake is simply like, I'm just not paying attention.    Anne: Paying attention.    Lau: Yeah. Let me be honest. I could have caught that if I was really in (audio blip) with what they were saying and doing. But what I was doing was, and women are notorious for this, I was lying to myself. I was saying, oh, it'll be okay. Oh, that didn't happen. Oh, they mean this. Oh -- I was interpreting it in a whole way that it (audio blip) way, and then when the boom hit, and I said, wow, that really happened, I look back and I say, well, could I have caught that earlier? Most of the time it's yes. Most of the time it's me sugarcoating the situation. So there's that. There's that in that mis- (audioblip) to happen because I need to learn that lesson. Give people the benefit of the doubt. Be good to them, but also don't sugarcoat things too much and see them for what they are when they reveal themselves to you.    Anne: Exactly. Exactly.    Lau: Right? Oh, fantastic. We're turning into psychologists. (laughs)   Anne: Mistakes are good. Mistakes can be very good. Mistakes are learning experiences. And I think really, BOSSes out there, I think to become even better BOSSes, right, we need to make mistakes. We need to learn and we need to grow and move forward. (audio blip) else do we want for our businesses? Right?   Lau: There it is.    Anne: There it is.   Lau: You wanna learn and grow and thrive. And we have to go through that process in order to do it.   Anne: Good talk, Lau.   Lau: The best, as always.    Anne: Ah, you know, BOSS (audio blip) mission, big impact. 100 voices, one hour, $10,000. What is Anne even talking about? Oh, four times a year. By the way. Visit 100voiceswhocare.org to find out more. All right. Big shout-out to our sponsor, ipDTL. You (audio blip) can connect like BOSSes, like Lau and myself. Find out more at ipdtl.com. You guys, have an amazing week and go ahead and make those mistakes, and we'll see you next week. Bye.   Lau: See you next week. Bye.   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.com 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 is joined by special guest, Ian Russell, a multi-award-winning voice actor. They discuss his career in the voice over industry, including his journey to success. They talk about the importance of social media and authenticity in character creation. He advises aspiring voiceover actors to be careful not to violate non-disclosure agreements and to use social media to support their profiles. Anne and Ian also discuss the importance of respecting specified ethnicities and the limitations of casting notices. They highlight that authenticity and believability are essential in video game casting, and that having an acting background is a serious advantage. Tune in to hear the full conversation.    Transcript   It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere 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.   Anne: All right. Hey everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS podcast. I'm your host Anne Ganguzza, and today I am so excited to bring very special guest Ian Russell to the podcast. Hey Ian. Yay.   Ian: Hey, Anne.   Anne: welcome. For those of you BOSSes out there, we'll tell you a little bit about Ian, and then he's gonna continue on telling us about his journey, he is a, a multi-award winning, seasoned voice actor working in commercial, corporate, video games, audiobooks. His voice can be heard for companies including Coca-Cola, MasterCard, Nestle, Heineken, Club Med, Phillips, and a bunch more. He was the recipient of the One Voice Male Voice of the Year 2020 award. And also in that year, he was also best character performance. Is that correct?   Ian: Animation, yeah.   Anne: And then continuing in 2021, he won Gaming Best Performance for One Voice Awards. And in 2022, the SOVAS Outstanding International Audio Description, Museums and Cultural Sites. Wow. That is fantastic. Ian, so honored to have you here on the show to talk about your journey and your wisdom. So , let's start.   Ian: Well, good luck with that.   Anne: Well, let's start telling people about your journey. How did you get into voiceover, a little bit about yourself and how you got into voiceover.   Ian: It's a long and winding road, which is a Beatles reference, but the first ever voiceover I ever, ever did was for a radio station in Liverpool. And it was a friend of mine worked at the radio station, and they had a pre-recorded interview for Paul McCartney when he bought and set up the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts in Liverpool. It was his old school. And rather than having a boring interview where it was just Paul McCartney and some radio guy , he asked me. I was, we were in a local acting thing together, and he asked me to be the voice of Paul McCartney's teacher.   Anne: Wow.   Ian: When Paul McCartney was a kid. So we linked the questions, you know, and it  was like, oh yes, that McCartney he was always playing around with a guitar. He'll never amount anything. So it was that kind of -- we made it funny. I didn't even know what voiceover was, but I did it anyway. And it was fun. I didn't get paid or anything. I was doing it for a mate, but I still have the magnetic cassette tape, shows how long ago it was.   Anne: Yep. There you go. .   Ian: And then 30 years go by, and I get married, and my wife's stumbling around for what she can buy me. And we, because you know --   Anne: What happened 30 years though? That was a long time.   Ian: Oh, sorry. I, I went off and got a real job. I was, I was working in sales and sales management in the northwest of England and in Belgium and Holland and in and around Oxford.   Anne: So International for sure. Yeah.   Ian: Yeah. That's a whole other story, which we could get into another time. But that would use up our 30 minutes, would be nothing left . So anyway, so my wife's like, oh, well what do I buy him for Christmas this year? And I had done a bit of sort of community theater stuff as a young man, just explained with the Paul McCartney thing. And so she found a one day introduction to voiceover.   Anne: Uh-huh.   Ian: In London. It's a place called the Show Reel. And she bought me that for Christmas 2012. It's 10 years almost to the day.   Anne: Wow. Yeah.   Ian: And then two years later, we've had the credit crunch and the bank -- I was working for a bank at the time and they were trying to offload people, and I had to reapply for my own job multiple times. And in the end I'm like, I volunteer as tribute . Let me go, you know, I'm done here. I'm older than all these young guys. I don't want to be rushing around half of the UK seeing multimillionaires coming home at night, barely seeing my kids, writing reports 'til midnight, and then doing the same rinse and repeat tomorrow. I'll have a heart attack and die. Let me go. And two years later, they eventually let me go. And so my wife's American and we said, well, what are we gonna do now? ? Well, let's sell everything and move to America. Be near my dad, says my wife. So that's what we did.   Anne: I love that. Let's do it.   Ian: And I said, well, what am I, what am I gonna do?   Anne: Let's sell everything and move.   Ian: I'll give that voiceover thing a go. And I went to the guy in London and I said, does anybody get hired for this? And he went, yeah. And I said, would anybody hire me? And he went, I don't see why not. And that was the ringing endorsement that I had to come off and start. So 2014 I started properly, I would say.   Anne: Wow. Wow. And so when you started, what was it that -- I assume you, you got coaching, you got a demo, and then you started working, and so you started working and were successful in which genres?   Ian: I think I'm a product of the internet age. You know, I live in the metaphorical middle of nowhere. And everything I do is via the internet, pretty much. So I started probably the way a lot of people start. I didn't know anybody and I didn't know anything. I had some experience, life experience that helps for sure, the sales and having done a bit of community theater and all that. But I knew no one and I knew nothing. So I started searching on the internet, and I paid money down to online casting and, and started throwing mud at the wall. And I think in that market you do a lot of explainers. You do a lot of corporate. You do a lot of e-learning, e-sort of things that, that sort of thing.   Anne: And of course in the States now, you know, that accent of yours doesn't hurt you. I had a very good friend when I started and she was hired all the time for e-learning. Because I think for us listening, and you gotta have some sort of interesting -- like an American accent is, we hear it all the time. But a British accent might be something that, oh, that makes it more interesting. And so she was high in demand for e-learning and, and those explainers and corporate things. And she was always so wonderfully like natural and conversational about it. And it was just a pleasure to listen to her all the time. And I remember thinking, gosh, I wanna aspire to be that relaxed and that friendly in my voiceovers. And so I can totally see where that just, it lends it. It's also a very large market. And so everybody kind of gets there, and it's a good, good place to start off. And I know a lot of students that I work with, they start off in corporate or e-learning.   Ian: Yeah. There's masses of it. And it's relatively easy to find.   Anne: Exactly.   Ian: You might not get the best rate, but it's relatively easy to find.   Anne: Now, you won these awards, but these awards were not for corporate or e-learning. It was for gaming and character performance. And so let's talk about, 'cause I know when people start out, they're very concerned about you know, what's my niche? Like, where do I start and how do I know what I'm good at? You evolved into becoming an award-winning voice talent in gaming and characters.   Ian: Yeah, I know.   Anne: So let's talk about that.   Ian: How does that happen?   Anne: Yeah. How does that happen?   Ian: I'm gonna say I got lucky, but we all know that that's hard work meets preparation and all of that. But in 2015, so a year after I'd started, I booked a role in a significant video game called Payday 2. And the role is utterly -- it's this South African mercenary. He speaks like that, he's Locke, his name is Locke. And I have been performing Locke for Starbury Studios for seven years now.   Anne: Oh wow.   Ian: And it was the performance of Locke that won me the video game award last year. And we're still making content. And at the end of this year, we have Payday 3 coming up.   Anne: Ooh. Get ready, BOSSes.   Ian: And so there's a lot of chatter around who's gonna be in Payday 3. You know what it's like with a lot of --   Anne: NDAs.   Ian: -- casting for voiceover. It's --   Anne: You can't tell --   Ian: -- NDAs -- Well, well, if I knew something, I'd be able to tell you, but voice over casting often happens right at the end. So nothing, I can't say anything. I don't know anything. So.   Anne: So seven years.   Ian: I'm like a mushroom.   Anne: Wow.   Ian: Yeah. So, so that was my first video game thing. And I think a lot of younger folk, they're growing up now with video games and animation and it's a very aspirational genre for people to get into. And I think I got one, and I'll keep the story very short, but Locke, the character, has his own Twitter account, which now has almost 12,000 followers.   Anne: Do you have input into that account?   Ian: It's mine.   Anne: Okay. Okay.   Ian: It's all mine.   Anne: Now, was that something that maybe was requested of you through an agent or the company or --   Ian: No.   Anne: -- you just created it? That's a very interesting marketing um   Ian: Well, it was suggested to me because I went on a charity stream as Locke for Payday, and the guys that were running it said, you might want to set up a separate account because you don't want your personal account flooded with teenage boys --   Anne: Yeah, that makes sense.   Ian: -- swearing at you. Frankly.   Anne: Yeah, yeah.   Ian: Asking you about Locke, you know, what's your favorite color, that kind of thing. So I set up a separate Twitter account for him then; that was 2017-ish. And that, that's kind of just grown from there. And I don't just use it for Locke. I use it for Locke. But I, all my video game stuff I promote on there because they're all video game players. So they're interested.   Anne: I love that I'm talking to you about this right now because I wanna know, is the content monitored at all by the game company or the people that hire you at all? Or if you were to say something that maybe wouldn't be appropriate for your character, I would imagine that that's kind of a line that you walk.   Ian: For sure, it is. I'm pretty sure there have been several occasions where I've written something, and I've had the wherewithal to go, no, don't do that. Don't say that. That would be silly . The only thing that Starbury said is, because they own the character, they own the IP of the character, that I can't monetize it for myself. I have run charity fundraisers and things like that, but if I'm gonna do anything out of the ordinary, I go through them and say, hey, I'm thinking about about this; what do you think? I don't think they've ever said, no.   Anne: That's something that's so interesting for those BOSSes out there that are thinking about getting into video games or character animation. I mean, there really becomes -- it can have a celebrity attached to it, and that becomes more than just voicing. Right? That is voicing. And then also it becomes a marketing effort. It becomes something that is outside of your voiceover persona that is of concern, I would think, for you to make sure that you're not gonna say the wrong thing or make sure you're not gonna do something that spoils any new things coming out or disturbs any NDAs.   Ian: Yeah. I just basically assume that everything I've ever done is under NDA until it's public.   Anne: That's very wise, very wise.   Ian: I really don't, you know. It's just, it's easier to do that than to go, oh, I've been cast, I can't...   Anne: I think no matter what we do, we should consider that, even doing a lot of corporate work and e-learning, it really all should be considered.   Ian: It is one of the challenges with video games, because whilst we get cast often towards the end of the process, it can be months before the game is actually shipped. And I have got the list, but I've got games coming out this year with my voice in them, and I am burning, burning up with desire to tell people because I am so excited about it. And I just can't. And it's just really, really one of the hard things, you know, that you have to bury that.   Anne: Yeah. Yeah. So you got hired for this one game, it became something --   Ian: Yes. So the thing about the Twitter was, so a little while after that I had auditioned for a role in a Warhammer game called Inquisitor Martyr for one of the -- there were only gonna be three player characters. It was one of the player characters. And I got shortlisted, and they asked me for a second audition and I did that. And then they came back and they said, okay, it's down to two people, so can you do a third audition? I'm like, I almost didn't want to know. You know, me or the other guy. And if I don't get it, I know the other guy got it. And I'm like, I was so close. But , what I did say was, look, you must make the right casting choice for your game. But please know that I have a Twitter account with 10,000 followers who are all game players. And I promote any game I'm in on that Twitter account. So I just want you to know that.   Anne: I like that.   Ian: Don't let that influence your casting decision in any way at all, but know that I've got it.   Anne: Hey, that 27 years in sales, I think it served you well. I think it served you well. That's fantastic. I love that.   Ian: So I booked that. I don't know that, that's why I would like to think it was just because of my awesome acting talent. But it taught me a lesson that you can use these things to help support your profile, particularly in a high profile thing like animation or like games. You see like the anime guys that are doing that; they're always at cons promoting themselves. And you know that the anime companies are loving that. Because that sells more anime. And the video games is the same. So.   Anne: Now would you say that your award also was something you were able to use as a marketing for more characters and more work?   Ian: I'm gonna put it the other way around. I can't draw a direct line to -- I won this award in August last year in video games, and then suddenly I get cast in a lot of games. What I think happens, this is what I think happens, a lot of casters in video games are younger people. I mean, there are older ones as well, but they're very tech savvy. And I think that you --they get their auditions in, and if you get shortlisted, and you may not know you've been shortlisted, but they're gonna create a shortlist, and I think they pop over onto Instagram or onto Twitter --   Anne: Oh yeah, absolutely.   Ian: Right?   Anne: And look at your profiles and --   Ian: They wanna, who's, who is this guy? Is he an umpti or whatever. And they see the awards and they see the interaction with a game community from my case. And they go, oh, he knows what he's doing. He's obviously done it before. You know, and you can say that til you're blue in the face in a pitch proposal, but nobody reads them, I don't think. But when they see it on Instagram or they see it on Twitter, it makes a difference.   Anne: Yeah. It's validation for them.   Ian: Yeah. It's that whole trust.   Anne: Right? That maybe they're picking somebody that has that little bit of trust. Yep. That you've got these experience.   Ian: Well, and you think how many -- as, as the game studios get bigger, how many multimillions of pounds they've got invested in a game. And it has to ship successfully, otherwise the company goes pop.   Anne: Absolutely.   Ian: That narrative story to a two or three talent generally telling the story is a big decision for them. So I do think they check. I have no evidence directly for it, but I absolutely think they check.   Anne: Especially I think as a lead character. Right? I mean, there's more responsibility than just the voicing of it, because like I said, there's a persona attached to it, that can be attached to it, and the potential for that character to be able to sell more game, new releases of games.   Ian: I kind of figure if I can help sell 10 or 20 or 30 copies of the game, I'm getting out someway towards paying my own fee.   Anne: Now -- right? Now, lemme ask you though, in terms of, let's say compensation for games, right? What are your thoughts about that? I mean, do voices for big games get paid better? There's really no royalties, residuals, like that kinda sucks.   Ian: No. It does. Yeah. If I was being paid union royalties for Payday 2, I'd be a wealthier man.   Anne: Yeah.   Ian: It's just the, that's the way it is, Anne. I don't have any control over it. So all I can do is negotiate the best fee I think I can for each individual one. But that's the other thing you've got, if you like AAA games at the top of the feeding frenzy, and they can afford to pay a great deal more. And at the bottom, you've got one guy with a 40-watt light bulb who's making a game, and he wants to get a voice in it, and he just doesn't have the budget. So you have to ask yourself then, is this a game that will further my profile? Do I want my -- you almost, you talk about the celebrity element of it. Do I want my name attached to this game?   Anne: Absolutely. Yeah.   Ian: And there are games I want attached. There are a lot of games out there that the content is marginal, should we say? Not safe for work is the phrase. . And there is no value to me as a talent in attaching my name to a game like that, because it would impact -- if I wanna be in a big AAA adventure game, I think it taints a little bit, my profile. So I, there are games that I will avoid and I will ask. There's one game I'm in and they have a safe for work version and they have a non-safe work version. And I said, uh, nothing to -- if you want this character in both versions, count me out. But they said, no, we can just write you into this one. So, they did that.   Anne: That's great. Look at that. That, you know, and that's interesting that you bring up these things that I never would've thought of, because obviously I'm not doing video games, but I love that you brought that up.   Ian: But you could, Anne.   Anne: Well, I could if I wanted to. I mean, you did it. So what made you, I'm gonna say, what made you audition for that first game? Did somebody suggest it to you? Did they say, oh, we're looking --   Ian: The Payday one? No, it was an open audition. It said South African mercenary.   Anne: And you said, oh, I can do that. Right?   Ian: Yeah, absolutely. I was so naive that I thought I could do everything.   Anne: So you said, I could do that.   Ian: Yeah, I can do that.   Anne: Okay. So I have to tell you my little story.   Ian: They cast me so great.   Anne: That's fantastic. I have to tell you my story. My story was a long time ago, like when I first started, I was on one of the pay-to-plays and they had a audition out, and they said it was for a phone system and it was for a British accent. And I thought, well, I can do that. I was naive , and I got it. And literally I worked for that company for 10 years. And it wasn't until like I actually spoke to somebody on the phone, because we had communicated, got jobs from them all the time onto this. And then it became not a cool thing to do because what accent am I doing? And it started to become that sort of a thing. Well, you're not a native. They didn't know. They said, oh my God, we thought you were native --   Ian: Oh, really?   Anne: -- British. And, and it was because I just, I didn't know any better, and I made the mistake. I didn't read that where it said they wanted native. And I said, oh, I can do that. I'll give it a shot. I'll throw my audition in. And I got it. And they employed me for a good 10 years before it was like, oh, now Anne, we just need your English. You know? Not, not your British. So, but it's so interesting that you kind of on a whim just did it. And I think that really speaks to having the confidence to kind of just put yourself out there, and even for things that you don't think you're good at, because they think when people get into this industry in the beginning, they're so concerned about, oh my God, I think I should do this, and I'm no good at character, or I'm no good at -- and I think that really, you don't really know until you try.   Ian: Well, let me share another quick story for you.   Anne: Sure.   Ian: So I auditioned for another game called Road Redemption, which is a motorcycle game. And you drive along the road and you have an iron stick and you're trying to hit other people off their motorbikes. And I auditioned with a sort of a Ray Wins, yeah. Come over, we all gonna hit you with a steel bat, you know, that sort of thing. And I thought, yeah, that'll work. And they decided that they liked my take on the character. So we got together on Skype . Who remembers Skype? And we are chatting, there's three of them, and there's me here. And they're like, what's your Australian accent like? Alright, where's that, right out of left field.   Anne: Where'd that come from?   Ian: Where'd that come from? And he said, because it's this sort of Mad Max kind of feel to the game. And they said, you know, what's your, and I said, very bad. I said, any Australian will immediately notice. You know, I can put another prawn on a barbie kind of thing. But everybody will, they will know, he's not from Australia anyway. So then we're on Skype and you hear tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. And they've sent me a line on the, in the chat. Read that in your Australian accent, whatever it was. Hey, I'm gonna hit you in me iron bar, mate, you know, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. Read that one in your Australian -- yeah, this shrimp's gonna really get you, you know, anyway. And at the end of it, they said, yeah, okay, we're gonna use you for the game. And I said, okay, do you want the Ray Winston thing or do you want this? Oh, we want the Australian thing. Okay. Well, I, like I said, they went, yeah, but Australia's such a small market for us. We're not worried about that.   Anne: We're not worried that people in Australia are gonna complain . Well, it's true.   Ian: Right. And Locke's the same thing with his South African. And where it led me to in my head was video games, even if they're sort of set in an earth-like environment, are fiction. And I think a lot of game makers now particularly, but certainly back then as well, the acting performance of the character outweighs --   Anne: Is more important.   Ian: -- the absolute accuracy of a given accent.   Anne: Very interesting. Especially now because now it's a casting thing. Are they casting a native UK or a native Australian? And I think that we are all in a spot, like are we going to audition for that? Ian: Well, with that rider of there are accent issues and there are ethnicity issues.   Anne: Yes. Absolutely.   Ian: You know, I absolutely would not put myself forward for a British SWANA or MENA or -- I can't say African American because that's American.   Anne: Yeah, no, I get, I get that.   Ian: British Black, I think.   Anne: I think if they're, if they're specifying -- yes. If they're specifying ethnicity, then I think, yeah, absolutely. It's something that we respect.   Ian: PGM, person of global majority.   Anne: Yep. Absolutely.   Ian: That's, that, that works well for me. So there are things that I just will walk past now that maybe 10 years ago would've been acceptable.   Anne: Sure. Yeah. Things have definitely changed over the past just a few years.   Ian: This could be quite controversial, but I've seen casters ask for a minority ethnicity, and then in the sides it makes reference to, I don't know, America or Great Britain or whatever. And you're like, the ethnicity of of this character does not match the character in the script that you are portraying. And I fear a little bit, what's been the motivation for that?   Anne: You know what, interestingly enough, I know that you say that that's a very inter -- I had that with an e-learning, believe it or not, they had the characters, it was a character based e-learning, and they were all different ethnicities. And mine was a mixed ethnicity, but then they said, don't perform it in any kind of accent. And so I thought, well what is that there for then? You know what I mean? And that was a few years back now. I would kind of hope that if they're specifying ethnicity, that they try really hard to get that so that there can be authentic and genuine. Yeah.   Ian: Yeah. And at the top end, some casting directors at the top of the market will challenge that sort of thing. They'll go back to the studio, they're in a strong enough position to go back to the studio and go, really? Does that work? Are you sure? And they will challenge that if you like the mass market, often the person hiring the voice and directing the voice is a part of the studio itself. So. Johnny at the back, go and get a voice actor, will you, for this character. I think a lot of that is kind of left to the voice actor to work out for themselves. If you have an any kind of an acting background, and you are auditioning for particularly indie video games, you are already streets ahead because the guys in the studios have never hired anyone before. They don't know who to hire really. It's kind of like, we'll know it when we hear it kind of thing. So if you can make a performance, if you can create a character that's believable within the universe of the game, you are already streets ahead.   Anne: It's very interesting that you bring up the casting directors for video games. And you know, it's not necessarily, I think, the talent agents of today that you think of for commercial and broadcast. For video games, you do have to make it authentic and believable. And these people may only be casting for their game, and maybe they've never cast for another game, or they don't have a lot of experience . But that's a great point. And so I think that even more so now, the marketing that you employed, having followers on Twitter, maybe putting your awards on your website so that it's out there and it's known, that definitely has an impact. Because your casting directors may or may not be as experienced as somebody who's casting like 10 commercials a day. Right? That's all they do. That they listen for voices and they cast, whereas games, they're so into their game that they know their characters, and they're listening for just that character to come alive, what they believe the character is like.   Ian: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely. I had a beautiful testimonial from an indie guy, he put on Twitter, it was on Twitter, his casting notice. And he said, the character is 60 and British from the southwest of England, and he's got early signs of dementia. And he said, but there aren't many older British actors. You know, I've always found it a struggle to cast older actors. So when I wrote to him, I said, , I am 60.   Anne: I'm old. .   Ian: So anyway, so I got cast of that surprising, surprise me though. He actually cast me as a second character that he was struggling. I said to him, you said you were struggling to cast this. Have you've got anything else that you're struggling to cast? So he sent me, said, yes, I'm struggling to cast this. And he sent it to me, and I thought, I can have a go at that. So I sent it back and I said, do you mean something like this? So I didn't put it as though I was auditioning. I just said, do you mean something like this? And he went, oh great. Was that you? And I went, yes. He went, okay, yeah, you are hired.   Anne: I love it. I love it.   Ian: I booked two characters. But he said, you might just, it's a real kind of bigging myself up, but you might be, he said, the best actor I've ever auditioned.   Anne: Awesome.   Ian: And I'm like, aww.   Anne: What a wonderful, what a wonderful compliment.   Ian: Oh. That is on my Instagram. If you check -- care to go.   Anne: Yeah. There you go. . So I love that.   Ian: Oh, and I know, what did I wanted to say about, you talked about casting directors. So Bianca Shuttling, who's one of the big casting directors in LA, she goes looking on Instagram. She's very open about that. If she's not got someone in her little pool of people where she goes, she gets -- she doesn't go to agents, she goes to Instagram.   Anne: Wow, there you go.   Ian: That's where she goes.   Anne: There you go. I love that.   Ian: There, you learnt it -- you heard it third or fourth here. .   Anne: So let me say, because I really think that there's that business savvy that you have, which, BOSSes out there, do not discount the value of being business savvy and marketing savvy. Because I think that that's gonna get you opportunities that otherwise you would not already have. But I do wanna address the acting part of it because you don't just get these roles over and over again if you're not a great actor. So what do you attribute your acting prowess? Have you, just because you've been doing it for years, have you been working with coaches or what do you attribute it to?   Ian: I owe it all to my mum.   Anne: Ah, okay. Well, there you go. , I'd like to thank my mom and my .   Ian: Well, yeah. But in this case, my mom was a very prolific community actress herself.   Anne: Got it.   Ian: So my first living memory is a smell, and it's not the smell of the grease pain. It's that kind of musty damp wood smell that you get backstage in an old theater. And I have the image that follows it, but -- and I must have been maybe around two or three years old. There's no words involved in this memory. So I basically grew up --   Anne: In the theater.   Ian: -- in the backstage. Yeah. One of those things. So it was happening all around me all the time. And I did try and become a proper professional actor as a young man, but I couldn't figure out how to earn money doing it . So.   Anne: Same thing when you start off doing voice acting, right? It's kind of hard sometimes. How do I even get money? How do I even get started? Yeah.   Ian: Yeah, yeah. It took me another 27 years of sales and management --   Anne: Well, there's your overnight success. Right? And I love telling that to people. They're like, you're so successful. Like, how did you do it? And people think it's overnight, but I think obviously you've evolved so nicely into your success, and it well, well deserved.   Ian: And now it pays two -- pays me and I hired -- my wife works for me now.   Anne: There you go.   Ian: So that Christmas present 10 years ago has employed both of us now.   Anne: Yeah. So that 10 year overnight success in voiceover, I mean actually, actually it was a little less than that.   Ian: Yeah, that's interesting. Because I got my first nomination, and I was --   Anne: In 2020, right?   Ian: -- 2019, I got nominated. I didn't win anything that year, but I thought I was ahead of the curve at that point. You know, and then it all went a bit quieter after that. But the last two years, so years nine and ten, or if you count it from 2014, years seven and eight, really have my career, iIt just looks entirely different now. And it is for the people out there, the BOSSes out there, you know, if you are three, four, and five years in and you're making your way, keep going. Because it is my view that in another two or three years, if you are booking regularly, suddenly something will click, something will change, and bam, away you go.   Anne: I was just gonna ask you what's your best advice? But I'll tell you what, that was a golden nugget of wisdom right there . I think so many people, they give up so quickly, and they get their demos, and they're like, well, why am I not working? And they get so frustrated and down and yeah.   Ian: Took me three months to get my first booking. I worked for three months for nothing.   Anne: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, Ian, it has been such a wonderful pleasure having you in here.   Ian: Are we done?   Anne: Yeah.   Ian: Already?   Anne: Well, I, I can probably talk to you for another three hours, for sure. But I appreciate you coming and sharing your journey. I think ,BOSSes out there, you can learn a lot from this wonderful gentleman. And thank you so much for being here with us today.   Ian: You're very welcome, Anne. Anytime.   Anne: I'm gonna give a great big shout out to my sponsor, ipDTL. You too can connect and work like a BOSS. Find out more at ipdtl.com. And then also I'd like to talk to you about 100 Voices Who Care. It's your chance to make a difference in the world and give back to the communities that give to you. Find out more at 100voiceswhocare.org to commit. All right, you guys, have an amazing week. Ian, thanks again, and we'll see you next week. Bye-bye.   Ian: Bye-Bye.   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.com 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 and Gillian discuss setting up a home studio space and the necessary equipment for it. A home studio space should have proper sound absorption, emphasizing the need for high-quality audio recording equipment and internet connections for efficiency & consistency in their work. They mention the importance of finding a quiet area with proper sound absorption to minimize noises from in & outside of your home. Anne & Gillian also discuss the importance investing in a good computer, as it is a foundational technology that helps run your voice over business. For more insight and recommendations, tune in!    Transcript    It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere 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.   Anne: Hey guys, welcome to the VO BOSS podcast. I'm your host Anne Ganguzza, and today I am excited to welcome back once again to the show audio engineer, musician, creative freelancer Gillian Pelkonen for another episode for our BOSS Audio series. Hey Gillian, how are ya?    Gillian: I am good. How are you, Anne?    Anne: I'm excellent. So I thought we had a great conversation about picking your home studio space. And I think we should expand upon that a little bit in this episode and maybe get into a little bit about the equipment that we have into the space for our home studios.    Gillian: Yeah, I think totally a necessary point at the conversation because if you didn't listen to last week's episode or whenever it was, the last BOSS audio episode, you gotta go back and catch up because we talked about finding a space in your home for your voice setup. We talked about a little bit about treatment and how to get your space sounding a little bit better, whether you're at the pro level or if you're a beginner. And then we also had the conversation of what's it like to work in a professional studio versus home studio. And now we're gonna dive into getting that home studio, what you need for it and perfecting the sound a little bit.   Anne: What you need and what you don't need necessarily, right?   Gillian: Yeah, definitely.    Anne: Especially because of your experience working in professional studios where I get overwhelmed looking at the equipment there because I'm like, ah, I'm just a voice actor and (laughs).   Gillian: I'm just a voice actor.    Anne: I'm just a voice actor. I'm not an audio engineer, but I do audio engineering. I know what I know, and I know just what I need to know for that. And I'm very happy, Gillian, to give people like you my business when I need something more from my engineering. So just a little bit backtracking on the absorption factor or the sound factor of your studios. We had talked about finding a quiet area in your home, in an area that maybe isn't near a window or open doorways or places that you can't close off from external noises. So there's external noises coming into your booth, and then we've got the noises within your booth possibly, right, that get reflected back into your microphone. So there's external and then there's internal noises that we want to protect against and have some sort of absorption. And one thing I did wanna mention, and this was a misconception that I had, is that, is there a way to 100% soundproof anything (laughs)?    Gillian: Yes. You know, it's so crazy. This is a slight tangent, and I don't know the details so it's gonna be a half story, but there is a room --   Anne: I know where you're going with this.    Gillian: There's this room where they've completely soundproofed it. And supposedly, I mean, I, I just got out --   Anne: You could go crazy in five minutes.   Gillian: You could go crazy in it. And I feel like I'm in a quiet space right now, and my Apple Watch is telling me that there's 73 decibels of sound going on.    Anne: Oh my God. You have that on your -- see, you are absolutely an audio engineer.    Gillian: I love to know.    Anne: I cannot tell you how many decibels right now on my watch, no.    Gillian: I can tell you from my watch because it's important to -- oh my gosh. We could do a whole episode on ear health and keeping your ears because that's very important.   Anne: I agree.    Gillian: Which is why I have it on there 'cause -- I wish Apple would sponsor us, 'cause I just talk about them all day. But there's a ton of ways to check and make sure that your hearing's not being damaged both by --   Anne: Oh, fantastic.    Gillian: — what you're listening to and the environment you're in. That's super interesting and really important to me, near and dear to my heart, because this is my livelihood, like your voice.    Anne: Absolutely.    Gillian: The way you care for your voice, I care for my ears. But there is a place where they completely soundproofed it and supposedly people can't stay in there for more than five minutes.    Anne: Yeah.    Gillian: It's so uncomfortable. It's so quiet --   Anne: Yeah.    Gillian: — you can like hear your blood moving in your body.    Anne: So I'm sorry I have to tell you about this. So a while back, my ear got perforated. I had a head cold, and I went to a doctor who wasn't the best doctor, and they said, well, we can't see in your ear because you have a buildup of wax, so we need to take care of that. And they took a syringe to clear out my ear and I said, well, that typically doesn't work for me because I've really tiny eardrums. And they're like, no, no, no, no. And so they flushed my ear out and proceeded to poke a hole in my eardrum when that happened. And it was really scary, number one, because my equilibrium just got completely thrown.    I had to sit down for like 45 minutes, and I should have, this could be a whole ‘nother episode, I should have probably sued them (laughs) because I told them not to do it.  And so, they punctured my eardrum and I know because I could taste the fluid going down my throat once the syringe went. I know it's gross. Sorry. But anyways, I will tell you about the recovery period. So when you have a hole in your eardrum, your eardrum performs many, many important functions, right? Keeping sound out and also sound in. And so when you have a hole in that (laughs), the sounds that you hear are incredibly different.    So for a good year after that happened, if not longer, I would hear wooshing sounds in my ear because it was literally fluids in my body that I could now hear. And it was like I could hear when I had sinus issues. I could hear when it was an allergy day, and it would get very loud. And this white noise I call — like it wasn't a white noise 'cause I couldn't stand it. It was like whooshing, whooshing in sounds that were constantly, I couldn't go into a room full of a lot of people talking because my brain couldn't process all of the sounds. And it made me very confused and very foggy. It was very upsetting. So for a long time, while my ear was healing, and it still hasn't completely healed, my brain had to get used to the fact that I could hear noises both from inside my body and outside my body. So it does not surprise me that if you had 100% pure quiet in a room — and by the way I think that's like miles like below the earth, that room that you go down into, and they've soundproofed it -- it makes a whole lot of sense that you would go crazy, because I was able to hear all sorts of noises, my heart beating. It was incredible.    Gillian: Uncomfortable.    Anne: It's very uncomfortable. Very unsettling.    Gillian: Yeah.    Anne: So (laughs) in terms of --   Gillian: No, you should not want to get a completely soundproofed room.    Anne: Yes. But, and that's why also they have signs in studios, shh, recording. Because you cannot possibly really 100% soundproof. Like if you're gonna run screaming down the hallway in a studio, I think still you'll be able to hear some of that sound coming through a door. Maybe not, depends on how loud, you know, you still don't wanna make any extraneous noises that you don't have to.    Gillian: Well, it is interesting because a lot of the studios that I work in, there are certain things that will really help.    Anne: Yeah.    Gillian: And I learned in school about the things that you do. You do floating floors, which is like the regular floor and then another one. So that --   Anne: On top of it.    Gillian: And then just basically rooms within rooms, which is what --   Anne: Oh, I was gonna say --   Gillian: — a booth is. Same thing.   Anne: A room in a room. And that's the protective like walls on the outside that protect the sounds from coming in.    Gillian: Well, they also, when they build them, it's like double paned everything. And the doors are really heavy. I mean on important rooms that need like the control room where we blast music doors are, they've gotta be like a hundred pounds of those doors just to, and solid wood to keep everything out. Even the glass, there's like double paned glass and it's slanted, like kind of like we talked, you don't want complete parallel surfaces anywhere, 'cause that just creates for reflections everywhere.    Anne: And what's interesting is that I've not had a window on any of my booths. Now I know a lot of the booths that are pre-fabricated, you can buy with a window, and it and it's cool looking and it's pretty. But when it came time to designing this particular booth, I said, oh I want a window. ‘Cause I never had a window. And Tim Tippetts said to me, do you really want a window (laughs)? He said, did you have a window in your last booth? I'm like, no. And he goes, so the window kind of brings up a whole ‘nother set of things that you have to protect against because it's a different surface. Right? It's not the same as a wall. And so it's a pane of glass so you also have to protect that. So when I was recording he said, really you need a sound panel to put over it when you record to keep all of the noise out. So I just said, you know what, I don't need a window. I really don't.    And my door, by the way, which has always been a really heavy part of my booth -- I have double doors here. So not only do I have double walls, but I have double doors, and that's to help keep noises from the outside from coming in. And now in terms of inside, I also have sound that's traveling inside this booth. My booth is probably built at a very tiny angle. It's not like a huge angle, it's not visible at all. But the walls are not completely perpendicular to one another. And also I have these panels that are the acoustic panels that are on the walls. Again, any of the sound that right now is in my booth will bounce around and get absorbed by these panels.    And I mentioned before that they're slightly offset from the wall. So like by a quarter inch maybe? I'm looking right now. They sit off the wall a quarter inch so that if it hits that wall, it has space to travel back through the back of the panel and then get stopped again before it could travel back into this microphone. And that's typically what you're trying to do is to stop the sound from reflecting and reverberating off the walls and coming back into the microphone as feedback or some sort of echo. So that's a little bit more on the absorption part. But now once we're in the studio, (laughs) and we're recording --   Gillian: Once we're in the studio that you've built and whatever says…   Anne: — there's equipment. And of course we could probably talk about microphones all day. But I, I really think that there's other pieces of equipment that I wanna focus on today, and maybe this will even go into another episode, in regards to what's important for voice actors. I'm gonna start the conversation with your internet connection.    Gillian: Yeah. And we kind of talked about this a little bit last time. Like internet computer, without those two things, you don't have a job. You can't connect with anybody.   Anne: So true.    Gillian: I mean it's different when you're in a recording studio 'cause that's all there for you and you don't think about the fact that they have the computer, they have the recording equipment, especially since as a voice actor just standing in front of the mic, putting on the headphones. Like those are things that you think about. But we worry about that all the time, and less the internet connection, which we've had to do that and configure things to be on Zoom with people to send audio that way. But it's definitely very important. And my computer is my, I don't wanna say baby, but kind of (laughs); more important than my phone, it is the most important thing in my professional life, and I spent a ton of money on it to get the most updated one and it, it hurt.   Anne: It's an investment.   Gillian: It hurt a little bit.   Anne: (laughs) There was some physical pain when you invested --   Gillian: Emotional pain.    Anne: — but it's an investment.    Gillian: I have someone that I work with that we talk about this all the time 'cause we both have, you know, brand new Macs, iPhone. What -- I don't have the newest one, but when I upgraded I got pro Macs, the best phone. Because why would you not invest in something that you use every single day and that you use every single day for work?   Anne: Yeah.    Gillian: Like you're paying to have less trouble issues, be faster. I think that's a worthy investment.    Anne: Well, I'm gonna go back, I'm gonna backtrack a little bit because I'm adamant about the internet. I love the internet and it's always been said that I would marry the internet if I could (laughs). Like, like Vince Surf is like one of my heroes, okay, the inventor of the internet. And so I guess my point is I have some people that say when I'm connecting to them for their sessions and I use ipDTL to connect exclusively with my students for their sessions because of the fact that it's a high quality audio connection. It allows me to hear them better so that I can direct them better. We can record our sessions. There's lots of wonderful advantages to using ipDTL. Also source connect, all the other methodologies that people use to connect to each other, to their clients and to studios, you need to have a quality internet connection.    And sometimes when I have students say, well, my connection -- yeah, well, I think we have like a 300 connection, 300 speed. Most people don't necessarily know what speed connection they are connecting to the internet. And I think that it's important for you to know as BOSSes, first of all, what speed is your internet connection? And if you have the capability of getting a gig or a faster speed, why not choose the top of the line speed for that internet connection? Because your business, not just your audio and connecting with clients, but your entire business runs on the internet and the communication. Because we are pretty much an online business. Right? And we're connecting globally to people. So why on a daily basis -- I probably am on the internet, oh goodness, 8 to 10 hours a day, possibly more.   Gillian: An embarrassing number of hours a day. (laughs)   Anne: Well, yeah, because we watch our televisions now, which are, you know, everything is fed through the internet. And so if you can get the fastest speed, absolutely, it's an investment in your company. I just say that over and over again. And as a matter of fact, when I said this before on an episode, when I moved here to my new house, I actually checked and said, what speeds are available in my area? If I cannot get fiber to my house, I will not move here. I will not move here.    You know, it's one of those things they say, oh, fiber's coming, fiber's coming. But you know, if it's years until fiber's coming, and I know how important that connection is to my business, the livelihood of my business, I actually chose where I was going to live based upon my internet speed. Because again, until I retire, guys, this is it. This is where I make my money, and I know how important it is. So, alright, I've stepped down off my soapbox for the internet, but get the fastest speed, guys. It's an investment in your business and write it off. Right? It's your business. Okay. Now Gillian onto the computer thing. So.   Gillian: Well no, no. I feel like this doesn't get, and maybe it does get talked about. I'm not hearing it, so we're talking about it (laughs), but like --   Anne: I'm rambling on and on about it. (laughs)    Gillian: Computers, XLR cables, like these are not exciting purchases. A microphone is an exciting purchase to some degree.    Anne: Well, I think they're exciting. Gillian. I'm sorry. I was gonna marry the internet, remember?    Gillian: That's true, that's true. That's true, in love with the internet. But I think that there's a ton of things that make your space great that are not flashy --   Anne: A microphone.   Gillian: Or exciting. I mean, unboxing my computer was like a spiritual experience. I loved it. It was like so awesome. I just, when I got my Apple Watch last week, I took a video of the unboxing because I was like, oh my gosh, it's so aesthetically pleasing. (laughs). I mean --   Anne: Wait, did you say that to yourself? This is so aesthetically pleasing. I love that.   Gillian: I said it in my head. Yeah, of course.    Anne: I love it. I love it.    Gillian: Everything with Apple. I made my boyfriend hover above and take the video while I unbox it and I was like, don't move.   Anne: Wait, wait. Get the lighting. Get the lighting perfect. I would do that too though. I'm such a geek about things like that. I really am.   Gillian: You only open an Apple box once. Once it's opened, it's not the same. Anyway sorry, little BOSSes; you're listening to us ramble about Apple. All of you PC lovers, I'm sorry.    Anne: Yes.    Gillian: You just will never, never understand (laughs). Or maybe you will.    Anne: Well, they have their own unboxing, so that's absolutely fine. You can get excited about -- but I know a lot of people that build their own computers, and that's exciting.    Gillian: Oh yeah. That's an activity. That's fun.    Anne: That's definitely a very cool thing to do. So your computer, again, it's part of your livelihood. Now there are people out there that say for voice acting, you don't need to have a very powerful computer, and no, you don't necessarily for the actual physical audio recording of one track perhaps. I'm gonna say that, yeah, you don't have to have a billion megabytes of RAM or, or a ton of space. But honestly, everything we do combined together along with the audio recording -- I am connecting with clients. I am looking things up on the internet, I'm researching, I am doing so many activities on that computer for my business, marketing, connecting with clients, audio recording, audio editing — why wouldn't I want it to be as optimal as it could be?   And so there might be people that are using multiple computers. Like one is just for recording my audio. That's fine. Whatever works works there for you. However, there's still -- I think Gillian and I were discussing this a little bit earlier, and we can continue this discussion about the speed of your computer, when you're recording, your audio does play a factor in the quality of what you're getting out. And you certainly don't want your computer to be an ancient piece of equipment that can't handle your interface or it keeps crashing. Like I know for a fact -- Gillian, you use Adobe products?   Gillian: I do. Yeah.    Anne: Right? I mean, just any Adobe product for me has always been a little bit of a memory hog. And so if you've got Adobe Audition running in the background and you're recording and you've got it on a kind of an older computer and you don't have a lot of RAM or you're running out of space, whatever it is, it can cause that to crash and cause many, many frustrating problems. So as good as your performance is, right, if your DAW's gonna crash time and time again…   Gillian: And there's nothing worse than being in the middle of an edit, and it crashes and you lose all of your hard work on an edit. That's happened -- I mean, not as much with ProTools. There's always like automatic save. So I'll just go back to previous version, but it's happened enough --   Anne: Or a good take. Right? You could be actually recording like, and you've got the best take of your life, and then something, you know, happens. I mean, that would suck.    Gillian: Yeah. So it's interesting because computers become important when you're doing everything off of it. Kind of like we're saying, you're sending emails, you're uploading auditions places, you are, I don't know, creating your post for social media in Premiere, you're recording, you're editing, you're -- all of these things, they take up space and why would you not — obviously don't go into debt for a computer.    Anne: Yeah.    Gillian: I mean, do what you want, but --   Anne: But it's an investment.    Gillian: Again, it's a worthy investment, and I think people always -- from my experience of talking with voice actors, people would be much more willing to jump to buy another microphone or another, something that's, in air quotes, fun versus, you know, really splurging on the super important things.    Anne: So true. Like a foundational technology that helps you run your business. You're absolutely right. And not to say that microphones aren't important, but again, no, you don't need like the U87 (laughs). Well, I kind of want one, but(laughs), I still am holding off on that one. But microphones like, I feel like the microphone technologies, they last a little bit longer than — you don't have to worry about updating them. It's not like you're upgrading the OS on your microphone, right?    Gillian: No.    Anne: Or upgrading the RAM, uh, microphones, they work and they just work unless you're gonna beat it up.    Gillian: They're completely different.   Anne: And pour water into it. Yeah. It's a completely different, it's a piece of hardware that…   Gillian: It's a piece of hardware. I mean five years and who knows, but five years down the line, at least for me, I'll trade in my, yeah. Mac for another Mac through Apple. That'll be great. But if you have a microphone, you can sell that at any point. If anything, it's probably gonna go up in value the longer you keep it and take care of it. And yeah, I mean, I'm kind of a U87 hater. I don't like them. I don't like them at all.    Anne: That could be another episode. I'm not sure how many people would disagree with you there.    Jilian: I think, I don't know. I don't know how much of it is just, it's a -- I mean I've used it, I've done shootouts with mics for myself for other things where you just line them all up and you sing into them. And the one that I'm using now is my favorite from a lot of mics that I've tried within my budget. My favorite mics are like $20,000 ones that I can't afford and don't need to afford, because why would I? But producers, clients, nobody's gonna know what your gear is. They just care about how you sound. And so I don't personally think that everyone needs to spend upwards of thousands of dollars on gear. I think there's really smart ways to make less expensive gear sound great when you're starting out.    But then the expensive gear is room to grow within your business, within your voiceover experience. And isn't that like something to look forward to or know that, you can resell your gear to someone who's starting off and then upgrade to something bigger, and just all of these big purchases are investments. And they are important.    Anne: And another thing that, I'm just gonna say that like equipment that you don't think about for your voiceover business, your online storefront, hello, your website. Oh my goodness, I cannot tell you how many people want to -- and I'm not saying you can't do it on your own. However, look, I worked in technology for 20 years. I did websites back when they were easy. Okay? They're not -- when you could write HDMI Notepad and it was simple. And then all of a sudden like CSS came out and I was like, I was overwhelmed. I was like, okay, no, I just know what functionality I want in the backend of my website. I'm not a graphic designer. I'm a functional person, so I know what I want, and I know what functionality I want.    And so at some point I said, okay, I am not making my own websites anymore because it is a face of my business. And so I wanna pay someone who actually does this eight hours a day, if not longer. And that's what they were trained to do. And a lot of people try to skimp on that. And I hear that constantly from voice actors. And I guess my question is, back in the day when there was more brick and mortar things, like actual studios, Gillian, you know, you go to them all the time — you used to have to front the bill for leasing once a month. If you had a store, you had to stock it with inventory so there were all these like monetary investments you would make.    And then all of a sudden when things became easy from technology and easier from technology and online, all of a sudden people think that, well, it's so easy, I can just do it and cheap out on it. It frustrates me. Like that mentality -- I understand that yes, doing anything online at home is a great business to start, but you have to still invest in it. And there's so many worthy things to invest in, and your storefront, if it's not brick and mortar, it's online. The impression you make is so, so important in order to be successful in this industry.    Gillian: And there are just ways to -- I love my website. It's very important to me. I've gotten like compliments on it that it looks really professional, and I didn't make it. I hired someone to make it for me. Obviously the content that I fill it with is mine. I do that. But I would've never been able to make the website that I have now. Both from how it looks and a functionality standpoint, I feel like people are not really using their websites in a functional way where you could, you know, manage contacts and, and communicate with people that way.    But for me, I mean, I work with voice actors, I do sessions with them. Every once in a while I will have to look someone up and the first thing I look for is a website. And if I can't find a website for someone, I kind of don't know what to do. I'm like, if I can't find you and listen to your demo right away — and if it's not easy for me, and especially like if you could get your demos online, easily downloadable for anybody in casting, anybody working at a studio that kind of gives you a leg up. It really like, it just does because you're easier to work with, you're easier to find. And I kind of know who you are. I'm like, okay, this person is a legit voice actor. Which might not be the right answer, but it's what I do.   Anne: Well, and a professional voice actor. Right? So, again, there are people who, well, you know, do I need to buy a domain? Do I need to, you know, I can do my own website right now, and I can upload my files to a pay-to-play. But honestly, when I shop and I shop a lot online, hello? Gosh, I can't remember the last time I was at a mall. Although I do love getting out and seeing people. But honestly I do a ton of online shopping. And so for me, the trust factor and the value factor has everything to do with the website. And when I first get an impression of somebody, when I go to the website, right, I can tell, oh, are they trustworthy? Are they professional?    And if you've got a website that you made and you don't do that for a living, right, it's gonna look homemade. Here's an old school thing. I always talk about business cards, right? If you walk up to somebody and they hand you a business card, which still happens these days, not as much as it used to, but then that business card was printed on a printer in your home versus something that was professionally made, you can absolutely tell the difference. Same thing with a website, right? You can absolutely tell the difference, but there's just a level. It's like a movie and a B movie, (laughs). It's like, it's absolutely a level of professionalism that comes with something that's been professionally designed.    Gillian: And unfortunately it's kind of all the aesthetic versus, and that analogy is incredible. I mean, I've never really lived in a business card world. I know (laughs), but when I was like 10, I had professionally made business cards for my babysitting business.    Anne: There you go.    Gillian: So I kind of did. And those were --   Anne: It made a difference, right?    Gillian: I, I don't know, I still have them, but I got work probably 'cause people were impressed that a 10-year-old had business cards.    Anne: Right?    Gillian: But for me, I mean I'm in my 20s, I first look at people's website, and off the bat there's just a different pro versus not pro vibe that I immediately, it just goes off in my brain. And same thing. And then if I can't find them immediately, the next thing I look for is Instagram. And if I can't find you and see that you're doing any sort of voiceover work, then I'm kind of confused. You know, if you have a great voice, I'll email you, but it's a different world.    Anne: So that's interesting. So you go Instagram, what about TikTok? At what level is TikTok or other social media channels for you?    Gillian: Um, it really is for me. I use my Instagram, it's like professional now. Everyone that I meet on a session, artists that I work with, I connect with everybody on Instagram. And that's like the way that I keep up with what people are doing and what people are up to. I personally don't really use LinkedIn. I did when I was in less creative field, but nobody that I work with uses it.    Anne: Right. But our potential clients do. That's why I'm just gonna say that for us.    Gillian: Well, yeah. I think it's different for what I do versus what you guys do. But I, I think I'll go to LinkedIn as a last resort if I can't find somebody. But for the most part, like Instagram and websites. TikTok, I don't really use for work. That's like fun for me. I would never like look for someone on TikTok or like look for voice actors on TikTok. But I do know that there's definitely --   Anne: But if there were creative voice actors, I was gonna say if there's creative voice actors that are doing something entertaining on TikTok, you'll take notes.    Gillian: Yeah. I'm also not a client. I'm coming at this from a strictly studio perspective. I do, every once in a while some voice actors will come up on my feed, or I know there's some people that I know that are like voice actors and musicians and they talk about stuff like that. Um, so I can't say that I know too much about it, but yeah, Instagram is like the thing for me that I can check if someone's legit or not.    Anne: I think the last little, I'm gonna call these the soft equipment requirements. I'm gonna talk about how before it was a voice actor, always, well I've got a face for radio, that kind of thing. I loved voice acting initially because there weren't the requirements of being on camera. I thought, well, I can act and I can be behind that microphone. However, it has evolved and times have changed. And I do believe that there's a video element and there's a face element because people wanna connect with humans. And so for us as voice actors, there are the times when we need to connect with others as humans. And a lot of times I'll have live sessions where they'll wanna connect and watch me via Zoom. I don't always have the camera on. Sometimes I will always to say hello.    For obviously my podcast, yes. I do this and I do some, if you were going to do some social media posts, I have a YouTube channel called my Teachable Moments. So the other equipment purchase that people don't necessarily think about is a good camera and good lighting. And then also I hire a video person to help me to actually create videos and edit videos. So again, it can present to my online clients. My online presence can be of a more professional nature. Again, I don't do video production, but I do know lots of people that do. So I think camera and lighting so that you can look professional. And then if you have videos that you upload, make them look professional and have people who do video editing. And so what a good conversation. And we didn't even get to the hardware yet, really.    Gillian; I know, I'm sorry, guys. There's one more --   Anne: Or the microphone or the headphones and, and all that. So that's for our next --   Gillian: Sorry, guys.   Anne: That's for our next episode.   Gillian: But I got, one more thing I got for you. It's so interesting because obviously I'm learning about the voiceover industry. I know about audio; I record it, but learning the ins and outs of the industry or what people are doing, sometimes it's confusing to me because sometimes stuff goes like against what I would think or things that I think are obvious, people aren't doing. But for voice actors, I feel like, and this is my take, you can tell me if I'm wrong, I feel like it'd be easy to be yourself on social media because anything that you do with you talking, just being yourself. It's your voice. And that's --   Anne: Uh, yes, it's true. It's so true.    Gillian: Wouldn't that make so much sense? I'm on social media a decent bit. I'm on TikTok. People are always like, this is my morning routine, this and that. All these videos with voiceover. And when I make my tos, I do voiceovers. I don't do voiceover, but you know, I'll talk in them, but really, I hear a lot of people getting hung up on like, I have to be talking about my booth or voiceover. But really anything that you're doing --   Anne: Anything you're doing.    Gillian: — using your voice is showing off your voice --   Anne: Who you are and your brand.    Gillian: Yeah. But then if, if you're being yourself, then it's kind of like sneaky, you know, it's like I'm just being myself. People are getting to know me, and they're realizing that I have a great voice and a great sound. So that's what I always think about and I don't see a lot of.   Anne: Yeah. And people buy from people they know, like, and trust. And I've always said this podcast, I have gotten so much work from this podcast. There's so many people that come up to me and say, oh my gosh, I feel like I've known you for years because I've been doing this podcast for years and, and I'm pretty much myself on this podcast. And ultimately that is a really wonderful way to get your brand out there and to have people know, like, and trust you. And then, when they do come to you, they're ready to purchase. And that just becomes a really cool thing. So yeah, guys, so this has been a great talk about the soft technologies. I don't even know what to call them. The soft technologies or the technologies that most people don't think about, right? The hardware people don't think about.   Gillian: Or just things that people don't think about that are not the --   Anne: It's not the microphone --   Gillian: — exact gear. I'm sorry, guys. We're just leading you on. I'm so sorry (laughs). But there's just not so much to say.    Anne: Next episode. All right, well, thank you, Gillian. It's been fun. We're gonna talk next time about maybe some equipment that people have been thinking about. Well, what about my headphones?   Gillian: I know.    Anne: So good stuff. So BOSSes, as individuals, it can seem difficult to make a huge impact, but as a group, we can contribute to the growth of our communities in ways that we never thought possible. Visit 100Voiceswhocare.org to learn how. All right. And a big shout out to our sponsor, ipDTL. You too can network and connect like BOSSes. Find out more at ipdtl.com. You guys, have an amazing week and we'll see you next week.    Gillian: Bye.    Anne: Bye.   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.com 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.

To create a successful voiceover performance, authenticity is key. This can involve using props, physicalizing the script, and infusing in personal experiences to deliver a realistic & engaging read. Anne & Lau emphasize the importance of intention, nuance, and understanding the corporate story & mission. Just as a chef must gather and prepare ingredients before cooking a delicious meal, hard work and effort are necessary before reaping the rewards.Want to improve your performance? Try taking notes, emphasizing key words, and using aids like pictures & videos, and of course, tune into VO Boss! We'll guide you through it.   Transcript   It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere 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.   Anne: Hey everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS podcast and the BOSS Superpower series. I'm your host Anne Ganguzza, and I'm here with my amazing special guest co-host, BOSS lady Lau Lapides.    Lau: Hey, hey. Hey, Anne.    Anne: So Lau, I am very excited that it's early morning, and I have my coffee.    Lau: Me too. What would we do without it?    Anne: I know. So many people have contacted me and said, it sounds like you and I in the booth in our podcast are just sharing a cup of coffee and shooting, shooting the breeze, having a conversation,    Lau: High balling the water, which you gotta do in between the coffee.    Anne: That's right. That's right.    Lau: Just to wash the vocal folds out.    Anne: Let me share — there's my big old water bottle with the coffee.    Lau: And then I'm gonna show everyone, I think everyone already knows this about us. Watch this. We're gonna do this as well.    Anne: (laughs). I love your lipstick. Oh, so here's mine.    Lau: Wonder Twin powers activate!   Anne: Right? Wonder powers activate. So, yeah, my red. But you know what, guys? Maybe one of these days I'm gonna switch it up.    Lau: Hmm. Ooh, you should. You should.    Anne: Oh gosh.    Lau: Naked lips. Let's see what naked lips look like without the red. That would be fun.    Anne: I feel like I'm so pale. (laughs), but I feel like I'm so pale.    Lau: You are pale. But that's your beauty.    Anne: Pale without my lips. Well.   Lau: But you know what I just noticed, Anne? You know what I just noticed? Literally, I just observed this, that we just used like three props. Three props.    Anne: Oh my God.    Lau: In our world.    Anne: We totally did.    Lau: And we were talking all the way through that, as we always do. And we had no problem using the props, talking and connecting, getting our points across. And that suddenly just dawned on me, like, that's a part of our world in finding connection --    Anne: That's what we do.   Lau: — and authenticity with each other.    Anne: That's what we do in the booth. Interesting. So let's chat about this. Let's take this apart, because you know, I do this a lot when I'm trying to talk to students about being authentic and believable with the script. And I think what just throws the whole wrench into it is that we've got these words in front of us, and all of a sudden we don't know how to make them a part of us. And interestingly enough, like we just demonstrated, and BOSSes out there, you just heard it, even if you're not looking at us on YouTube, we were able to pick up objects and share ideas, and have a conversation, engage with one another, and not miss a beat. And we weren't even thinking about it. But what I want you guys to do is let's take a look at, a more in-depth look at this to kind of figure out how we can take what we do in real life and translate it into the booth to be believable and authentic. Right? Bring that real life into the booth.    Now, one thing, I think that was first and foremost, we talked about props, right? Ah, I always have my trusty lipstick or my cup of coffee, or probably most of you have one of these, a phone or even just a mouse (laughs). Like you must have something in your booth.    Lau: I mean, it's endless what we have really with us. And doesn't that make us feel comforted and taken care of? And we identify with that brush in a lot of ways. It's part of our life.    Anne: I'm bringing all my makeup out. I've even got jewelry in here, but (Lau laughs), in case I --   Lau: I think a man's gonna pop up all of a sudden. (laughs),    Anne: Gosh only knows I have tons of these, the headphones in there. So now, if you're trying to sound authentic and believable, one thing that we've covered multiple times in our podcast is there's not a perfect voice. Right? There's all sorts of imperfection in our voices, and a lot of that can translate -- I mean, not that — everybody has a beautiful, wonderful voice all on their own. You don't have to perform behind the mic, right? It just is beautiful when we're engaging. And so props can help us to bring that scene to life, right? I know I just had a really wonderful workshop with the amazing Ellen Dubin, and she was talking about video game acting, and all of it was about blocking, get up, move around, change your position. Do that, because that's gonna add that reality.    And I'm always telling people physicate behind the mic, because that's gonna make our vocals not perfect for some reason. If we sit silent and straight behind the booth, and we just read these words, hello everyone, and welcome to the VO BOSS podcast, and the BOSS Superpower series, right? So I'm just reading, but I'm not moving, that physical part of having a prop, having somebody to talk to 00 expressing, expressing with our bodies.    Lau: I love this. You know, you had me physicate. Like I have never heard anyone use that word. So I'm stuck on physicate. But yeah, I would love voice actors to take it a step farther and just Johnny Depp it out. Like take their script and go somewhere. Go to a store, go to a Starbucks, go to a library, go be in your car, and I want you to deliver that. Deliver the line as part of your universe.    Anne: What a great idea.    Lau: Yeah!   Anne: Yeah.    Lau: Right? Doesn't the booth at times sort of pen us and it becomes boxy to us in our minds where we can literally move it outside, move it, and see how it flows and works, and physicate in that environment. Like, if I'm ordering a drink or I'm getting food, or I'm sitting at a table, or I'm da da -- how would that line live within that universe versus only within the universe of the booth? I mean, ultimately, we can't do that on every script, but as part of your actor's work, it's well worth the time to do that so that you can bring that imagination back into the reality of your beliefs.    Anne: Sure.    Lau: And relive that, you know, relive those moments.    Anne: What I like is, even if, alright, let's say you've got a very dry corporate narration script, right? Maybe a company talking about their corporate responsibility, which may not be the most exciting stuff that you'll ever hear in the world. So for me, I'm always telling people, in order to kind of make it sound conversational, and it may not be written conversational at all, or authentically, or it's basically like here, this is stuff that you would typically read. You wouldn't necessarily say it out loud. You would typically just read it and then understand it as information that the company has provided to you. Take that script and put it into your own words. So you might have this long run-on line that's talking about corporate responsibility and all of these things about what we are doing to promote corporate responsibility in the workplace. And so take that, those words, and just put it into your own words.    And when you can take that sentence, which sometimes most of the time is a run-on sentence and formulate your own speech about it, or your own personal conversation about it to someone else, explain it to someone else, that's gonna give you the idea behind the melody and the point of view that you wanna take. And then all you do is, when you get in the booth, replace it with the words. But you have the intent, you have the point of view, you have the thought of, here, it's this idea, and then this idea, and then I'm gonna combine it with this idea. And then that's the finished sentence. So it's kind of allowing you to regroup the information that's presented in the sentence in a very structured way and creating it in your own authentic way.    Lau: That's right. And you have to think of your work like you're layering a cake. You have the cake; to some degree, you have the cake. Even if you're at the beginning of your career, you still have some sort of cake. It might be a demo, it might be a beginner level studio, whatever it is. But I have to layer that over time and make it more interesting. So for instance, if I were to take my pen, my trusty prop, and talk about my corporate responsibility script, I might take a note on that. Because if I'm working in corporate, I'd be writing down minutes, I'd be taking notes as I went. And that puts me in a mindset, a frame. It gives me a framework to work by that when I'm corporate -- and this is just my choice, it's not the right choice, it's just my choice — when I'm corporate, I always tend to write a few notes. I tend to take a moment to write things down. That changes my sound, it changes my pace, it changes everything.    Anne: So that physical action of writing something down — also, the fact is, is what would you write down? Right? If you had that big, long run on sentence, right? What are the notes that you would take? Right? Typically, those notes are the most important parts of the sentence, right? Those are the notes that you as an actor want to probably linger on a little longer. So when we talk about being authentic, and Lau, and I, when we're speaking, our pacing isn't the same. Sometimes I, I pause, like I just did, and sometimes my words are longer. And usually the ones that are are longer the ones I want her to hear more. And so when you're creating those notes, right, you're creating, this is an important point that I wanna express to someone. So that word can be a little bit longer than maybe the word the (laughs) or the word at the beginning. At the, at the, or just tiny little words that connect. Beginning is an important word. So at the beginning, notice how at the becomes almost like a, I don't know, a 16th note in melody if I was speaking vocally, but in the beginning, beginning is an important word, so I'm gonna linger on that.    Lau: We can emphasize, you need to linger on that, right? If every word is the same, and every word is important, nothing's important. (laughs).   Anne: Right? It sounds monotonous and robotic.    Lau: Like what's important if every word is important, right?    Anne: Right.    Lau: But if I take that pen -- and to me this is a corporate moment or a business moment, or whatever you wanna call it-- I think maybe I'm gonna do bullets, how I would do in my life. I'd take a sentence, I'd take a thought, and I'd pull a word or two out of it that are my emphasis words, my bullets, and do like little bullets. and say, wow, out of that sentence, I got coffee. That was the word of the day for me, coffee as a bullet. So that when I go back and I review that for my speaking, I can remember, I can mark that coffee, that the word coffee or the name of the coffee is really an emphasis for me.    Anne: Sure. Absolutely.    Lau: This helps me with that. Like, because then I'm gonna say coffee, like Starbucks coffee.    Anne: Right.    Lau: And I'm gonna use this.    Anne: And the other thing too that I think is super important to remember is that we talked about you taking the script and going out into the real world with it, right, and start practicing with it and playing off of maybe someone else. Notice how you said, well, let's play off of someone else. I mean, when we started this podcast, you and I were talking to one another. We were engaging with one another.    Lau: Yep.    Anne: Well, when we're sitting here in our studios behind the mic with a script, you cannot be alone (laughs) just saying. In your head, you must be the person that is speaking. And you must also have your imaginary friend that you are speaking to. And so you want to make sure that you are engaging with that audience member or that listener. And so you must talk to them, and they will have reactions for you or questions or comments. Right? And you cannot just start talking to them like, oh gosh, have you ever had a friend, Lau, that you can't get a word on edgewise? Like, and it's basically all about yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, ya. It's all about them. Right? All about their monologue.    And so when you're behind the mic, don't let it be all about your monologue. Let it be about you engaging with your listener and allowing that listener a beat to acknowledge, to respond, to have a question, whatever that is. And I'm not talking about you have to time things, but that's an imaginary beat where I've said something, and now Lau, I'm looking for you to respond, right? You just shook your head, right? You just went, mm-hmm. So that's where I think we need to also invite that into our script, right? And invite that real life into our script.    Lau: You have to do it. It's so important. And have cheaters if you have trouble reaching that at times. Like in our daily life, we're not always great conversationalists, or we're not always in the mood for a talk or whatever. So you have to have those cheaters, whether you're talking to your kid or your dog, or a photo or a video or something that stimulates you into thinking, this is part of my daily experience. This is part of a reality of my life that I can connect to right now, that I can make real. Because I may not be in the mood or in the mindset every single day to connect to that particular audition or to connect to that particular product.    Anne: What I love is like literally like now that I've sat here, and I'm taking notice and, and BOSSes out there, really, let's watch the YouTube video on this, because I was just watching you, Lau, and everything you said, you had your hands, everything you said, and I was responding. I was shaking my head, I was going, mm-hmm. So that's the parts that you have to play in your script. And believe it or not, even in a mundane medical narration script or in a telephone prompt, believe it or not -- I'm always imagining, here I am and I'm talking to the listener and they've got their thoughts about me (laughs). Because maybe they don't wanna listen to an automated attendant. Maybe they're angry, maybe they're frustrated. But yet I will still talk to them with a tone where I'm like, I know you're frustrated. I know that you don't wanna listen to my voice, but let me help you. Okay? And so that point of view, that intention — all of a sudden, I'm speaking about intentions so much lately -- I think that intention, before you even approach voicing or opening your mouth, I think your intention is so very important.    Lau: So very important. And you know, in the script, in this context, it would be an actor's intention because you're in a false reality. You're not in your real reality; you're in this technical reality.    Anne: Sure.    Lau: But then you have intentions or purpose, or whatever you call it in your daily life and thinking about, wow, how much do I care about things? How much do I connect? How much do I try to make action happen and go well? Well, I have to bring that intention into the booth. I have to bring that into the booth. And I think if we were honest, we would say, in our daily life, half the stuff we do is crap. It's like chores. It's like, I have to go to the dump because I have --   Anne: I don't want to go to the dump.   Lau: -- bring my trash. Right? (Anne laughs). But how do I have a joyous life still being able to go to the dump? Well, I keep the intention alive that it's not about me hating to go to the dump. It's about me wanting to have a clean and wonderful household.    Anne: Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely.    Lau: That's really what it is. So it's the same with the script. if I have a disdain or I have a dislike for the delivery or for the language, or for the content --   Anne: Or the message, maybe. Right? Yeah.    Lau: — then I'm skirting the intent. What's the intent? Oh, the intent is to get you to understand how this new product worked, or, or how the new program is gonna help your lifestyle. That's really what it is. It's like a, in acting, we call this the super intention, the super objective.    Anne: Maybe this is the wrong way to phrase it, but I think intention can change throughout the script. So you don't come at the script in the first couple of sentences with a particular intention and it stays that same intention. Because a lot of times, right, we're there to tell a story. And so intention point of view changes along with the storyline. And if you're not necessarily reading that, right, or understanding that, then you're not doing a good job at telling the story. Lau, at the beginning when we were talking about coffee, I was like, oh, thank God, coffee. I was, was that sense of relief. And then we started talking about, well, my lipstick, I get excited, right?    Lau: Yeah.    Anne: So I have a different, and it may not be an extreme change in my emotion, but I talked about my lipstick. I'm like, it made me smile. Right? And so that was a different intention. And as we flowed with the conversation, our point of view changed. Our intention changed to help us to go along and flow with the storyline.    Lau: Yeah, exactly. And I think that if you BOSSes listening in can have fun, you know, treat it like a board game, have fun with your actor friend, or your accountability buddy, or even with your husband — have fun and take a few minutes and say, okay, what are all the things I'm using in my world here that can be helpful to the delivery of the read? But, oh, wait a second. What's the intention? What's the intention of this? Why do I take a moment and put this on? There's a reason for it, there's a purpose for it, whatever that is. Why do I pick up my water bottle and drink it? Sure, it makes me feel good and it's delicious. But the intention is what, to hydrate.    Anne: To be healthy.    Lau: To to be healthy, right? Why do I drink my coffee cup if I'm delivering a script, right? It's not just for Anne to see that I'm drinking coffee. It's for me to feel energized, to feel warm, to feel connected. Coffee's a big psychological connector for a lot of people. Right?    Anne: And notice all of the emotions that go along with that. I mean, that is something to really think about. I think that, you know, I'm always telling my students that there's a purpose for every word. Even if you don't agree with all of the words that are there, there's a purpose for them being on the paper. Somebody somewhere at some point thought about what they wanted to communicate, and all of those words have meaning. So to just read through them as if they didn't have meaning or any point of view, I think is a disservice. It's a disservice to the copy. It's a disservice to the story that you're telling. And so, no matter how nuanced it is, right? You don't have to be like, oh my God, I'm so happy! And then, oh, I'm very, very -- you know, it doesn't have to be that to be dramatic. Nothing has to be dramatic. As a matter of fact, the more nuanced you are, I think, the more you, you can really connect. And the people that are listening, they'll get that. And sometimes I feel like nuances mean more. I really believe that.   Lau: Nuances are life.    Anne: Yeah, exactly.    Lau: Right?   Anne: And it can really, really have meaning. And so I say look for the meaning in the point of view. And the point of view to me is synonymous with bringing yourself to the copy. Bringing an emotion to the copy that is reflective of how you feel the company would like to bring that emotion out to the potential client.    Lau: Anne, hold on one second. Hold on. I'm coughing. (laughs).    Anne: All right, no problem.    Lau: I love nuances though. I wanna say something about that. My intention (laughs).    Anne: Now see, there's a real world moment there where Lau is actually having a little bit of a coughing spell and(laughs), see, and I've reacted to it. Show a little bit of concern.   Lau: I don't mind if you show that too, Anne; I don't mind if you keep that in, because the intention sometimes changes with the same item. So we don't have to stay static on our intentions, is exactly what you saying. The nuance of being hydrated is important. We do it and we know it's important. But see how my intention changed? I had to get myself out of the coughing fit by dealing with the vocal folds quickly so that I could continue the conversation. So it deepened, the stakes got higher. It became much more important that I drank the water.    Anne: Oh yeah. Absolutely.    Lau: So the prop in itself changes. It changes, the intention gets deeper. You change it. You have the power, you have the superpower to take your environment and have it utilize it in your favor to solve your problem or to fill your need.    Anne: And I think also -- so it goes beyond just like a surface — here are some words on a piece of paper. Let me read them and let me try to figure out what this company is saying. Like what we've done is we've actually brought in so many components of our real world experiences to help us to tell this story better. And I think it warrants, BOSSes, it warrants a little bit of time from you before you run in your studio and do your audition. I say this all the time, I feel like there's this, I don't know, a long time ago, there was like, somebody said, you must do this many auditions in a day. And all of a sudden we become like, I must get 60 auditions out a day in order to be successful in voiceover.    And in reality, like getting 60 auditions out a day probably does nothing for your performance in terms of, if you're just so intent on rushing through them, and you're not thinking about what's the story? How am I going to bring this to life? And I believe it takes a few minutes of your time -- not a ton. You don't have to spend hours breaking apart a script. But you do need to spend a few minutes really kind of reading, rereading, trying to find out what is the true message. And again, I'm always saying, sometimes we will get auditions, and I'll be like, I have no idea what this is even talking about. Now when that happens, that means that Anne has to look at the script again and again, and really try to read those words. Do my Google, Anne GanGoogle, do my Google to find out what I can, if the product is listed or the company is listed, or even any phrase that seems like it might be a tagline, Google it. God, we are so lucky, right, to have that?   Lau: So lucky.    Anne: And to just try to understand what is the story? Because again, somebody was paid probably a good deal of money to sit down and write that story. And you just may not be privy to what product it is or what company it is. But you have to understand what that story is. And I think a lot of times, it's probably purposely vague because they wanna see who the actors are. (laughs). They wanna see who can bring those words alive and tell the story. And that requires our imagination. And every time I ask somebody to think about corporate and what's your moment before when you're gonna do this corporate responsibility -- everybody's like, what? Like, what do you mean? What's my moment before? Why would I ever say this?    And you really must, because to somebody at that company, it's their heart. Like they're responsible, like their corporate responsibility is, this is their purpose. This is something probably that came very deep within, or I wanna say this, I mean, unless you're an evil company, right? I mean, but (laughs) for most companies, like my company mission, my company purpose, come from a very deep, deep within my soul because I formed that company because I believe that I had a product that would help someone. And that's what I like to believe about all corporate scripts. And that helps me, by the way, to get into a purposeful and positive mind frame, to be able to voice just about any corporate script. Because that's how I, I assume every founder or owner of a company must feel at some point like, I'm gonna form this company 'cause I have this great idea. This is gonna help people. And yeah, of course, maybe I can make some money too off of it. But I like to always consider the heart mission of a company or a product that.   Lau: Love that. Because it's so easy to flatten out and just perfunctory-ize -- I think I just made up a new word. Perfunctory-ize, meaning just not come with any sense of joy, energy or imagination to something that you don't care about or you don't know about. But to understand, and this is to me the true empathy factor of nuance. Like to me, the more nuanced person -- like you're a tremendously nuanced person because you have a depth of understanding and knowledge and empathy --   Anne: Empathy is huge.    Lau: — and what someone else is going through and living through.    Anne: Yeah.    Lau: And you don't have to necessarily know or have experienced it yourself. You just have the knowledge and the history behind you to know it is a truth. It is their truth. And so I have to take a little bit of time to find intention to represent their truth. And that's nuance right there.    Anne: Yeah. Yeah. I feel that. If somebody asked me what's the most important component as a voice actor that you can have? Or what's the most important thing to think about as a voice actor to be authentic and believable and real when you're voicing a script? I would say empathy. And empathy toward your listener. Who is your listener? What are their joys? What are their pains? How can you help them? And how can what you're saying make them feel better, look better, I don't know, make more money, make them healthier — whatever it is, come from a place of service?I just really believe that empathy is the one word that everybody should just have in their back pocket for a great read.    Lau: Well, the more you give the more you do get. And sometimes the get is really like this inner true feeling, whatever that feeling is, that you then connect to the experience. And so you can bring that back to the experience. And so that's why I believe, you know, as actors and as vocal actors, we get addicted to the work, because we get addicted to the feeling of that authentic getting back. So the more we give, the more we potentially can get back. But we have to give true and authentic intention. And if we don't, then it's flat and it's kind of boring, and we fizzle out quickly; we get exhausted.    Anne: Sure, sure.    Lau: It's actually depleting.    Anne: And I think, you know how I can always tell I have, I have a really great read is when I feel it. When I feel it.   Lau: When you feel it. Right.    Anne: But I feel it.    Lau: Right.    Anne: Because sometimes things just happen and it's just like, I don't know how that happened, but it just did.    Lau: It just did.    Anne: It was amazing. Right?   Lau: That's the magic.    Anne: That's the magic. And I wish that I had that for every single read that I do. And I think that as an actor is what I try to achieve, right --   Lau: Yeah.    Anne: — is the feel it felt right. It felt good, it felt authentic and it felt believable. So I always try to tell people to just feel and not listen. And it's so hard to not listen because I think from a very young age, when I got behind the mic and all of a sudden my voice was amplified from that mic, right? Then I felt like, ooh, now I have to sound even better. And interestingly enough, that's not what we're looking for. We're looking for just the you that is amplified louder by a device that sits in front of you on a day-to-day basis. We're really just looking to connect with you.    Lau: That's right. And I, I would say be careful of chasing the high. 'Cause a lot of people come in and whether it's the money or the feeling of excitement or whatever — don't get addicted to chasing the high or the dopamine kick. Just know it will be there at times for you. But you gotta like -- think of my analogy of like, you gotta take the trash to the dump. There's a lot of work, there's a lot of groundwork that happens in order for you to come back to the clean home and go, ooh, smells fresh. And I'm feeling good. So you can't get one without the other. You can't get the reward without the real work put in.    Anne: Absolutely. What a great analogy, Lau. Like honestly, like we could just, just all go home now. Like take it to the dump (Lau laughs). BOSSes, take it to the dump, then come back.   Lau: Take it to the dump.   Anne: Take it to the dump and come back refreshed. I love it. Lau, what a really cool discussion. Thank you so much.    Lau: My pleasure.    Anne: BOSSes as individuals, you know, sometimes it can seem difficult to make a huge impact, but of course we've been talking with Lau today and how we can make an impact. Well, if you ever wished that you could make more of an impact with your communities in ways that you never before thought possible, find out at 100voiceswhocare.org. And thank you so much to ipDTL that allows Lau and I to connect and have these amazing conversations. Find out more at ipdtl.com. You guys, have an amazing week and we'll see you next week. Bye.   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.com 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.

Long before you lay eyes on your next script, you should be thinking about how your improv skills can help you stand out. Anne & Lau share their practical advice for integrating improv into your voice over work + act out some improved scenes for the Bosses! Improv is about being in the moment and responding to what is happening around you. Rehearsed speech sounds unnatural and stilted because it doesn't reflect the way people actually speak. If a script is written the way you'd like it to be written, great! But if it isn't written that way, then it is still your responsibility to make it believable. Improv requires imagination & creativity, which are both important elements of succeeding as a voice actor. Bosses, your voices are vehicles for storytelling, emotion, and world building.   Transcript   It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere 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.   Anne: Hey, hey everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS podcast and the BOSS Superpower series. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzza, and I have with me my very special guest co-host Lau Lapides.    Lau: Hey Anne.    Anne: Hey Lau. How are you?    Lau: I'm awesome. Great to be back.    Anne: Ah, it's good to have you back Lau.    Lau: Okay, here's the situation. Ready? Here we go. You just bought a car, and you're picking it up for the first time. They even sprayed that new car smell. And it's shining and gorgeous. Had a little bow on top. Give me a moment of pre-life. Like what's the exclamation you make before you speak?    Anne: (screams) Oh my God, I'm so excited! I can't wait to get my car today!    Lau: Oh, and I would do this. I would go, ooooh, I'm so excited. I can't wait to get my car today.    Anne: I think it was important. I had some good physicality back there behind my mic here.    Lau: We both did. We both were like exploding.    Anne: So what is that, BOSSes? What are we talking about? Mmm?   Lau: Mmm, I think that's improv city right there. Improv.    Anne: Improv. So, so important to everything we do. I'm gonna say so important because, it really helps us. Would you say Lau, 90%, if not more, of casting specs are calling for believable, authentic, real? And I think honestly, in order for us to be real (laughs), improv is so very important to be able to create what's happening in the scene, your reaction, your emotion. I mean, that's really what makes us stand out from all the other people auditioning. Right?    Lau: Right. I mean, speakers in the larger world outside of our industry, call it impromptu speaking, being able to think off the cuff, think on your feet, being able to think on the fly. Every time you hear someone say that, we know it's a tough skill for people. We know it's not a natural ability for most people to be under these unnatural circumstances and just think on the fly. Right? But it's a great tool, right, for voiceover talent to be able to do that.    Anne: And you need it for everything. Guys, I don't want you to think that this is just for, I don't know, video games or character animation. You need improv for everything you do, including medical narration. Just saying. I'm like the biggest proponent of being in the scene, because we are so used to -- I think, those of you that just got into voiceover and you don't necessarily have acting experience — we're so used to picking up a piece of paper with words and reading the words out loud, and listen to what I just said. We're used to taking a look at the piece of paper and reading the words out loud. And that's what you don't wanna do, right, as a voiceover actor. You want to be in a scene. You want to sound as if you are there and speaking authentically and naturally and believably.    And so you can't just pick up a piece of paper with words that you've never seen before and just read them from left to right. You always have to put yourself in a scene. And that includes -- gosh, when I'm doing telephony script, and I'm saying thank you for calling. Like I put myself in a scene. I want people to really feel as though I'm thankful that they've called me (laughs). And improv helps me do that.    Lau: Yes. And you know, a lot of times people will say to me, but Lau, I don't get it. Like, I can't improv as a voiceover talent. Everything is scripted. They're never gonna ask me to improv when I'm auditioning or when I'm doing a gig. So why do I need to know this? I say, well, wait a second. What about all your prep time? You and I were just talking about this, Anne, how important it is to think of yourselves as an actor. You're a voice actor; you're acting a role. So when you're acting, you have to have technique, tools and technique to call upon to find your character development. How do I find that? So improvisation is a tool that helps us find the authentic, true character, sound, connection, quality, tones. It helps us find that. And then once we find it, we can pull it out like just outta your toolbox. You can pull it out whenever you wanna use it. And just that exercise we just did right now, the pre-life of exclamation, just that can potentially book you a gig.    Anne: Oh gosh, yes. And it's so interesting because I tell my students all the time, I'm like, okay, what's your moment before? Right? And I could be referencing a script that is the driest corporate narration script in the world. And it makes no sense because in the real world, I would never say these words. And that's what I constantly get from -- I would never say these words in the real world. But okay, we're not in the real world. Okay? We're acting. And we need to create the world in which those words would sound natural. And even if they're not written naturally, you have to create the scene.    And that I think, is so important. You're not preparing the script to sound a particular way. You can read the specs, and they're like, oh, we want youthful, millennial, or maybe sound with gravitas. Stop preparing that sound. What you need to do is to prepare the character, prepare the scene, prepare what's happening that's going to make you react, right, in such a way. that might portray those characteristics that are being called out. And I have so many students that get frustrated. I'll say, what's your moment before? And they'll be like, uh, I have no clue. Like, doesn't say anything in the script. Guess what, guys? Here's where you got — your imagination comes into play, right?    Lau: Yes.    Anne: So important. The imagination in developing a scene, develop a scene that makes sense to you.    Lau: Yes. And improv is an acting tool. It's an actor technique. And it's very challenging to do improv and be lazy. Like you can't be lazy and do improv well, because you're talking imagination. It has to kick in and connect. And oftentimes that requires energy, focus and speed in order to do that. And it's hard to do it if you're not engaged, if you're tired, if you're lazy, if you're disconnected. We oftentimes will get feedback for an actor from like casting that will say, ah, I don't like it. They feel disconnected, they don't feel connected somehow. And I always think of improv, 'cause improv is a wonderful source of connection to another person. How do we credibly and authentically connect to another person? Well, we practice it. It sounds like an oxymoron. You have to practice improv, but you do. You do.    Anne: You do. Absolutely.   Lau: You have to practice that skill. Right, Anne?    Anne: Absolutely. And the improv doesn't just happen at the beginning of the script. It's not just something you do to give yourself some pre-roll. Okay? Because if you start a script, and I say this constantly, especially with long format narration, when you are voicing something for a long period of time, you're in a scene, you need to stay in that scene. You can't just create the scene and then just read. Right? Because all too often people will create the scene, they'll be at the start of it, and then they will do a monologue. It becomes a monologue where they forget that there might be other things happening in the scene, or there might be other people in the scene that they're acting with. And just because they're behind the mic, right, and they're not physically there -- like if they were on stage, it would be easy to see that you're with somebody, right? And you're bouncing ideas off of somebody, and it's a back and forth, like a real improv class or a workshop.    But behind the mic, I think we tend to forget that there's other people in that scene with us. There's other things happening. There's movement. And if you are in a monologue, right -- I feel like monologues, unless they're extremely well written, right, are not as engaging (laughs) unless they're extremely well written. There are a lot of scripts that are not necessarily written for monologue. Right? It's like, here's my speech on this product, and you know what I mean? Like, here's my monologue about the product. Now how engaging is that? Right? If somebody's not interested in the product, you have to get them interested in the product. It has to be a story. And that story has to happen in between the sentences too. Right? You cannot stop just at the beginning.    Lau: Okay, I have a great improv. I have a great improv based off what you just said. All right. Peeps, listen in. Sell the product, whatever it is that is on your script. Sell the product or service. And do it completely in your own words. Like get rid of the script. Completely re-envision it. But remember, it's not just about saying the words or the lines. You have to persuade us. Like you have to make it feel like this is something that's super important to you, that you believe in and that you want us to know about. Right? So whether it's like a blouse or a car, or a cheese, or whatever it is, I would love to hear you talk about that from your own perspective, your own point of view, and really connect to it. And a lot of times, I know you get this, Anne, in coaching too, “but I don't, I don't eat cheese,” “I don't wear blouses; I'm a guy,” and“I don't drive cars.” Especially like that.    Anne: Yeah. I don't care much about the brand. I always get people that say, yeah, no, I don't really worry about brands. I'm like, okay. But for a living, you might be selling a particular brand. And so it's important, right, that you're educated about the brand, or you have to have some interest in it. You have to have some passion in it. And by passion, I don't mean overextended passion or over the top passion, unless it's called for, right, in the script. Because a lot of times for us to be believable and authentic, we have to sound authentic. So am I constantly like, oh my God, this product is amazing! I mean, I can't be that. Right? I can't. But I need to be as authentic as I can in my improv, right, in selling that product.    Lau: Well, you know, we should do, Anne? We should demo, we should do a quick demo. We should take something like a, an object, a simple object. We should have like a a 15 or 30-second conversation about that object.    Anne: Okay. So I always (laughs), I always have my lipstick. Okay. I always have my product here.    Lau: Okay. And the listener, maybe someone who doesn't wear a lipstick or doesn't care about lipstick, or maybe you're a man listening in, you don't ever -- okay, that's fine. But we're gonna have a conversation right now, Anne, about that. And it's all improv, right?    Anne: Okay, okay. So Lau. All right, so this Chanel, okay, typically inexpensive brand, right? Typically, most people will say, oh, it's way — this, this lipstick might be way overpriced. However, for me, I love this lipstick. I love this lipstick because I only have to put it on once. And so to me, the savings of time for this is amazing. I don't have to continually reapply my lipstick. I can drink water, I can eat, and I don't have to put it on over and over again. And it just stays on and it looks good. What are your thoughts? Would you, would you pay, would you pay $34 for this?    Lau: I would pay more than that, because I'm looking at it on your lips right now, and it's gorgeous. I love the gloss, I love the staying power. The color matches your skin tone perfectly.    Anne: And look, I can drink.    Lau: I love it. And you can drink, right? And it probably doesn't even leave residue on the cup.   Anne: And it's still there. And it doesn't feel dry.    Lau: It's still there.    Anne: It doesn't feel dry.    Lau: And I think it's economical for what it's offering you.    Anne: Well, right?   Lau: I would get it.    Anne: My time is worth money, right? And if it, and if this is gonna save me time, right, from reapplying lipstick, or if it's gonna give me confidence because I feel like, oh God, you know how some lipstick will just kind of, you know, come off your lips, and you'll only have like a portion of on your lips, and then all of a sudden you get in the car and you look at yourself in the rearview mirror and you're like, oh my God! (laughs), my lips look horrible.    Lau: They're gone.   Anne: Why didn't, why didn't my best friend tell me about that? So this, I don't have to worry about that. And so the ease, my mind being eased that I don't have to worry that it's come off and it's flaked off and it looks weird, or it's, God forbid, it's on my teeth. (laughs). No, it doesn't happen.    Lau: You took the words right outta my mouth. I was gonna say, your lipstick is never on your teeth. I'm impressed by that alone, and the fact that it's not all over your face like mine can be, by the end of the day, my lips are all over, you know, everywhere. So I, I just think that it's very cool for you to hold on to this and not go to other products, but really stay with it. Because it works, right?    Anne: Have I convinced you?    Lau: Now here's the thing. It's like, we do this in our daily life, right? We do this every day in our daily life.    Anne: That was improv. That was -- by the way, BOSSes, that was improv by the way.    Lau: That's all improv.    Anne: And that, I think if you are absolutely thinking about how would I sell this product? Like how would I voice this product? I mean, you can just riff (laughs), you know, I really love this product because it's amazing. And the funny thing is, is that Lau, you and I had a back and forth. And I think for improv, you have to also improv, if you don't have anybody with you and you are trying to improv your audition, I think you create that second person that you're having the conversation with. It's very much a technique that I use to sound conversational and just sound natural or believable, is to actually play a part with somebody else.    Because that's what you would do -- if you had a script and you were on stage, you'd be able to bounce your ideas back and forth. There would be an acknowledgement or a smile, or a nod or a conversation between two people. And so you have that movement, you have that scene that you can then improv, right? And once you improv, your voice takes on, especially like with you and I, it takes on the emotion and the point of view, which really, really brings out a script versus a read. This lipstick is wonderful, right? Versus, I mean, I'm like a robot saying that, but when I'm really like, oh, this is amazing, this is wonderful — it completely shows up in my voice. And so the fact that I've created in my mind this improv back and forth with my imaginary person that I'm telling about this lipstick is really makes all the difference.    Lau: It does. It does, Anne, because that's the power of improv. It's the personalization of it. When you're gonna say to me, but I don't use lipstick, Lau. I don't wear makeup -- I'd say, that's okay. Now let's engage your imagination. What if, — the magic “what if,” right? Stanislavsky's magic if -- what if you did wear makeup? What if you did wear lipstick? You know, when you were a little kid, you thought that way. And you weren't wearing lipstick or makeup (laughs).That's the irony, right?    Anne: And here's the deal. Transfer this lipstick into, let's say, a Halloween costume, right? You put green on your face if you were gonna be be the Incredible Hulk or, whatever that is, right? So consider that, make that part of your imaginative world, right? And how did that make you feel? I think there's always that, like, did it make you feel confident? Did it make you feel good? Were you excited to go show that off to your friends? And how does that translate in your voice? How does that make you sound — first of all, it's gonna make you sound connected, right?    Because when you're disconnected from the material, right, there's no emotion flowing in that voice. There's no emotion in that word. There's so many technical things that happen to words when you inflect an emotion onto them, or a point of view, right? So it's like, this is amazing. Like just the fact, amazing. Like I, it's not like I didn't say, this is amazing. No. I said, this is amazing. And so the rhythm changed, the intonation changed, so many technical things changed about my voice. And that is something when a casting director is listening to you, right? That is going to hit their ears and go, ah, there's an actor. And I swear to God, right? We know, for the first few words out of the mouth, we know if you're acting.    Lau: Oh, yeah.    Anne: Right?    Lau: Oh, yeah. And start with something that is known to you, personalize it to you, like give yourself a quick scenario that you lived, that you know, if it's possible. So let's go back to the lipstick, Anne. Let's say I'm a man, right? Or someone who doesn't wear lipstick or whatever. Okay. But my favorite aunt wears lipstick, and every time she would kiss me, I would literally smell it. I would smell the lipstick, I would notice the color of it. I always think of that color when I think of my aunt. So I'm personalizing it into something I know, and something that means something to me so that I can go into other scenarios that are a bit farther away from me.    Anne: Absolutely. Absolutely.   Lau: But if I don't start with any frame of reference at all, then I get that falseness, I get that falsehood of like, let me just sound like I love lipstick.    Anne: This lipstick — yeah, exactly. And I think that voice actors, if you're just getting into the industry and you're not realizing just how important this is to really make your auditions stand out and make you connect with the copy -- it's incredibly, incredibly important that you spend time. Like I know so many people are like, oh, I did 60 auditions today, or I did a billion auditions today. Well, I want you to take five minutes before you start, before anything comes out of your mouth (laughs). And I want you to first of all, research the product. If you know what the product is. Sometimes you don't know what the product is. Sometimes the script is obscure and you're not exactly sure what it is. And that makes it even more challenging for you to improv, right? Because you're trying to figure out what is this even talking about? And I know that's just the case for a lot of audition scripts that come along and we don't know what it's even talking about.    So then what we have to do is look at that script even closer. Every single word on that script has a meaning. And it may seem that you have no idea what it's talking about, and it's ridiculous. But honestly, somebody was paid probably a lot of money (laughs) to sit there and write every single word to create that brand message or to get that brand message out. And you need to really look at those words and think, what do they mean? What could it mean? And can I improv a scene, right, so that they would sound logical and realistic and have meaning and create emotion?   Lau: Absolutely. And let's say you don't do this at all. Let's say you say, I can't do improv at all. I can just do the lines --do this. This is a very famous actor method. Do substitution. Like how do I get to something personal? Let me take this little thing of lipstick. I have my own on my side, lipstick on my side. And this is no longer a lipstick. What this is to me is an EpiPen. So this EpiPen can save my child's life when she has a problem and get stung by a bee. And you say, well, how does that work? It's lipstick. I said, well, I can still do an improv with Anne and talk about this as if it's an EpiPen, but it'll sound like, I can't live without this. I really can't live without this. I always have this in my cabinet ready to go. Day or night, it goes with me. And you'd think I was talking about the lipstick. But I'm really talking about the EpiPen.    Anne: Sure, absolutely.    Lau: Try that in terms of your improv in your daily life, when you need to connect with someone's situation, someone's stuff that they're bringing up that you don't really have any idea about. You haven't lived through it, you don't use it. You don't know about it. And you ask them questions about it. But think about what that is to you in your life. What's the substitution in your life that connects to what they're talking about? That's how powerful improv can be. It can make you friends. It can win you jobs. It can make you a lot of money.   Anne: And something else that can help you -- I feel like I see this every episode, Lau — Google is your friend. Anne GanGoogle, right? Google is your friend. Like if you, if there's any indication of what you're talking about in the script, or there's words in there that you're not sure what it's even about, Google. I mean, I can't tell you how helpful it is to --if you're not familiar with the brand and the brand name is there, you can go to the website, and you'll get a great visual representation of what that is and who they might serve. And that will also help you to place your improv and place your scene in a place that's logical.    I mean, it has to be logical, right? I mean, you want it to sound natural and believable. And so you should have a little bit of education about the product or the company, or maybe what's their demographic? Are they selling to young people? Are they selling to a more mature audience? And that can help inform the scene for you that you are going to create. But you must, you must use your brain. And it's not easy, right? It is sometimes it is. Like I rack my brain trying to figure out what is this saying? Like I don't even know. This is so ethereal and so out there that I don't even know what this is saying. But I, I find that if I keep rereading the lines, somewhere along the line, if I look at the important nouns, if I look at the objects, if I look at the emotion of it all, I can really read more into it to try to figure out, okay, this would make sense. Now, if this was a storyline where somebody was upset that something wasn't going right, and this product -- like the EpiPen, right -- was truly meaningful and could really help save a life.    And so I think if you just continually look at the words, see how the words fit together, and then if you have any clues whatsoever in the script, go ahead and Google it. And that's gonna help you find out maybe what the brand is. What do they actually do? Do they serve multiple demographics? What are the colors? I mean, you can just go into like the visually, what are the colors on the website? What is their tone of voice on the webpage? You know, the verbiage on the webpage? How do they approach their clients? And I think that will really help to help you build the scene that you must improv.    Lau: Yeah. And if you go to their YouTube channel, you're gonna see visuals of what the culture is like, what the sound, feeling, environment is like. I mean, put yourself in that environment. That's the old actor Johnny Depp type exercise where the method actors would always go to the place that their character is in and just feel what the place feels like. Well that's kind of important because if I'm doing a lot of corporate work, and I'm getting a lot of corporate narration or corporate scripts, and I've never worked in corporate America, and I have no idea what it's like, just go somewhere, be in a big tall glass building with people who wear suits and see what it feels like, right? See what they eat and drink, hear how they talk. Or just go to a Starbucks. You'll see 'em in Starbucks, hear how they talk. So that you're not necessarily mimicking them, but you're getting an essence, a suggestion of where you wanna head towards that may be very different from your world and your existence. You wanna talk the lingo, have a sense of that.    Anne: Yeah, absolutely. You wanna be able to align to the environment, right? And I think, Lau, if I said to you, is improv important in promos?    Lau: Improv is important in everything,    Anne: Right. So why? I'm playing the devil's advocate here. I'm thinking my students would be like, yeah, but you don't really need to improv in a promo, or you don't need to improv when you're doing a phone system. And I would tend to disagree with you heartily. I think improv is needed everywhere. I'd like your take on that, Lau.    Lau: I agree. As I said, I think it's an immense tool to find your interpretation. Like if I'm gonna give more than one take, or let's say I'm just dealing with an in-house client. I'm not auditioning; they're just calling me and I'm giving them takes, I'm gonna say, wait a second, who's calling? Like, who are the people that are calling? What if I have an impatient person calling going to the system, right? I have a person who's a seller or pitcher calling? What if I have a young teenage person calling the system? How am I coming across to them? How would I speak to them differently and what their different needs are? That would be an improv tool that I would start to be utilizing in that telephony or whatever system.   Anne: And if you're a voice for a healthcare system, right? Okay, somebody's calling for an appointment, right? They're nervous, they're not feeling well, or you know what I mean? They want the results of their test. Understand who it is that you are going to be talking to, right, and then talk to them. I always say that when I read the back of pharmaceutical labels, I do medical narration, and I want to be able to speak to that person who is nervously looking at the back of the bottle and saying, oh my God, I have all of these symptoms. That's me, by the way. I have every single symptom ever known. And who do I call in case I die? That kind of thing. I'm taking that lightly, but I really do think about the person that's going to be looking at this bottle and what I'm voicing and I'm improv-ing, right? I'm playing that scene out in my head so that I can voice it better.    And so that's for medical narration, and for promos, you know, tonight, like if you're doing like a television promos, right? Still, you've gotta get into the mindset of who's the audience that watches this show, and how can you -- hey, oh my God, did you catch the latest episode of — that kind of thing? You've got to get into their mindset 'cause you're talking to them. And that is where improv will come into play, right? Know that network, know that show. Be the person that watches that show and talk to them.    Lau: And if anything, if you don't believe in anything we're saying, just talk and listen to people talking because that's one big, huge improvisation. Conversation is just one big, huge improv. Life is one big, huge improv 'cause we don't really know what's coming up next. So you don't have to perform, you don't have to act, you don't have to do anything other than listen, observe and communicate. Because then you're improv-ing.    Anne: And I will tell you that every other month, or at least once a quarter, if you join the VO Peeps, we do have a workshop that covers improv. We do it. I think it's necessary to continually just keep your skills up. And I know, Lau, I'm sure you have something is part of your group as well?   Lau: We do. We have a Monday night improv mania that runs. It's a lot of actors, a lot of VO talent. A lot of people come in, even just people who are in business come in and they just want to --   Anne: And it's so much fun.    Lau: Fun. Yeah. They wanna free themselves, wanna be free.    Anne: And that's the thing. Yeah, improv should be fun. It shouldn't be stressful. And the only way that you're gonna make it fun is by doing it really. And just getting yourself used to it and getting those responses quicker and quicker and quicker. And thinking off the cuff. And it will always help you especially — I've just had a conversation with Dave Fennoy talking about video games. You know, the storyline and video games is constantly evolving and changing. Improv is huge. You may prepare your character for one set of scenes, and then when you get to the studio to record somebody's changed the script on you. And that could be for video games, that could be for commercial, it could be for any script where you might have last minute changes. So I think it's so important, guys, that we are well-versed in improv, know how important it is and go out there and practice it.    Lau: I love it. Here we go. Ready for the improv of life.   Anne: The Improv of life. You guys, I'm gonna give a great big sponsor shout-out to ipDTL. You too can connect and network like a BOSS. Find out more at ipdtl.com. And I also want to give a shout-out to 100 Voices Who Care. This is your chance to make an immediate difference in our world and give back to the communities that give to you. 100voiceswhocare.org to commit. Thanks so much, guys. Have an amazing week and we'll see you next week.   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.com 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.

There are very few things in life that are black and white. The world is full of nuances, nuances that can be challenging when they come up in business. Anne & Lau dive into the emotions & decision making process that happens when you make a decision to protect the ethics of your business. Most people don't want to talk about ethics in business. They are uncomfortable with the topic and don't know how to approach it, but discussion is one of the only ways to bring awkward subjects into the light. No decision is without trade-offs. It usually means losing something, whether that's time, money or energy. When faced with a tough decision, ask yourself how this feels in your gut? Is it the right thing for you? For the future of your business? Remember, there are no right or wrong answers. Only decisions that feel right or wrong for you at this moment in time.   Transcript   It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere 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.   Anne: Hey, everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS podcast. I'm your host Anne Ganguzza, and I am excited today to bring back to the show Lau Lapides.    Lau: Hey.   Anne: Yay. Hey Lau. Here we are. The BOSS Superpower series. I'm so excited.    Lau: Me too. I feel like it's been a long time since I saw you.    Anne: I know, right?    Lau: I just came back from vacation.    Anne: Well, and I, of course I'm working over here like a dog (laughs), and I need a vacation now. But I have to say I encountered something that was difficult for me and my business while you were having fun in the sun there. And I thought we could talk about it today. And it's all about ethics, and ethics in your business, and what you can do to get through a situation that is not easy to deal with, especially when it comes to your moral ethics in terms of will you work with a client. So I had a client. And they asked me for something that did not sit well with me, Lau. And it made me feel icky. (laughs).    Lau: Gotcha. Oh my gosh.    Anne: Yeah. And it was one of those things where the opportunity was great. There was gonna be opportunities for more work, and this was a very well-known brand. And I really struggled, and it was one of those things, and I thought, well, is it worth it, right, to align myself with this brand when I'm kind of feeling icky about what they're asking me to do, because it could mean more work if I maybe choose not to work with this client? Will I be seen as somebody that's not easy to work with or difficult to work with and will they tell other people? And so it just became, ugh, such a difficult decision, Lau. And I know that in our businesses, I like to think that everything's easy, and all the clients are easy and I get to choose what clients I wanna work with.    But every once in a while, a client can also kind of flip on you (laughs). So typically I think I'm a good judge of character, and I can say this is gonna be a great work relationship, and I'm gonna be able to work with this client. But sometimes those clients, maybe the company changes hands or you're working with somebody else from the company, or the rules change or the policy change or whatever it is. Or the script changes. This actually didn't really have to do with the script, Lau, but I also think this applies to any potential job that talent have the opportunity to voice that maybe they don't agree with the copy, with the script.    Lau: Right. I'm telling you, as long as I've been alive on this earth, I can tell you that the longer you're in business, the more often you're going to experience this kind of thing. And, and it is to be expected. And as uncomfortable as it is, and it is really uncomfortable, and I, you know, I'm trying to put on my empathy face right now, I also have that feeling that yeah, it's to be anticipated, it's to be expected. And I always like to think of it as like a magic carpet ride. You've got this beautiful carpet, you created it, you're floating, you're flying, you're moving in the direction you wanna be moving in. You're going fast, you're high.    Anne: I was flying high, Lau.   Lau: Flying high. You feel really secure. You got your seatbelt on. Then all of a sudden the carpet gets pulled out from under you and then you fall. And you feel like you're falling, you feel like your credibility's falling, your hopes are falling. The perception of your audience is falling. You feel like you're losing something. And it's scary 'cause you don't know how it's gonna land. You don't know, am I gonna survive this? Am I gonna get out the other way and get up and run? And you always do. You always do. You're most resilient person I know. Like you're gonna get up and run after it. But to go through it is really like, what would you call it? Like the milestone of moving through life and moving through your business and saying when difficult things happen, that's when I build my character. That's really how I react to that and how I stand my ground, and how I build my character is really, I'd like to say what it's all about at the end of the day. And I think you're amazing in the choices that you're making. And so you're making choices about this, right?    Anne: Yeah. Oh yeah.    Lau: The path, which way you went.    Anne: I have to say I made the tough choice, and I chose not to work with the client. And after that, Lau, I had days, I had days where I was second guessing that decision, thinking what would be the ramifications and how would it affect my business, in all aspects. Because I thought, well, this might become something that other clients will know 'causethis client knew a lot of other potential clients that I've worked with. And so it became a thing where I had to sit back in a quiet space and just ask myself how does my gut feel? And I, I know we've talked about this is I, I like to run my business by my gut, and I usually listen to my gut, 'cause for me it's usually the right thing. But I'll tell you, I was back and forth with this and once I made my decision, then I second guessed myself again for days.    I mean there was no way, once I had made the decision to cut the relationship; I mean, I couldn't really go back. And so then I just sat there and worried and I thought, oh no. And again, you think that being in business all these years, maybe it would be easier. Or I would be able to get through it quicker. But I think maybe sharing my experience with the BOSSes out there, I can at least share my experience and, and talk to people about here, it happened to me. This is how I felt. Like how did I feel? I felt like once I was given the opportunity, and it was presented with a job, I was initially like taken aback and was so surprised. And then I thought, oh, that doesn't seem right. (laughs) That just doesn't seem right. And so I asked a couple of close friends and colleagues of mine what they thought if maybe I was misreading something. ‘Cause I wanted to kind of have another set of eyes on it.    And of course this was with people that I trusted and of course I wouldn't wanna shout this on social media or on the rooftops because again, it was a private connection between me and my client. And so I kind of got other people's first initial reactions, which were similar to mine from a lot of people that I spoke to. I then sat with it for a while, and I couldn't get it outta my brain. It was one of those things that, until I said something, we were gonna be working together. It was just gonna be a wonderful thing and a great relationship that was gonna continue on, and I was just gonna continue to work with this client, and things were gonna be lovely, and my business was gonna be accelerated by this. But I kept thinking and feeling in the back of my brain and in my heart that something just didn't sit well.    And so then I made that tough decision to cut ties with the client, and then there's the ramifications of the back and forth because I cut the ties with the client through an official email. Right? I had to do that. I would've liked to have actually maybe had some, I don't know, some Zoom time or maybe a phone call. But I had to cut the ties via email. And that was tough. I mean, because trying to go back and forth on something that it's a little more than a, than a negotiation on a job, it's tough to do through email, through text or email. And I was hoping that I would have an opportunity to further, I don't know, either talk to the client and maybe -- I didn't burn any bridges. I didn't wanna burn any bridges. And that was important. So I think that when that happens, BOSSes, you have to really consider, I don't wanna burn bridges. That's just kind of who I am. Although you may not be able to do it without burning a bridge. What are your thoughts, Lau, with all of your years and and experience in the businesses that you've built? It's happened to you.    Lau: Oh my goodness. Yes. That's the thing. And you and I talk about this all the time, Anne, you can't get through life completely unscathed, as much as we would like to because we're positive minded people. We wanna think the best of our connections. We wanna give the best, we have the best intentions. You're dealing with human communication. You're dealing with behaviors of human beings that have this whole frame of reference that has nothing to do with you. They're coming to the table with a whole life, a whole mindset, a whole viewpoint that has nothing to do with you.    So in my mind that slides into every single exchange that happens, their ethics, their behavior, their morality, their persona. That kind of goes into the mix. And we have to understand that, that when we're doing the recipe, it's not always gonna taste good. The cake's not always gonna come out the way we think it's gonna come out. And that's okay. So I think as women, we make a couple mistakes. One is we do take the brunt, we take the emotional brunt of having to make important decisions or what we perceive to be important decisions and stand that ground and feel uncomfortable with that, and take on the other's trauma, the other's mistakes, the other's whatever. We take that on and we emotionalize that. And I think that's a big issue for us as women because we're high pathos. We're very visceral beings. That's what makes us good at our jobs. But it also is a double-edged sword because that's what makes us take on a lot of things that are not our problem. They're just not our problem.    So being able to objectify it just enough, sort of like an audition. So for those of you who are listening in who audition for a living, right, you have to care about it. You have to emotionalize it enough. You have to connect to it so it's authentic. But then when it's done, you have to walk away from it, and you have to disconnect, and you have to not make it the most important thing in your world. And that's the skill that you have, that all successful people have to cultivate is not saying, oh, I don't want things to go wrong. I don't want things to happen where the rug is pulled out from under me. No. But saying --   Anne: I don't wanna disrupt things. I don't wanna disrupt things.    Lau: Yes. It's like, are you a gentle disruptor? Are you an eloquent disruptor? Are you an intelligent disruptor? But the disruption will happen. It's just the nature of dealing with human beings, and it's the nature of business. Business is just difficult (laughs) on so many levels. It's tough. It's not easy. And I think if we could learn to objectify enough and walk away, that would be really important to do. Another thing we do too is we exaggerate situations. I noticed this in myself for many years, 'cause I was an actor. I was a professional actor for many years. And I would say, am I a drama queen? I mean, am I, what is wrong with me? Oh ah, I'm an artist. I see things in a certain way, typically emotionally first. And then it becomes larger and larger and larger and larger until it's like massive.    But to the outside world, they don't see it that way. To them, it's small, it's simple, it's almost non-existent at times. So I found that for me as a technique to save myself and sort of objectify and say, I think I'm blowing this out of proportion. I think I'm exaggerating this into something really huge when I don't think it's viable as a huge thing. I think it's just my perception in the moment of the massiveness of it. The truth is we're not a golden calf. We can be replaced; they can move on. And then sometimes it's almost as if it never happened.    Anne: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And I like that you mentioned the over dramatization and, and that I think in terms of feeling the way that I was feeling, right? Oh my gosh, is this going to bring down my business? What are people going to think of me? What if other people find out what happened, and that kind of thing. And I, and you're right, I think it became like for me, emotionally bigger than it should have because I beat myself up over it for a good few days and spent a lot of energy thinking about what if, what if, what if, or oh my gosh, and being stressed out about it that I feel that I probably wasted a lot of energy on that. And I think at that point, when you're going through something like that, having the support of colleagues and friends that can remind you of things like, hey look, this is okay. Do what you feel is right. We'll support you no matter what -- I think that's so important to help you through the tough times for that.    And also I think being able to talk about it with a trusted colleague is going to be very, very helpful. And just to remember those things. I mean that's something you said to me, look, why is it that you feel bad for something that has nothing to do with you? And you're right, to the outside world, like it's insignificant, right? And a lot of times we build those issues up in our brain to be larger than life, when in fact nobody's really necessarily even thinking about them or concerned about them. But for me, in my business, I was in such a dilemma. And so I think that for me, after I went through the days of second guessing myself, stress, thinking about what if, what if, what if, I now have come out the other side, and I am proud that I stood my ground and did what I believed in, and I feel stronger for the experience. And again, this is not the first time it's happened to me. And I'm sure it's happened to you as well multiple times in your business. It's happened to me before and I've come out the other side fine. And I should remind myself of those things. But I think every situation is different. And in the moment, it may seem like it's, oh my gosh, it's the worst thing in the world that could happen.    Lau: It's the worst thing in the world.    Anne: Yeah.    Lau: And also just for you to note, and I love doing this as a coach but also as a person in the world -- I love passing on what someone says about someone else that they would never know that could be like super amazing and life changing. So I passed on the generality of the situation to a dear female coach and family member of mine of many, many years, just generally speaking. And you know what she said about you, Anne, and you, you don't know her at all. She's not in the industry. She's actually a therapist. Not my therapist. But she's a therapist in the world and we have a lot of crossovers 'cause we're both coaches; she's a life coach. And she said, isn't it nice to know, Lau, that you're not only working with someone of that caliber, but there are people still left in the world that character and morality really means something to them?   Anne: Wow.    Lau: And are willing to stand their ground for it? And I thought, oh, it's so uncomfortable and upsetting to Anne, but it's so amazing. And like, I don't know what the word is, but it's so like revolutionary to the people who witness it around you, who say — it's almost like you can take a breath and say, wow, there are people in our industry that feel something real about injustice when it happens and actually do something about it, but do something in a very professional, kind, diplomatic, and thoughtful way, not a hostile, angry, violent way. Oh, I love that civility. That level of civility and diplomacy I think is to really be rewarded. And again, you don't know it, and you don't feel it in the situation, and you feel quite oppositional to that. But those around you, your circle that circles you, that witnesses that is really inspired and in awe of that. It sort of gives other people courage. It gives other people strength to say, yeah, if something comes at me, and my rug gets pulled out from under me, people like Anne, people like — are doing things to help build themselves up without getting destroyed by it. I can do that too.    Anne: Well, I appreciate you telling me that. Thank you so much. And now I feel even better about my decision and I appreciate you saying that to me. And I think it was very important and worth mentioning again, when you are handling something like this and taking a stand, especially when it's in regards to your business -- and this could just be me. I'm always like trying to be the professional, always trying to not burn my bridges. Because again, you never know where your relationship will go, how the client will react, maybe something wonderful can happen out of it. So I never choose to burn my bridges. And so I did break ties with the client as professionally and as diplomatically as I could and thank them for the opportunity to work with them and appreciated everything that we had worked on together. And yeah, I think that's an important thing to consider when you are faced with ethical decisions.    And again, this doesn't just have to be about scripts, because I know we've spoken about that before. I mean it could be like, well, what if you get a script and you have to voice something that you don't believe in? I'm strong on that one. I'm like, I don't have to voice that. Like to me, that's a no-brainer. But when it came to my business and working with a client that I thought maybe didn't align to the same goals as I did and making that tough decision, I think that the ethics, it's all around. We have to address ethics all around in our business. Not just on what script we voice. And again, BOSSes out there, I entirely encourage people that if you don't feel comfortable voicing a script, you can take that stand and turn that down.    Lau: Or even you are not comfortable working with someone. Like you don't have to justify it. It's okay. You don't have to tell everyone. But you can certainly internalize and say, why am I feeling uncomfortable? I just had this recently with a new partnership with an agent out in LA who was interviewing one of our people and said, you know, I have to be honest with you, I wasn't comfortable with him. This was on Zoom; this wasn't — I wasn't comfortable. I just didn't, I didn't like his personality. He made me feel uncomfortable. I didn't feel like I would be able to do dealings with him, and I didn't offer him a contract. And I said, well good for you. I didn't take any offense to that at all. I said if I were in your position, I probably would do the same. Because you wanna be able to have that free flow of ideas and conversation in that somewhat level of trust that you're on the same page, you're tracking kind of thing.    Anne: Yeah. Yeah. That you align.   Lau: You're tracking. I'm gonna make a prediction for everyone in the audience. Here's my prediction. My prediction is this client, Anne, is gonna come back to you for future things, whatever that is. Whether it's a recording job or whether it's uh, something else. And you're gonna have another decision to make. And that is, do I want to work with them? Because somehow how we feel like, oh, the coffin shut, the nails are in. And that's often not the case because guess what? The time goes by. They realize who their friends are, they realize who they can trust. They realize and they say, you know, that wasn't a comfortable thing that happened, but a year has gone by. Two years have gone by. I miss her. Where is she? Let me got in contact with her again. Don't be surprised if it's not the end of the relationship.    Anne: Yeah. Very interesting. Hmm. Wow. Well, it certainly was something that threw me for a loop this past week, and I'm glad I'm out the other side. But I did wanna share my experiences 'cause I thought maybe if I can help anybody — and it's funny because I'm, I'm very much a person who likes to showcase my business as being together. And every time, Lau, you and I get together on this show, I'm always going, oh my God, Lau. I've sabotaged myself. I'm feeling insecure, but I'm sharing because I'm hoping it will help people that they're not alone. This happens even if you've been in the industry for a long time, and it looks to everybody like -- I mean I like to think that I have it together, but ultimately the experiences that I go through have helped me to build my character, build my business stronger and hopefully continue to do that. I think the last thing I want, because I put so much of myself into it, is for my business to not survive something like a client relationship that I have decided not to pursue any further.    Lau: I also think too, unless you run the kind of business where you're really relying on one or two or three clients to keep you alive -- I think you're so diversified and you working with so many people, I don't think that's actually possible when you have so many irons in the fire. But I think it's that, again, it's that sort of blown out of proportion perception, that six months down the line or a year when we are talking, you'll be like, how did I take that so hard? Or why was that so important to me?    Anne: Why was that so hard for me? Yeah.   Lau: Why did I go through that? I did the right thing. But why did I, like we, we have a Yiddish word called grizsha. Grizsha. It means to sit for a week and just worry and up, grizsha and upset. Make friction for yourself because you're going through the process of it. It's like grief. It's a loss. You're going through a loss.    Anne: Yeah, that's exactly right. That it was a loss. And I always think, well, the reason why I went into business for myself is so that I didn't have to go through the stresses that I went through when I was working for people. Right? When I was working in the corporate world. And I was like, I'm not gonna be beaten by the man. And literally I'm like, this is what I love about working for myself is that I get to choose. Right? I get to choose who I work with. I get to choose the projects. And again, I think that is such a wonderful blessing, and it's such a wonderful thing to be able to build a business for yourself. ‘Cause you do have the options to make all these choices.    And I think that if you do end up going through an ethical dilemma, I think it's good for the soul, even though it wasn't pleasant going through it. And I second guessed myself and stressed out, and -- but I do think that it is one of the reasons that I think being employed or self-employed and having your own business is such an advantage. I mean, we have those choices in front of us to decide upon who we work with. And again, I don't think you get to that point in your business until you're confident and you have -- for me, it always comes back to, and this is a sad thing to say, but it's a reality is, if you have the financial stability in your business to be able to really make those decisions. And I am grateful, and I'm also proud of the fact that I've built my business to the point where I'm okay, I can say no to a client. And I think any BOSS out there that has been able to do that, wow. I mean how wonderful is that? It's just an amazing thing and you should all be so proud that you are able to make those decisions and able to decide whether or not you want to work with a client or not. That's a luxury.    Lau: It's a huge luxury. And you have to have that awareness of not being such a people pleaser, such a yes person that you're doing that at the demise of you, your business, your model, your time, whatever. Like that's an ethical dilemma for a lot of people. I went through it for many years 'cause I'm a natural-born people pleaser.   Anne: Yeah, me too.    Lau: I was brought up that way actually. And I love having that quality still. A lot of people call me Mama Lau, 'causeit has like sort of caring --   Anne: Oh yeah. That's great.   Lau: — essence to it. But at the same token, you have to be very careful because there are things you must say no to. There are things you must decline, you must whatever. And those are the hard moments, whether they're ethically driven or financially driven or whatever, that you just know in your heart, I really shouldn't be doing this. Or I really don't wanna do this or what — and you're still saying yes, that's your own ethical dilemma. That's your own saying, what is my value system? What are my principles? What do I stand for? And sometimes there's nothing wrong on the other side. It's just you shouldn't be doing it for whatever reason. You know what I mean? So I think you're awakening us all to really having a good hard heart to heart talk with ourselves and saying, yeah, what do we believe in? What do we wanna be doing? What do we wanna spend our time with? When is it okay to say no? And just set that up. Just be okay with that. Don't kill yourself because you're saying no for whatever reason.    Anne: Yeah. Good talk. Thank you, Lau.    Lau: Amazing.    Anne: Mama Lau.    Lau: Amazing.    Anne: I love Mama Lau. (both laugh) That's pretty awesome. Oh man, great discussion. Thank you so much as always. Words of wisdom, golden nuggets from Mama Lau (laughs). BOSSes out there, as individuals, it may seem difficult to make a huge impact, but as a group we can contribute to the growth of our communities in ways that we never before thought possible. Visit 100voiceswhocare.org to learn how. And a big shout-out to our sponsor, ipDTL. You too can connect and network like BOSSes. Find out more at ipdtl.com. Guys, have an amazing week, and we'll see you next week. Bye.   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.com 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.

Ever wanted to know what it takes to create a TV pilot? In this special episode, Anne is joined by Scott & Miranda Parkin to discuss Comet Casino. Comet Casino is a story centered around found family. It talks about those relationships & friendships that grow so near and dear that they feel like family. Scott & Miranda voice two of the characters, but were heavily involved in the creation of the show. From planning out the story to animating, Miranda was in charge and excited about this mid-century modern tale. After two year, the pilot episode is ready & shipped out to all the right people. So what's next for the duo? There may be more planning, creating, and meeting taking in their future…but you have to listen up to hear the whole story.    Transcript   It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere 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.   Anne: Hey everyone, welcome to the VO BOSS podcast. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzza, and today I am so excited and pumped to have the Comet Casino team here with us, special guests Scott and Miranda Parkin. You guys, welcome to the show. Thank you so much. Yay!   Scott: Thank you so much for having me. You were an early supporter of this. (inaudible) merch on your show, you donated money, and now we're in the pitch phase. So we really owe a great debt of gratitude to the VO BOSS.   Miranda: Yeah, seriously.    Anne: Well, thank you. Thank you. I mean, it's not hard to support and love what you guys are doing. So for those BOSSes out there who may not be familiar with the famous Comet Casino team, I thought we would start with a little bit of an introduction of each of you so that the BOSSes can get to know you a little bit better. So let's start with Scott,‘cause he's older. (laughs) So Scott, I mean actor, amazing improv instructor, voice actor, I mean everything. Tell us how you got started in the industry and where it's going (laughs) and your life.    Miranda: And your social security number.    Anne: Yes.    Scott: No, that's horrible. That's horrible advice.  I'm from Sacramento, California, and I started in radio when I was in college. I interned at KCAP, the home of rock. When I was around 20, 18, 19 in that sort of range, I was able to weasel my way onto the air with a guy named Kevin Anderson. He got fired, but he made a tape of the time we were together, sent it to Tulsa, Oklahoma. They had us come out for an audition. They asked me if I'd ever been to Oklahoma. And at the time I said, uh, the furthest east I've been is the Nevada side of Heavenly Valley, dude. And that is literally how we all spoke in Northern California. You were more like this, like, are you gonna put change on your car before you go to Tahoe?    Went out there to Oklahoma and did that. And then I got fired again. Came back to Sacramento, got a gig in Dallas, was there for 11 years, got married, got — moved to Los Angeles in, I wanna say ‘98. Had a kid in 2000, got divorced in 2003, done voiceover and writing for television and acting, and I always say you gotta hit it from every angle possible, so I'll do most of the stuff that they'll pay creative wise. So Miranda's been raised on TV sets and in voiceover lobbies and all that. And she started in the business when she was about five.    Miranda: Pretty crazy.    Anne: So, yeah. So Miranda, let's talk about that because you did grow up in the business. Yeah. I'm so excited again to actually see you and talk with you. And so tell us how you kind of got started, and was this something that, because you were around it for all the time when you were small, is it something that you loved right away, or did you kind of grow into it?    Miranda: Well, I mean, I feel like I loved it first because I was like, oh, I just really love reading. Like I love reading out loud. Like that very much fun.    Scott: Nerd!   Miranda: Shut up.    Anne: That was me too. That was me too.    Scott: Yeah.    Miranda: I liked reading out loud. So when they were like, “hey, do you wanna read this thing out loud,” a little five year old? And I was like, yeah, of course I wanna read that thing out loud. So I did. And then I was like, oh, oh, they like it when I do that. That's cool. I like that. You know, I was five, so I didn't really know, but it just made me feel happy, you know? Like I've always loved reading out loud. And then I got paid to talk about SeaWorld, and I'm like, I love animals and I love talking about whales, like of course I, I'm gonna do that.    Anne: Was this when you were five or a little bit later on?    Miranda: A little bit later on because I started when I was five, and then it was kind of went until eight or nine I think. I think nine was when I, I got the --    Scott: When the hammer got dropped.    Miranda: Yeah. Yeah. I got the job of, uh, Lucy in a direct to DVD Peanuts movie. And my mom was like, no, you can't do that. So I was like, oh, alright. I really like reading out loud. I really like the Peanuts.    Scott: But her dad was a voiceover actor, and anything that had something to do with me was --   Anne: Ah.   Scott: Yeah.   Anne: Okay. So there's the six degrees here I think because you said Lucy, right? You read for the —    Miranda: Right.   Anne: Okay. So my maiden name is Lucy. Okay?   Scott: Excellent. Is that true?    Anne: Yes, it's very true. It's very, because people called me Miss Lucy when I was a teacher, and then they would sing, Miss Lucy had a steamboat. The steamboat had a bell. Exactly.    Scott: I forgot you were a teacher. My mom was a teacher for 35 years. I have I have so many teachers throughout our family.    Anne: Well, so that's number one. And number two is that when I was young, when I was about six, when I was in kindergarten, I love to read out loud as well. And here's where my claim to fame, my creative claim to fame is that I wrote books. I wrote books about Nibbles the Rabbit. And as a kindergartner, I read them to the first graders. So that's my claim to fame. I mean, I --   Miranda: Kind of a power move.    Anne: I mean, so Miranda, if I could only be half as good of, and I illustrated and wrote, and you know what I mean? Which is, that's incredible.    Miranda: That's, that's amazing.    Anne: You do everything. And so I just feel like the apple doesn't far fall from the tree there, I think; the writer, artist, voice actor, actor.   Scott: I can't draw a stick figure without uh, without help. So.   Miranda: That's true. He can draw a palm tree and a lightning bolt.    Anne: There you go. Very good.    Scott: And I can draw an oak tree too though.    Miranda: And an oak tree. Oak tree. Sorry, forgot about that. One of the three.    Scott: Yeah.   Anne: I got good at drawing a rabbit as a kindergarten. But other than that --    Miranda: Nibbles the rabbit.    Anne: — that's kind of where it stopped. Although I always was in awe of people who could draw. And so I want to actually talk about Comet Casino because that's really why I wanted to bring you here so that we can talk about the whole process. Because BOSSes out there, if you're listening, the whole concept of Comet Casino is BOSS from start to as it evolves. Because you have encompassed all areas of the creative arts, all areas of funding, of marketing, of starting something and seeing it grow and seeing it evolve. So I love the evolution of Comet Casino. So before we do that, let me show the BOSSes a little preview of what we have here. So let's do this first.    Scott: Can we set it up real quick?    Anne: Yeah. Let, we're gonna set it up right now.    Scott: This is not a trailer. There's no voiceover or anything like that. This is the first 90 seconds of the pilot, and the shuttle attendant is the lovely great Delisle Griffin. And we love it. And so you get an idea of where our story takes place, who are the principals, and what's going on in the first 90 seconds. The whole thing, the whole pilot presentation is just over 10 minutes. There you go.    Miranda: Yeah, there we go.    Anne: All right. We're gonna give you guys the first 90 seconds. All right. Here we go.    >> Attention passengers. We will be landing shortly on Luparif Omari, please return to your seats. If you've morphed during the flight, please regenerate and buckle up. Okay? And remember, as long as you look like you're gambling, they gotta keep bringing you drinks. Good luck.    >> Luparif Omari. Everybody knows it as the loop. Number one adult playground in the galaxy and the armpit of the fucking universe. Everyone is thrilled when they get here and broken, disillusioned when they leave. That's just after a weekend. I spent the first 18 years of my life here. On the loop, after high school, you pretty much have three choices: bartending school, dealer school or alcoholic gambler. I wanted something more. So I went to law school on the nearest planet. After graduation I took a really good job as a defense attorney. It's difficult and none of it comes easy, but okay, it's somewhere else, and that's all that matters.    So what am I doing back here? My dad, owner of the formerly luxurious Comet Casino passed away. How? Uh, he just stopped breathing while a guy was choking him to death, which on the loop is considered natural causes. The loop is 100 miles of casinos, clubs, and general debauchery crammed into a thin band of oxygen. Everything else is toxic. My dad used to drop off associates in the desert when it was time for them to die of natural causes.    >> Hurry. Hurry, everyone.    Anne: Haha, awesome. I love it. And can I tell you that honestly, when I first heard it, I love the beginning, right, with the introduction. But Miranda, when you start telling the story, I teach like storytelling to students for years. And you have such a beautiful, wonderful presentation of storytelling in that, like it is so damn impressive.    Miranda: Hey, I used to love reading stories out loud. Now I do it all the time.    Anne: If Scott knows me, I don't say that lightly. I love, love the performance.    Scott: That's not — this whole thing, this has been two years in the making, and we directed all these legends who are friends of ours and have always supported Miranda. And if Miranda wasn't able to hold their own with these legends, it doesn't work. All of what we've done, it just doesn't work. So.   Miranda: That was one thing that I got scared about. Like I know literally like after we like got all these people to do it, and they were like, all right, now it's time to record your part. And I'm like, oh, I have to actually, I have to go up against these — oh my God. Not, not go up against, but like work with, like be in the same cartoon as, and I'm like, oh my God, that's like a dream come true regardless of where this thing goes.    Scott: Yes. And frightening as hell. And same for me. ‘Cause Miranda actually does video games and animation. I don't do so much of either of those. So after asking these people and then having to, you know, what was really cool was that we recorded our parts at SoundBox LA with Tim Friedlander. So first Miranda and Tim directed me, and then we switched, and Tim and I directed Miranda. So that was really, it was really cool. And he's been so supportive and known Miranda for a very long time. So it was, it was just really cool to do our parts at Tim's with Tim directing.    Miranda: Yeah. ‘Cause he's such a good friend and such a great dude. And he supported it all the way through. It just seemed like a natural fit.    Anne: So let's talk about, how did it all start?    Miranda: Ooh, ooh, ooh. I've got this one.    Anne: Okay.    Scott: Keep it tight and bright.    Miranda: So essentially it started as an FBI agent gets teleported into space and works off her debt at a space casino. So that was like our initial idea. And I wanted to do something    Scott: That was all Miranda's --   Miranda: Yeah. And then I was like, okay, well the FBI thing is kind of silly, stupid. Let's just go with a mother-daughter story about a girl that actually lives in the casino and went to the casino and like lived at the casino, and her mom was the boss and she had to come back. And then we were just like, okay, let's cut the mom. Because I don't know how to tell a mother daughter story. I know how to tell a father-daughter story. So let's make a father-daughter story about a dysfunctional --   Scott: Well Miranda, you have to be honest, Ed Jager, our head writer and 23 year veteran television writer came in and said, I'm killing the mom. There's no story there. It's a father-daughter story. It's all about the daughter. Going away. Wanting to get the hell outta home, and then having to come back and then finding out that, ah, you know what? I hate this place, but I work here. It works. I have a connection here, and I'm really good at all the jobs I'm doing. It's the Joan Didian. You can't go home but you, maybe you can kind of thing.  Does that make sense?    Miranda: See the thing is like at the beginning of it, it morphed and switched. But I always wanted to make it a space casino. Always, always, always.    Anne: But then, let me backtrack here. So you're telling me the beginnings of the story, but what's the beginnings of the idea, Miranda? Was it something that you said, I wanna create? So not many people in this industry, and I know BOSSes out there, this is the whole enchilada, this is the writing, the artistry, the production, the casting. So did you just one day say, I wanna make a show like (laughs)?    Scott: We pitch ideas back and forth and have written a bunch of stuff, but Miranda always said that whenever they go animated shows, they have an episode at a casino. But I forget how you said it, M, I'm sorry.    Miranda: So like in a lot of sci-fi media, there's always like a one-off episode with a casino. Like in Cowboy Bebop, there's a one-off episode with a space casino. In Star Wars, they go to a space casino in one of the newest Star Wars movies. In like Rick and Morty, they go to a Dave and Busters type thing called Blips and Shits. And I'm just like, why don't you stay there? There's so much potential. You have beings from all over the galaxy. You know, you have people that go to Vegas for conventions. You've got people that go to Vegas in sororities. You have gangsters and mobsters and bachelor parties    Anne: I love it.   Scott: Corporate convention. Always bringing different people. And if you put it out in space, 200 years in the future, the hell knows what --   Anne: Right. So many stories. I mean, I think so many stories can evolve from that. So yeah, there's longevity there. Yeah.    Scott: The other thing we really liked was the found family because Miranda's been, was at my house from age 16 on solo and moved out two years ago. So big on found family. At my house growing up there was always an extra person. Somebody that just got divorced or some teenager had been kicked out of their house. So we're big on found family. A found family is such a lovely story. You can take in so many different directions, and in Miranda's situation, it's right here, found family.   Miranda: But also it's relatable to everyone. Whether you have a good relationship with your parents or not, you always have friends. You know, friends are the family that you choose. I know it's cheesy, but everyone can relate to it. Everyone has a friend that you feel like you're a sibling.    Anne: So then you had this idea that you wanted to do this. The two of you were bouncing ideas and then you said, yes, this sounds amazing. Let's get a writer. Like what happened after that? Just get a writer involved.    Scott: Like I said, we've had multiple ideas, and I think they're very solid ideas, but Miranda is a voracious performer and artist. They like to keep going and going and going. So if we didn't get something with legs on it early, it got set aside and fan art and something else, or voiceover or her life just got in. But this was much more substantial. And it has something that Miranda really likes is retro futurism and 50's --    Miranda: Like mid-century modern atomic age type stuff, Jetsons style.    Anne: Yeah, absolutely.    Scott: They really enjoyed drawing. So it was very inspirational. And then I showed it to my buddy Ed. We had made a little video presentation and it's 1000 degrees different than that, than the thing that we first made. But he goes, this is great. We showed it to Swampy Marsh, the creator of Phineas and Ferb, who's sort of Miranda's mentor and my good friend. And then we all got together with a couple of the writers from Gary Unmarried, that show my buddy Ed wrote about my life that was on CBS, and other writers that I'd worked with on their pilots. And we all got a room and sort of hammered out a thing.    And then the found family thing, or how each of the casino employees used to work at the casino as a crooner or a fighter or something like that. And now the old man me has hired him to work on the, on the thing because they're no longer viable as performers. So we had that, and then Ed just took it off and built this great daughter goes away and comes back to save the found family sort of thing.    Miranda: And it was so well done and well-written. And we pitched on jokes, and I would be like, oh, this character probably wouldn't say that, or this and that. But most of it was Ed really. He just brought this huge heart to it.    Scott: Ed started on Roseanne and worked on Darma and Greg and so many great shows. And I was a joke guy, so you know, we were able to make the jokes crackle, and then you just crank it, crank it down, crank it down until it's tight. And then we hired Swampy Marsh and Bernie Patterson at Surfer Jack to do the staging animatics. So each time they go through, it's single line, really rudimentary, but it gives you a good idea of where everyone's going and what it will look like. I think they did four passes there. They hired Miranda to work on small projects. So Miranda got to work on her own pilot there.    And then I think after we had our thank you party last summer at Tim's, Miranda said, I want it all to be -- I have so many ideas. I want more characters, I want some different backgrounds. This would be funnier if a chop from above. And so Miranda said, I wanna do all of this. So she redid everything. And so every frame you see in the thing is her character's shirt background, a couple backgrounds. We hired her roommate Lauren to do, really wonderful stuff. But almost all of it is Miranda's vision. So there you go. And then laid in all the sound. Tim West at Rebel Alliances donated hours and hours and hours of time. So the sound design is really good. Adam Gutman, Miranda, you can talk about.    Miranda: Yeah. He's like a, he's a Disney composer. He does like all the music for these Star Wars land rides, and Amphibia, and he's worked on Greatest Showman and all these things. And I did a lot of work with him during the lockdown, and he had this like musical project, and I was able to do some animatics for him. And then after that, you know, we kept in contact and then he was like, if you don't let me do the music for Comet Casino, I will be very sad if you don't let me just do it. You know. And I was like --   Scott: Of course, of course.   Miranda: He had all these like great kind of almost hotel lobby tracks from like a Star Wars thing that he worked on. And he's just like, I can tweak this and do this. I'm like, that is so cool. It was crazy.    Anne: So a few things that I wanna point out to the BOSSes out there, because again, I think a lot of people that listen to the VO BOSS podcast they're thinking very much in just voiceover. And again, the scope of this project is so amazing, and I'm hearing a couple of things that just keep coming back to me. Number one is having a great network, right? And having a wonderful team to help put this together. And so I think that networking is such an important thing to have a successful --   Scott: Without, without it, this wouldn't exist.    Anne: Yeah.    Scott: I called in and asked every favor I had to get us at this point.    Anne: Yeah, absolutely.    Scott: Listen, I don't constantly work for free, but I work with friends and things I like mm-hmm and everyone liked all these people that are in this, Maurice Lamar, Billy West, Tara Strong, Luray, Newman, Mindy Sterling — all of them have known Miranda since about three years old because I was asked to be divorced when Miranda was three. So I had her with me, and they all sort of watched her grow up and watched her. So when I said, hey you guys, this is what we're doing, would you be willing? And they all said the same, some version of yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Tara Strong's like, just tell me where to talk. They didn't owe me anything, but I, we asked favors.    Miranda: And one thing that I was so happy about is they've always been, ‘cause we're, you know, a lot of us are at the same agency. So like from being a kid, like not not a kid, but like, you know, in my 20s, early, early teenage years, they were always like, if you make something, if you make something, you know, put me in it. Please. So, you know, and then we finally followed through with an idea, and now it was like, I can do that. I can ask these people and they'll say yes. And that's just a such a great feeling to have, to have such a great support network of all these incredible talented people. I'm really honored.    Scott: And Miranda designed each of the characters for each of those actors. Aunt Maisie was designed for Tara Strong. Gary Anthony Williams is Hendrix. So that's kind of a cool thing too. But you definitely have to be willing to work with -- I mean I've worked on so many pilots that got shot and didn't get to air. I don't get any money from that. I just get the experience providing and supporting. So when I have something, I call those guys and they're like, yeah, let's get together and write this.    Anne: So then yet another thing that I wanna talk about that I think is so important in the development of this is you're still pursuing this, you're still getting funding for this. And so --   Scott: We've just started this phase.    Anne: Right.   Scott: We, it's taken two years to get up to that.   Anne: Yeah. And I think that there's something to be said for the level of commitment obviously, that you have to have for this. I mean in my brain, there's no way that it can't not be successful for you guys. I mean that's the way I feel. I don't know.    Miranda: I honestly think it's successful already. I am just, I am happy to be involved with these incredible people. I'm happy to have this part of my portfolio, and I'm ready to get this, this art in front of people who work in amazing studios. Like all these studio people are going to be seeing my art. So that was like the goal from early on was to get my art in front of studios, and whether it gets made or not, it's just a step in the right direction regardless.    Anne: I love that.    Scott: The beginning premise was to get experience at storyboarding character design and backgrounds. So when we hired Surfer Jack, the idea was that Miranda would sit on Bernie's shoulder and watch him staging storyboard. But then Swampy screwed that up by hiring Miranda before they even started on the pilot to be head of small projects there. So the idea was to get all of her stuff in front of as many people as possible. And because of Ed -- his theatrical representation is APA — they saw that 90-second trailer and called us in for a strategy meeting. So now we're actually represented by APA.    Anne: Love it. That's huge.   Scott: They're not only showbiz adjacent, but they represent people like 50 Cent, Mark Ruffalo, you know, that kinda people. So now, next week the pilot goes out to every animation studio and every streaming service, full support of the head of animation at APA. And they'll bug them to watch it and then hopefully take a meeting. So we already won because all of that stuff is in front of them. And Miranda -- by the way, she's like, in my early twenties — these are your early 20's; you're 28 (?) until next week, you know.   Anne: That's phenomenal. Miranda, I love that you said that it's already a success because it truly is in my eyes, and that's why I feel like it can't be anything but a success already. I've seen it evolve, I've seen it progress, and to me I'm in awe. I think it's amazing. I love the evolution, I love the whole creative process. And I think that it would help BOSSes to maybe wrap their heads around the whole production process of a creative project because I think it will help us to become better actors, become better business people, understanding the networking that you guys are going through and the process to get this produced and and get this out and see if — it's like a big huge audition. Right?    Scott: It is. The other thing is, I told you I don't book animation. So what we did was build a pilot and write ourselves into the pilot. So if I book animation, it'd likely be something that we wrote then Miranda drew. So I think that's a really important thing for anybody getting into it. Don't wait to be asked to the dance. Get out there and start dancing.    Miranda: I also think like the thing about networking that you said like Swampy, a friend of ours, you never know who you are going to meet or who's gonna hire you or who's gonna be your friend and let you work on their project or whatever. ‘Cause like, you know, I hired my roommate to work on some of the backgrounds for Comet. And the networking is so important in this industry, especially with animation, the way that it is right now. ‘Cause animation is very weird and not an incredible industry to get into right now. ‘Cause everything is very up in the air.    Scott: What do you mean, not a great industry? Do you mean it's uncertain?    Miranda: Yeah, it's very uncertain and there's lots of things.    Scott: Voiceover and acting --   Miranda: No, no, but like animation in particular, a lot of animated projects are getting canned. Like they took so much off of HBO Max and Netflix. Like all these animated projects on Netflix.   Scott: That happens in every facet of the entertainment --   Miranda: Right. That's true.   Anne: Ebb and flow.    Scott: It's building your house on mud and hoping for the best.    Miranda: Yeah.    Anne: Yeah.    Miranda: But you know, like you just never know who is gonna hire you. You never know who's gonna be part of your story next. So.   Scott: It's also a good reason to be nice to everybody.    Miranda: Exactly. It costs some money.    Scott: ‘Cause you never know. And that's why I always say, hey people, I know we have, we're represented by an agency, but please if I sent you the pilot and said, hey, send it to creators that you know, it's always great when something comes to the same point from different connections.    Anne: Sure. Absolutely.    Scott: Oh, this is the pilot. Oh this is the guy that Apple, the Apple guy sent me this. So I believe you gotta get as many lines in the water as you can.    Anne: Absolutely. And that networking completely helps that. And I think that it's just something that's so important for us to know as we progress in this industry because this industry's uncertain, voice acting. Oh, oh my gosh. You know?   Scott: Also the other thing is Miranda's not stopping. She's doing Comet art for the pitch deck. Should we get the meeting, I feel confident people are gonna say, hey come in. We like it. We'd like to chat, doing that. But she's also prepping a bunch of stuff to submit for Smiling Friends. She just had a meeting with the storyboard director from Mitchells and the Machines. So you know, you can't just go, well, we've got our pilot. Let's just sit back and let the money roll in.   Miranda: Not over until it's over.    Anne: That's not over.    Miranda: It doesn't start till it starts.    Scott: Ah, I like that one.    Anne: Yeah. Now lemme ask you, Comet Casino, what's next? What's the next step?    Scott: Next week. Well, Miranda's doing art for the pitch deck. Hopefully it goes out to all the stupid buddies, the the titmouses, the --   Miranda: Bento boxes, the tornates, the 20th Century Fox.    Scott: It's gonna go out to every relevant animation company and every streamer, Amazon, Apple, all of those. And then we clear our schedule because we'll be just meeting so many people and having a bidding war on the Comet scene.    Anne: There you go.    Miranda: One would hope. One would hope.    Scott: We still, did you get one of these, Anne?    Anne: I did not get a bag.    Scott: We wanna send you a bag as a gift from the Comet Casino.    Anne: Oh, I love it.    Scott: And we'll put one of the lucky chips in there too.    Anne: Oh, I love that.    Scott: I always keep 'em in my pocket when I audition and I booked three commercials with one ofthese in my pocket.    Anne: Well, thank you. So let me ask you guys, before we go, first of all, how can somebody buy Comic Casino merch? Where do they go?    Miranda: They go to the Comet Casino gift shop, and it's the first thing that comes up on Google. I'll also send you the link so you can put it in the description of whatever podcast.    Anne: The Comet Casino gift shop. And guys, I have a few things. I have a few things from the Comet Casino, but I do not have a bag, so I would love that.    Scott: We'll send you the retro airline bag.    Anne: Thank you.    Scott: Cool thing where you put the cardboard on the bottom, and they put hard glasses in the bottom.    Anne: I love it.    Scott: And then we still have a bunch of shirts. We don't have a lot of stuff. We got hit pretty hard. Oh, we do have some of these handmade pendants that are really, really cool. We only have a -- I think there's only five of those left. They're really, really, really stunning.    Anne: That's very cool.    Scott: Our friend Lori Magna is this artisan in Boston, and she made, she does all the little -- I mean --   Anne: Oh, I love it.    Miranda: Aren't they so cool?   Anne: I love it. So Comet Casino gift shop.    Miranda: Yes, indeed.    Anne: And how can someone follow you, Miranda?    Miranda: Oh, well my Instagram is Parkinart, Parkinart. No spaces, no caps, no nothing. No, no underscores or dots or dits or numbers.    Anne: Perfect.    Scott: You can see me on a Tide commercial    Anne: Ah yes.    Miranda: And his Instagram. His Instagram --   Scott: Hang on, I forgot to say we just got these, the premade --   Miranda: The booklets.   Scott: Big comic books with all the concept art. They're 22 pages, and we just got these. There was a misprint. We got to help with the pitch and they did a misprint --   Anne: Will you be signing?    Scott: We're signing. Miranda will sign. I'll sign it. It doesn't really matter if I sign it, but Miranda's gonna sign it, and then if you get other cast members to sign it, you got something there.    Anne: Very nice.    Scott: That'll be up on here very quickly as well.    Anne: Very nice.    Scott: Anne, thank you so much. So sweet of you to have us on.    Anne: Thank you, guys. It was amazing. So much fun. And I'm looking forward to interviewing you again after it gets picked up and you guys --   Scott: Absolutely. And remember, we're voice first, and we have a very long memory and we remember everybody that was so supportive and helpful. And believe me, we'll be working hard. We don't know who's gonna buy it or what the situation will be. They may buy it outright, tell us to go away, you know what I mean? So we have no idea what that looks like. But if we have any say in it, we're gonna bring people to audition. Everybody gets up to bat, we're gonna write your names as a character, spread the wealth.    Anne: Love it. And your cat wants to say hello. I love it. You know, I have three cats, so I'm all about that. Well fantastic, guys. Thank you so much again. It was amazing. So much fun. Love, love, love what you're doing.    Miranda: Thank you so much for having us on.    Anne: Absolutely.    Scott: You've been so supportive, Anne. You jumped on the bandwagon and gave away merch very early on. This was an expensive proposal, right? Hiring an animation company to do four passes, and then I was sending random money to not take any other work while they worked on this thing. So it's really, really helpful to have such support. The main thing is, it's just really fun to see the cool logo and all the great art on it. It's very nice.    Anne: Absolutely. All right, well BOSSes, here's your chance to use your voice to make an immediate difference in our world and give back to the communities that give to you. Besides giving to Comet Casino, you can go to 100Voiceswhocare.org to find out more and commit. And also big shout out to our sponsor, ipDTL. You too can network communicate like BOSS. Find out more at ipdtl.com. You guys, have an amazing week and we will see you next week. Bye!   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.com 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.

What you'll learn in this episode:   How Jeremy found that landscape architecture translated to jewelry making Why he was drawn to working with paper, and how he came up with his distinctive technique Why jewelry is a powerful object to preserve memories Jeremy's design process and how he creates a unique piece of jewelry for each client   About Jeremy May   Jeremy May is a Landscape Architect born in Suffolk, UK. After having worked in his field of design for over 10 years, Jeremy created the first paper ring in September 2007. Jeremy's literary jewels were first introduced to the public in January 2009, transforming the paper that aspires to last beautifully and bring joy, colour, and love to all those sustainably minded individuals. The jewels have been presented in London, Paris, Osaka, Athens, Hamburg and Saint Petersburg. Currently Jeremy is working on private commissions and on creating collections of jewels under a thematology to be presented in exhibitions around the world. He lives and works in London.   Additional Resources: Jermey's Website Jermey's Instagram   Photos available on TheJewelryJourney.com   Transcript:   It takes an adventurous jewelry designer to eschew traditional materials like metal and diamonds in favor of paper. But as a former landscape architect who left his career for more thrilling creative pursuits, Jeremy May was up for the challenge. He joined the Jewelry Journey Podcast to talk about why he was drawn to paper when he first discovered jewelry making; how he came up with his one-of-a-kind technique; and how he works with clients to create the perfect, meaningful piece. Read the episode transcript here.  Sharon: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Jewelry Journey Podcast. This is the second part of a two-part episode. If you haven't heard part one, please head to TheJewelryJourney.com.    Today, speaking to us from London is Jeremy May, who creates unique literary jewels from pages of vintage books. He transforms these books into unique pieces of paper jewelry with quotes carefully cut from the book. Each piece is unique to the wearer. We will hear more about the books and how he creates his unique jewels today. Welcome back.    So, you're proud of everything you do, you said. Have you ever told a client, “That book isn't the right book for you”?   Jeremy: Yeah. I've had clients come and say, “I'd like you to use this book,” and I'm like, “No, not really. Can you think of something else?”   Sharon: You don't think the book reflects the person they want to give it to? It's too blah?   Jeremy: I haven't really thought it through. If they say, “I want you to reuse this book because of this and this,” then I'll say, “O.K., that's fine. It's not my personal choice. I don't particularly like that style of writing. I don't like that author,” but sometimes you get a feeling they want me to make a piece of jewelry and they haven't really thought through what the title is or what it means or what the story represents. Sometimes after we've had a chat and I've explained my feelings about the book, they go, “O.K., yeah, you're absolutely right.” They come back with another title and I go, “O.K., that's great.”    Sharon: So they listen to you, basically. Besides the jewelry, they listen to you. You describe your jewels as sculptural, and you haven't put them together. Is that something you intend to do?   Jeremy: That's right, to put them together.   Sharon: Put them together to make a larger sculpture. Do you intend to do that?   Jeremy: Yeah, potentially. Sometimes I think about things and they don't come to fruition for years. I'm a very messy designer. I don't have notebooks. I'm not that way. I just have loose pieces of paper, much to my wife's annoyance. I'll take a piece of paper and just sketch. I have an idea, and then I'll put that in a drawer. I'll be looking for something six months later and I'll go, “Oh, yeah, I forgot about it.” Sometimes it takes a while. I would love to make something bigger, actually combining books together to make one piece. Yes, absolutely. It's definitely possible.   Sharon: The people who find you are mostly men. What happens when a book is in a different language, like you described how you were in Japan and you had an exhibit? What do you do when it's in a different language?   Jeremy: I find a translation online, or I can go and buy another book in English. The majority of books—this sounds very pompous—are in English, and then they've been translated into another language. When someone comes to me, I can go, “Yeah,” and I can find that quite easily. Basically, I find a translation in English.   Sharon: That's interesting. What kind of creative outlets did you think about when you were leaving architecture?   Jeremy: How do you mean?    Sharon: You had mentioned that you left architecture because you felt you could do other things and you'd done it for 12 years.    Jeremy: Yeah.   Sharon: Did you think about other creative outlets you could do instead?   Jeremy: No, the jewelry came at the time when I thought I was happy doing landscape architecture with design. I realized by working with jewelry and creating jewelry that I was happier in a way. I had more creativity, more ideas, more output. I was like, “Oh, there's a bright light. I'm just going to go over here.” I was quite happy where I was until I was given something else to take my attention. I didn't think about anything else.   Sharon: You're following the shiny penny.   Jeremy: Yes.   Sharon: Did you immediately transition from architecture to jewelry? The way you described it, it didn't sound like you did both for 10 years and then segued to jewelry.   Jeremy: No, I created a few pieces of jewelry over about two years. I was still working in an office as a landscape architect, and slowly I was spending more time making jewelry and experimenting. Then it came to 2008 when the recession happened here in the U.K., and a lot of my projects I was working on with Watkins Dally Architects were put on hold. Then I was given the opportunity to spend more time working on my new passion. I worked on that for about six months. I was so enthusiastic about it, but I wasn't getting enough work. I wasn't paying the bills, let's say. So, I went back and worked with Watkins Dally Architects for another year and was still working on jewelry at night. After that, I went into creating my jewelry full time. So, there was a transition of a few years.    Sharon: What made you decide on jewelry? A lot of people have it as a hobby. You came home from your landscape architecture job during the day and then did jewelry in the evening.    Jeremy: Yes.   Sharon: Describe your feelings there.   Jeremy: I felt so passionate about it. This is what I wanted to do. This was my calling, if you like. It's what really got me excited and got me out of bed in the morning. I was really happy about it. It was a big leap of faith, and my wife was super understanding. I just went for it and so far, it's paid off.    Sharon: You have an understanding wife. I probably would be saying to my husband to go get a job. You mentioned that you ask your clients for their favorite quotes within the book. Is that correct?   Jeremy: I ask them for their quotes. I also take my own quotes.    Sharon: It's encased in the jewelry then, if I'm understanding it correctly. Right?   Jeremy: I take the book as the foundation for the design. I then take the quote as the detailing of the jewel.    Sharon: Does the quote come directly from the book?   Jeremy: Yes. There will be a particular quote I get inspired by to complete the piece of jewelry. It's also within the jewel. Sometimes it appears on the surface and sometimes it's inside. There have been times when clients have asked me for a particular quote to appear on the actual jewel so it's visible, which is very passionate to them. It's a combination of the two, I would say.   Sharon: If it's in the jewel, if it's not on the outside, what's their feeling? Do they get upset or do they trust you that it's there?   Jeremy: They trust me, which is amazing.    Sharon: How do you get more color? Do you get more color into the jewel if your client wants more color?   Jeremy: Yes, I have two ways of doing that. One is I stain or dye the paper if I want a particular shade or color I can't find using colored paper. That's the other way I add color to my jewels, from colored paper, which I find everywhere with wrapping paper. I find it and store it. I have drawers of different colored paper.    Sharon; Do you use that paper?   Jeremy: Yeah.   Sharon: Has anybody ever come to you with a comic book and said, “Do something with this?”   Jeremy: No, they haven't, but I have used Japanese manga books. They were absolutely amazing to use.   Sharon: Why?   Jeremy: Because they have so much depth and color and texture. When you're laminating from a book using just text, you have the color of the paper and then you have the black text. When you're using a coloring book or a manga book, then the actual color from the ink is there. You end up with this very multicolored surface and technique. It's much more vibrant.   Sharon: It sounds very nice.   Jeremy: Yeah, it's super nice. I was fortunate enough to go to Japan, and I came back with a second suitcase.    Sharon: Do you have favorite books you like to do, favorite jewels you like to do? What are your thoughts about that?   Jeremy: No. I go to secondhand bookshops and charity bookshops. I go there every week and look for whatever takes my fancy. I'm a bit of a magpie when it comes to that. Then books will sit on my bookshelf. This is for when I'm making jewels for my own collection to exhibit in museums and galleries. They may sit there for a few years or a few months, and then I'll be inspired to take that book and read it.    I look to choose books that I would never normally find. That's why I like to go to secondhand bookshops, because you never know what you're going to find. It's there, and you can sit there and actually look. When you to go to a new bookshop, they're all pristine and perfect and in alphabetical order and everything. I like to go rummaging. I like to go through big piles and boxes of books and discover something I would never find normally by going online or into a new bookshop.   Sharon: When a client brings you a book you haven't read, do you read the book first?   Jeremy: Absolutely. I read all of the books. Even if I've read it before, I read it again because it gives different emotions, which I then translate into the design. I always read the book, no matter if I've read it two or three times before.   Sharon: When you say you are passionate about jewelry, how does that compare to passion for landscape architecture? It sounds like that really caught your fancy in the beginning.   Jeremy: Yes, the similarities between the two are that they both change people's lives. I think with landscape architecture, you're working with the greater public and you're designing an environment which is going to change their lives for the better, hopefully. With jewelry, you're creating something beautiful which is going to change someone's life. That's just one person's life, but they're quite similar.   Sharon: In the beginning, did your passion to change people's lives with landscape architecture influence the way you do jewelry?   Jeremy: In the beginning, yes. I was designing urban parks and working directly with the public. You have lots of conversations with them and you work up their exact needs. Sometimes a lot of people don't know what they need, so you need to ask them other questions to find out about their lives and how they're going to use the landscape. Then you come up with a design that way.    Sharon: If somebody needs a jewel and comes to you and says, “I need a jewel for an anniversary,” what do you ask? Tell us what you ask.   Jeremy: It's quite funny because there are a lot of transferrable things from working with landscape architecture and designing a park with making a piece of jewelry. I ask people to send a small bio about who it's going to be made for so I can actually understand who they are. Otherwise, I'm designing blind. I get inspired. I take a lot of inspiration and discovery from the text, but I also need to understand who I'm creating for because all my jewelry is completely unique. I'm not producing the same ring or necklace over and over again, so I want to know who I'm designing for. I don't ask specific questions. I want the person to explain to me and give me little nuggets of information that fill me with joy. When a gentleman comes to me and says, “I want a ring for my wife,” you go up into the clouds and he's like, “Yes, she's lovely.” I love that. I really love that.   Sharon: Do people find it hard to write about another person?   Jeremy: No, I have never noticed that because it's about your loved one. It's someone you deeply care about that you want to have this piece of jewelry designed for them. I've never had anyone say, “I don't know.” It's very spontaneous, I think. I've had pages sometimes, and sometimes it's just been a couple of paragraphs.   Sharon: I can see writing about somebody else. If I had to write about myself, that would be harder.   Jeremy: Yeah, but sometimes people give a little biography. Sometimes people want me to use a book that was given to them by their father and the father has passed away. They'll explain more about their father or their mother or someone who's passed away and explain why this book is so personal to them. They may say a little bit about themselves, but there's more about why they want this book used. You end up designing a ring for that person, but you're also understanding where that desire to have that jewelry comes from. It's for the passing of a dear friend or a relative. It all adds into the soup.    Sharon: The mixture.   Jeremy: Yeah, the mixture of the design. All those things are swimming around in my head. That's what I really love about it.   Sharon: Can you describe how it is when you jump out of bed, or do you jump out of bed? What do you start or how?   Jeremy: In the morning, it depends on the day, but most of the days I'm ready to go. There are some times when I take a weekend off and I'm super, super eager to get back into the studio on Monday morning. I have itchy fingers.   Sharon: Do you ever have kids—let's say their parent comes and they say this is for their mom, but the kids give the book and want you to create the jewel?   Jeremy: Yes, yeah.   Sharon: Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. It's great. Your work is in a collection, you said.    Jeremy: Yes, I am. I'm about to go off now to the private view. That's happening now. I'm super excited about that. That's going to happen over the next few days. I'm super, super excited.    Sharon: I wish I could be there to see all your jewels. Another year. Jeremy, thank you very much.   Jeremy: Thank you very much. It's been an honor.   Sharon: We will have photos posted on the website. Please head to TheJewelryJourney.com to check them out.   Thank you again for listening. Please leave us a rating and review so we can help others start their own jewelry journey.  

What you'll learn in this episode:   How Jeremy found that landscape architecture translated to jewelry making Why he was drawn to working with paper, and how he came up with his distinctive technique Why jewelry is a powerful object to preserve memories Jeremy's design process and how he creates a unique piece of jewelry for each client   About Jeremy May   Jeremy May is a Landscape Architect born in Suffolk, UK. After having worked in his field of design for over 10 years, Jeremy created the first paper ring in September 2007. Jeremy's literary jewels were first introduced to the public in January 2009, transforming the paper that aspires to last beautifully and bring joy, colour, and love to all those sustainably minded individuals. The jewels have been presented in London, Paris, Osaka, Athens, Hamburg and Saint Petersburg. Currently Jeremy is working on private commissions and on creating collections of jewels under a thematology to be presented in exhibitions around the world. He lives and works in London.   Additional Resources: Jermey's Website Jermey's Instagram   Photos available on TheJewelryJourney.com   Transcript:   It takes an adventurous jewelry designer to eschew traditional materials like metal and diamonds in favor of paper. But as a former landscape architect who left his career for more thrilling creative pursuits, Jeremy May was up for the challenge. He joined the Jewelry Journey Podcast to talk about why he was drawn to paper when he first discovered jewelry making; how he came up with his one-of-a-kind technique; and how he works with clients to create the perfect, meaningful piece. Read the episode transcript here.  Sharon: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Jewelry Journey Podcast. This is the first part of a two-part episode. Please make sure you subscribe so you can hear part two as soon as it's released later this week.    Today, speaking to us from London is Jeremy May, who creates unique literary jewels from pages of vintage books. He transforms these books into unique pieces of paper jewelry with quotes carefully cut from the book. Each piece is unique to the wearer. We will hear more about the books and how he creates his unique jewels today. Jeremy, welcome to the program.   Jeremy: Hello. It's an honor and a delight to speak to you.   Sharon: Tell us about your jewelry journey. How did you start?   Jeremy: I started in 2007. I made my first ring for my wife for our first wedding anniversary. I made it from a newspaper, and that's basically how it all started for me in the jewelry world. I studied as a landscape architect, and I did that for about 12 years. When I made the first ring, that was like the catalyst. I saw my new profession, and I decided that landscape architecture was not for me. I started making jewelry.   Sharon: With landscape architecture, had it been in the back of your mind, “I have to find something else”?   Jeremy: I started landscape architecture from a very young age. My parents were both in the horticulture world, so it was in the forefront of my mind. My grandfather was a head gardener, so plants and horticulture were always at the forefront of my mind. It was second nature. For me, a progression into landscape architecture was great because I loved art and design, and that was my output, if you like, for creativity. From a very young age, about the age of 12 or 13, I decided I was going to be a landscape architect.    I researched and worked out how I was going to do this, what courses and classes I needed to take. I ended up going to Greenwich University, and it was very much an art-based course. It was less about horticulture and plants and more about design. I loved it; I adored it, actually. It was less writing and exam-based and more about design and making artwork, really. I was in my element there, and then you get to the end of the course and go, “O.K., now I have to go and get a job. That's fine.” For 10 years, I loved it; I really did. I was working with the public. I was creating urban parks in London and having so much fun, but my biggest problem was that the projects were taking too long. They were taking years and years to come to fruition. I started to get itchy feet, so I decided I was going to change, but I didn't know what and I didn't know how. This went on for two years.    In the meantime, I made my first ring for Eva, and then it was like, “Oh wow! I can do this.” I had never thought about jewelry before. I had never thought there was this whole world out there. I had no understanding of it, but I knew I was getting excited about it. I was like a dog with a bone. I went to see friends who were jewelers and watchmakers and product designers, and I asked them questions. I had lots of chats with them and they helped me a lot. They gave me books and introduced me to other people, but everything they were saying wasn't interesting to me. They were showing me things that had already been done by people who had already worked with metal, with pearls, with diamonds, and it didn't really interest me.    I really wanted to understand paper, so people were showing me origami and folded paper. I was like, “O.K., that's great, but it's not really what I'm interested in.” I wanted to discover something new. I wanted to invent something or do something that no one else was really doing. I was just playing around, and I started stacking paper up. It was like a eureka moment. I compressed them under high pressure, and then it was like, “Oh wow! That works!” It was almost like turning paper back into wood. I created a material—it was a bit like plywood—but I wasn't using any glues or resins. It was also purely natural. It was just paper. I was like, “Oh wow! If I do it like this and I do that, maybe I can make a ring out of this.” That's basically how I started.    Sharon: With all the art they taught you, did they touch on jewelry at all?   Jeremy: No, never. It was fine art. It was painting. It was a little bit of collage, and we were working with clay. We were working with a lot of materials. We were given the opportunity to experiment and do anything to get the mind working, to be inspired and then to help you come up with a design. They were trying to get you to have a catalyst to get you inspired.    Sharon: Inspired for landscape architecture work or everything?   Jeremy: Well, it was good training for anything, but in this situation it was for landscape architecture. If ever you got stuck with a design and you didn't know where to go, they were saying, “Why don't you do a collage? Why don't you do a painting? Why don't you make something with your hands?” It would help you become un-stuck and inspire you.    At university, my teachers were constantly saying, “Think about something new. Think about something different. Don't go down the same route. Don't copy.” That formed me. What molded me into me now is that I don't want to copy people. I don't want to copy a design. I don't want to copy my same design. I want each piece I make to be unique and one-off. It bores me, in a way, to repeat myself. I can't do it. If someone says to me, “Oh, I like that ring. Can you make one the same?” No, I can't.   Sharon: That's interesting. When you went to these jewelers to ask them their opinion or get ideas, you already had it in mind that you wanted to do something different.   Jeremy: Yeah, because I didn't know what it was to work with paper. I thought about working with wood or some other material. They gave me books, “This is what other people have done,” and I was like, “That's great, but it's not what I want.” I wasn't inspired. It wasn't like, “Oh, wow! Maybe I can work on that and come up with another solution, another idea.” When I went away, I was a bit disappointed and frustrated, but after sitting there daydreaming—which is one of the things I love, just to daydream, to have the opportunity to sit back and look out the window and let your mind wander. I find a lot of solutions and problems are solved that way. Yes, my friends helped me a lot in showing me what I didn't want to do.   Sharon: These people, these jewelers, probably thought you were nuts when you mentioned paper.    Jeremy: Yes, in a way. They were classically trained jewelers working with precious metals and I said, “O.K., I want to do something different. I don't know what I want to do. Can you help me? I really want to work with paper because paper is the first material for a wedding anniversary.” That was my starting point. From there, it was like, “O.K., maybe you could do this. Maybe you could that,” and I was like, “O.K.”   Sharon: How do you choose the paper and the book? If I come to you with a book, do you say, “O.K., I'll take this book and use it,” or do you have input?   Jeremy: Clients come to me and say, “I want you to make me a piece of jewelry.” Some of them will say, “This is the book I want you to use,” and I go, “O.K., that's great.” Other clients say, “I don't know what book I want to use. Can you help me?” and I give them parameters. I say, “If you have a thick book, then the piece of jewelry can be bigger. If it's thin, then you can do a smaller piece.” It comes down to the quality of the book, whether it's hardcover or softcover, the age of the book, the country the book was published in, because that can lead to different qualities of paper. You have a chat with the client about that, but then it comes down to the clients, what book is personal to them. Books are very, very personal, and it means a lot to them to have a particular novel or author.   Sharon: Do you have a library yourself that you pull from and say, “How about this book?”   Jeremy: Yeah, absolutely I do. My shelves here are absolutely full. I can say, “What about this one? What about that one?” but the majority of the time they say to me, “I'll send you a book,” and they'll go to their own library and clip it out. Or, if they say, “I want this book,” I can start researching to find a suitable copy. I prefer to work with vintage books, ones that have been read or are being used. They feel like they have a history to them. I don't particularly like using new books that have just been printed.    Sharon: Do you say to them, “Pick the book,” and give them parameters, and then do you say, “Pick the quote in the book you want”?   Jeremy: No, after I receive the book, I read the book completely. While I'm reading, I'm sketching. Within the words, I get inspired for the design of the jewel. From there, I pick a particular quote, and that then inspires me to finalize the design.    Sharon: So, you might start out with a ring and then read the book and say, “This should really be a pin,” or “It should be a necklace.”   Jeremy: Yeah, absolutely.   Sharon: Does the client say anything to you? Do they argue?   Jeremy: I am so lucky that clients go with what I say. There have only been a few times when they said, “I really would like some reds. I would like it a little bit bigger.” I'm so lucky that clients just go, “Yup, that's great,” which is completely different from when I was working as a landscape architect. You would take your design to the client and they would go, “I don't know. Maybe you could change this. Maybe you could change that.” You go through so many revisions. Now I'm producing sketches, and I send them to clients and they go, “Yeah, great, fantastic!” I'm like, “Really? Are you sure? Would you like little changes?” “No, I love it. Let's do it.”    Sharon: That's very nice that they don't have that many changes, only once in a while. Tell us about the process. How do you make pages stick together? How do you make your jewelry stick together, because it's made of different pieces, right?   Jeremy: Yeah. That is a little bit of magic and a little bit of a secret, but I don't use any strong chemicals. I don't use glues or anything like that. I'm basically using high pressure and squashing them together. I use a form of Japanese lacquer to coat them, but the strength of it comes from the actual paper, the lamination. I'm folding the paper. I'm overlapping it and then compressing it into the actual form.   Sharon: Does paper jewelry last like a jewel?   Jeremy: Absolutely. I made the first one for my wife in 2007 and it's as the day I made it. You do have to respect it. It is paper. It's not metal, so if you do bang it hard, you can chip the corner or it can split. I've had that a couple of times from clients. They didn't realize it, mainly because it's so light. I've had this in galleries. People have come up and gone, “Wow,” and they pick the ring up and then immediately drop it because they expect it to be heavy. It's paper, so I understand that it can damage if they drop it onto a concrete floor or something like that, but I can easily repair it.    Sharon: The high pressure and the techniques you use, are they things you learned being a landscape architect?   Jeremy: No, this was completely separate. It was through experimentation. Over the years, I've just experimented and changed my techniques over the last 15 years or so. It's a beautiful material to work with because it allows you to do pretty much anything in any form, and I'm constantly experimenting with the form. I'm constantly looking for new techniques or a way of fine-tuning it to be able to make bigger or smaller pieces. I've started to experiment with larger sculptures because I think my work is sculptural. It's sculpture you can wear, and I've thought, “Oh, maybe I can make this slightly bigger.” I use books, so I'm confined by the size of the book. If I can find a big book, then I'm super excited. I have made three or four sculptures now.    Sharon: Can you put books together for larger pieces?   Jeremy: I suppose I could, but I've never actually done that.    Sharon: Would you say what you do is art jewelry?   Jeremy: Yeah, I think so. I always think of jewelry as precious materials and gold and stuff like that, so I see my work more as sculpture, jewelry sculpture. I always find it weird to call myself an artist or a jeweler. I don't know exactly what I am, but it's a point to say, “You're this. You're that.” But I create sculpture people can wear, I think.   Sharon: How do you describe it to people who walk into a gallery and see all this metal, whether it's an art gallery or a jewelry gallery, and then they see paper jewelry? How do you describe what you do?   Jeremy: All my jewelry is set within the book. So, after I've read the book, I'm cutting exactly the amount of paper I need from the book in the shape of the jewel. When I'm finished, the jewel goes back into the book. In the gallery, I present the piece of jewelry with the book, so immediately when they see it, they make the connection, “Ah, it's paper.” Sometimes they say, “Why are you putting clay jewelry in books?” They can't understand. Then I say, “No, it's from the book. It's paper.” “Oh, wow!” I do try and put text or some sort of reference to the book visible on the ring so in an exhibition, people can actually make the connection.    Sharon: That's interesting. That's why I asked you how long it lasts. I think of paper jewelry as being really delicate and not long-lasting, but you say you laminate it. Do you make one-offs only?   Jeremy: Yeah, absolutely. I do one-offs because I get inspired by the book, that individual, unique book. When I read another book, I get inspired in a completely different direction, which makes it super exciting. When I start reading, I don't know what I'm going to make. By the end of the book, I know exactly what piece I'm going to make. It makes my job super exciting. I never get bored.   Sharon: So, you'll pick a book that a client hasn't brought you, but just a book you wanted to read, and you design something while you're reading it.   Jeremy: Yeah, exactly. For an exhibition or a gallery exhibition, I'll produce a series of works where I've chosen the book. Normally I choose a theme. I've done exhibitions revolving around Harlem novels or fantasy novels or romances. I do it within a library or a genre.    Sharon: How do people find you? What's your biggest way of getting the word out?   Jeremy: I honestly don't know. A lot of it has been luck. When I started, a friend of mine had a shop in London and she said, “Why don't you come and do a few pieces in my shop? I can sell them there.” I said, “O.K., great.” From that, someone was walking past. They saw the work and said, “Oh, come and exhibit in Paris.” I said, “O.K., I'll come and exhibit in Paris.” From there I got an exhibition in Japan. It's all been like that. I never really went out looking for galleries or anything. I never pushed my work. People just found me, which has been really nice. Blogs have found me over the years. They come across my website and they've written about me. Then other people write about me through the internet. People are finding me that way. Then Instagram came along, which is fantastic as well.   Sharon: Your website is very nice. Tell us the name of the link on your website. We'll have it at the end.    Jeremy: It's Littlefly.co.uk. That's Little Fly because in the beginning I didn't know what to call myself or what to call my work. My first ring was inspired by my wife. When she was young, she wasn't given a name, and her eldest brother called her Little Fly. So, I decided that was great. I called it Little Fly and it stuck.    Sharon: How old was your wife before she had a name?    Jeremy: I think she was three or four.    Sharon: When you present something to them and it's finished, do you say to them, “Here's the book. This is where it came from, and this is why it's meaningful to you”? What do you tell them?   Jeremy: Yes, I come up with a design. I've spoken a lot with the client and they tell me about themselves. The majority of my clients are men and it's a gift for their partners.   Sharon: Oh, that's interesting.   Jeremy: Yeah, 90% of my jewels are for men for their partners. In the process, I speak with them and get an understanding of who they are. I understand what they need. After I produce a sketch and I'm showing it to them, then I don't know. Something just kind of clicks. I've had people crying when I've made jewels.    A gentleman came to me. He said, “I want you to use the book ‘The Whale Rider,' and I want you to make a ring for my wife.” I said, “O.K., great.” “When you come to London, could you come and meet her and give it to her?” I said, “Yes, of course.” So, we met in a restaurant. I came up, and they were already eating. I handed her the book, and she opened it and burst into tears. I was like, “Oh, no, she doesn't like that. Is it because I've destroyed her favorite book?” But no, she was so excited that she loved it. She immediately connected with it. I don't know how to fully describe it, what I do in relation to the client's desire for a particular piece or colors or form. I've done it for so long, I just seem to get that feeling, that emotion from them. I seem to understand what they need, if that makes sense.   Sharon: It does make a lot of sense. Do you think men buy from you for their wives if they feel like their wives already have diamonds and pearls?   Jeremy: This is a completely different emotional level. Gentlemen come to me and say, “I've been looking for something different for my wife for years. I found you, and you need to make a piece for her. This is her favorite book.” I had a gentleman who wanted to propose to his wife. This couple had traveled around Australia for two years, and they had used a Lonely Planet travel book for it. Inside there were notes and rips. The book was falling apart, and he wanted to use this exact book for me to make a ring for him to propose to his wife.    I've been nervous other times about starting to cut a book, but this is the first time I had this intense emotion that I was cutting the book itself. You could go and buy a new copy for a few pounds, but this book was so emotional and so charged that it was very difficult for me to—I put it off for a long time. It sat on my desk. “Oh, I'll do it later. I'll do it later.” I did it, but sitting there with a scalpel—because I use a scalpel for most of my work—I sat there ready to cut the first page, and that was very difficult.    Sharon: Have you ever had a book that's so dog-eared and worn that you haven't been able to use it?   Jeremy: Yes, absolutely. I've explained that to the client. No one's actually sent me one, but I have wanted to use a book because it's so beautiful, but it's falling apart. It would just fall apart while I'm creating the jewel.   Sharon: Can you put it back together if it's worn?   Jeremy: No. I've actually kept them. If books fall apart, I put them on the shelf because I think they're so beautiful as they are. I don't want to repair them because they've had a life. I'd rather go and find another copy that is usable. My shelves are littered with these old books, hundreds of years old.   Sharon: Tell us about something you're very proud of, the thing or one or two things you did with—let's call it vintage book jewelry. I don't know what else to call it.   Jeremy: That's a very difficult question because I'm always happy about the pieces I'm working on at the moment. I'm proud of all my jewels. I'm super happy with all of them, but what gets me out of bed in the morning is the piece I'm making right now. As soon that one's finished, I don't think about it; I'm thinking about the next one.   Sharon: We will have photos posted on the website. Please head to TheJewelryJourney.com to check them out.

The voice over industry is always changing. Pivoting for success is about preparing for that change and learning how to adapt. Anne & Lau are very experienced with pivoting professionally. How else could they keep their businesses thriving for 15 years? Pivoting is not just about immediately making changes to your process, but exploring your options. It's about taking a step back, looking at what you are doing and asking yourself “Is this working? Is this the right thing?” There's an incredible amount of pressure to stay ahead of the curve and keep up with the latest trends & tech. If you're not learning new things, you're falling behind. Don't sweat it, Bosses. Anne & Lau are here to help you embrace these shifts + take advantage of bigger & better opportunities...   Transcript   It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere 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.   Anne: Hey everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS Podcast and the BOSS Superpower series. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzza, along here with my very special guest co-host, Lau Lapides. Hey Lau, how are you today?    Lau: I'm, I'm doing great.    Anne: Awesome. So Lau, last night -- (laughs) -- Late at night, I had the television on, and there was an episode of Friends that came on. It's one of my favorite episodes because I don't know if you watch Friends. Oh, okay.    Lau: Back in the day, are you kidding me? We were all Friends.   Anne: So, do you remember the episode where they're trying to get the mattress up the staircase, and they're having a hard time making the turn? And Ross, Ross kept saying, pivot (laughs). Pivot. Pivot. And it totally made me think of my business, and I thought we could talk about pivoting. So question BOSSes, how good are you at pivoting and making quick changes, doing things in the moment, evolving along and changing direction? Good question. And I think we are at a point in our industry where things are changing, Lau, more than ever before.    I mean, I think things are always changing. We always have to be on the lookout for trends. But I do feel as though we are at a pivotal point, (laughs), no pun intended, a critical point too in the industry where things just may change. And if we wanna survive, Lau, as a business — and I sat back and really thought about this the other day, we have to be able to evolve and change along with that if we want to survive. And I thought, alright, let's ask myself the toughest question. What would happen? ‘'Cause this has been on the forums for good long time now — the threat of synthetic voices, right? Well, what would happen to your business? Right? Ask yourself the question, BOSSes, what would happen if you did not have voiceover anymore? How would you be able to maintain a business or stay in business? How would you pivot?    Lau: That's an excellent question. It's sort of a human question too. We never wanna think about this, but what happens if our career goes down? What happens if our house is gone? What happens if we can't walk anymore? I mean, these are things we don't wanna think about but that do happen in life to people every moment of the day. And it's not unrealistic to say, let me think of three possible scenarios that I could do if my business starts to crash and burn. Or if the pipeline for my business that I so rely upon, those 2, 3, 4 clients are gone? I actually saw one business, Anne, where there was four biggies in the pipeline for a talent, and they all went down. This was at the beginning of a earlier recession, and he had to close his business. He had to close, not because he didn't have the business, because he didn't know how to pivot.    Anne: Well, you bring up such a good point. And you know, the pandemic was a big jolt to everyone's minds in saying, oh gosh, all of a sudden things have changed. Right? And this became like, well, we better make sure our studios are up to snuff and because we're gonna now be working from our home studios. And it became a thing that if you were a talent and you didn't have the proper requirements for your studio, if it didn't sound good, if you didn't have Source Connect or ipDTL or another way to connect to your client, your business might be suffering. And so those that were able to pivot and quickly recognize this and implement that, if they didn't have it implemented already, we're able to pivot. That was, I think, one of the first jolts to, I think a lot of us in the industry, that, oops, something changed and we need to be able to pivot with it in order to be successful or remain successful.    Lau: Now, did you have one, at least one big pivot and during covid that you can recall and say, wow, that was a big shift? I changed, whatever that was? Do you have one in mind that you did during that Covid period right at the beginning?    Anne: That's a good question. Well, first of all, I know that right before lockdown, I was super excited because I was able to complete this studio before that happened. And so when that happened, the great thing was, is that I was prepared. And I know that I already had been active with my ipDTL, so I was thankful for that, right, and Source Connect. And so I technically knew how to use them, I had used them. I was able to then make sure that I had those advertised on my page to make sure I could handle new work coming in, or if people had questions, because it was becoming a requirement now in casting specs.    And so for me, it was literally making a pivot. I also had a lot of people reaching out for coaching, right? So I needed to make sure that I was able to handle the influx, which to me was a wonderful thing, right? I didn't have to necessarily worry so much about not working or losing business because more and more was coming in. So for me, it was an adjustment in terms of my scheduling and how I could fit everything in and do that. But what about you, Lau? Because you had a physical studio. Talk about that.    Lau: Yeah, I did. And I did what every other voiceover talent. I was building my own voiceover studio from home. But the big pivot for me that I didn't even recognize I was doing, besides going online with the business, which was huge — that to me was huge, like, being able to go into the global zone and reach clients that way was terrifying, but incredibly exciting. The other big pivot for me was becoming an agent. So I never, ever dreamed or thought of that or envisioned that as part of my business at all. And then all of a sudden, I was on lockdown with everyone else, and I said, I,  I --   Anne: Yeah, maybe we'll do that.    Lau: And yeah. And my husband said, do you know anything about that? Do you know how to do that? I said, uh, no. I've had agents as a talent, but I've, I've never worked in an agency. I've never worked in an office. I'll figure it out.(laughs)    Anne: I love that. I'll figure it out.    Lau: So it's that sense of — the way I was trained. Yeah. The way I was trained, my mentors were like, listen, in business, Lau, in business, you have to set up your service. And then you have to figure out how to do it. Because believe it or not, (laughs), right? Miss control factor here, you are not gonna know how to do most things before you sell it. And that to me was outta my mind with that. Like, I had to know exactly how to do everything before I could put it on the market. And I learned that's actually not the way business really runs. Like you're upgrading your product, you're offering new services, and you're kind of piloting it and pulling it to figure out what it is through your client base. And I figured out how to do that. But the big pivot for me was going online.    Anne: That's amazing. So you created another segment of your business, or you grew another segment of your business. And I'm gonna say for me, during the pandemic, it was growing my business for coaching and demo production and producing demos online. Now, I am gonna say, for me, I am so grateful that I came from a background of technology because I was very used to having new things thrown at me and then being able to learn them and adjust and pivot. And I cannot tell you how much that experience helped me through the pandemic and pretty much anything else that as the industry grows here, being able to adjust it.    You know, in the beginning, the fact that I understood technology or I could work with technology helped me when home studios weren't a thing, and then they were a thing. So I understood that it was something I needed to do. Being online, that has always been an inherent part of my experience, and I'm very grateful for that. It's how I brought VO Peeps into light. When I decided to quit my job and then just do full-time VO, I had to really start implementing things quickly so that I could bring in some revenue. And because I had experience in technology, I thought I would say, well, I thought, well, I can create a networking group that's global and that's online. And thus began VO Peeps.    As, you know, things started to evolve. I started to offer classes using streaming technologies and then hybrid classes so that people didn't have to be physically near me to take a class or in person. They could do it online, in Zoom. And so I was able to evolve with that. And so I'm very, very fortunate and I cannot stress enough for those of you out there that maybe are afraid of technology or afraid of your computer or learning new things, I think it's fundamental, number one, to be able to take advantage of the technologies, to help you pivot (laughs) and help you grow. And I think that that's number one, that I feel so lucky that I'm — was able to pivot with the help of technology, and the fact that I knew it — and if I didn't know it, I would learn it. Right Lau, just like you, if you don't know, you're going to have to learn in order to kind of stay afloat and survive.    Lau: I think also along with that, there's this sense of who I thought I'd be or where I thought I'd be by a certain age or a stage of life. And I know a lot of people go through this like, oh, I think I'd be this, or I'd be married by this day, whatever. Believe it or not, I always thought from a young age, I would be like, a talent, full-time, professional talent, because that's what I was trained to do for the first half of my life. And then that was a massive pivot. And very difficult too, because anyone who's a talent who pivots in another direction, whether they become a producer or a director or they own an agency or whatever, there's that loss. There's a little bit of mourning in that. There's that loss of understanding that, sure, I can do a gig or whatever, but my real focus for my business is in this direction.    So that was a massive pivot for me when I opened my studio to really say, I can still do a gig if I wanna do a gig, but it's no longer my focus, it's not my focus point. My focus point is this. And to be able to concentrate and discipline myself to, to pivot in that direction is tough. It's wonderful that we're capable of doing that. But every, like, I'd say, every year, maybe once a year or so, like I just wanna cry my eyes out because I think, oh, what could have happened if I used this in my performance track? You know what I mean?   Anne: First of all, I love that you mentioned that. I wanna say that I've always been of the philosophy that I love performing, right? I love being a voice actor, and nothing beats it. Right? But I give so much credit to my ability and what I've learned over the years to build a business in regard to keeping me safe and able to pivot, right? So again, if I ask the really hard question, okay, synthetic voices are getting good, right? There will be a market for them. There will be people who will pay for them. It will be okay at some point it'll probably evolve because I've gotten used to talking to Alexa. I always use Alexa as my example, but what am I going to do when parts of my business are taken away, right, by the technology? What can I do?    And so asking the really tough question, if there was no voiceover, if the synthetic voice got so good that maybe the market just collapsed, and that could happen, what would I do? And I am thankful, so very thankful that I have the business skills, right? I've built a business and I've maintained that business for 15, longer than 15 years. And so what can I bring with those skills, right, to maybe not perform and do voiceover? What else could I do?    And so I really started to think about, okay, there's lots of kind of things on the side. I have the VO Peeps group. I call it the tendrils of my business, like it's got arms. But really I could do something more with that. Or with the podcast, maybe I could be a podcast host or I could help other people develop their podcast. There's so many things that I am grateful for, again, because I have built my business up. But I think, BOSSes out there, you've got to really, really sit down and think, what will happen if this industry changes in a way that it's not what I intended right now? And am I preparing myself? Am I training myself to be able to evolve and pivot with it?    But I think the whole business skills thing, if you guys are bored, (laughs) BOSSes out there, if you're bored, like, what should I train on next? Right? What should I do? Yes, of course, performance. But don't forget, gosh, about business, marketing -- those things, those skills will be invaluable for you as a business in order to survive whatever pivot you decide or whatever pivot you do.    Lau: Yeah. I couldn't agree more with that. I think you gotta be in the business of being in business. My dad always said, I'm in the business of staying in business, right? So I'm not gonna do something completely unrelated, because it's not within my skillset. Like I'm not gonna go all of a sudden be a nurse. I'm probably not gonna be a firefighter. Could I actually have the skills to apply? Yeah. I really could, 'cause I feel like I've been taking care of people for a lot of years, but I'm not gonna do that. That's out of my realm, but within my realm — you're building hardcore skills, these BOSSes that are listening now. You're really, you may not know it, but you're building skills so that if one area of your business goes down, you don't wanna become obsolete.    It reminds me of the services that were doing, you know, VHS movies, you know what I mean? And you'd go in and you'd rent a movie and take — you and I remember those days, you'd take that movie, you'd rewind it and bring it back. Well, they went out of business, they became obsolete and went out of business when then we went to DVDs, and now we're streaming, and now we're this. So I always wondered, why didn't they go into that area of innovation? Why did they just close down? Why didn't they pivot and shift? Why didn't they go into DVDs? Why didn't they --   Anne: Great example, Netflix.   Lau: I don't know why.   Anne: Right? Netflix, it was videos, right? It was videos that you rented and they mailed them to you. Right? Do you remember that? I feel old now. They mailed them to you for $.99 when you joined, right? And you could just keep getting videos and look at their pivot. Wow. I mean, that's an amazing pivot. Now they're one of the largest online streaming services, and I'm gonna say Microsoft, IBM. Look at these big companies that have been around for a very long time, right, and how they have pivoted and evolved. Look at, I think I was mentioning this to you before, but I had just seen something with Gary Vaynerchuk, who I absolutely love. He just was talking about the tractor. So farmers, when the tractor was invented, they were like, oh, it's gonna take away my job, it's gonna take away my job. And they would scream, and guess what? We evolved, right? So now tractors are being used to help farmers do their job. And so then we can, as humans, do more wonderful things.    So I always think — when people have a thought that, oh my God, this is gonna take my job away. My business is gonna fall out from under me -- I think we need to really think about tractors or that concept that like, okay, how can we use whatever it is that's disrupting our business? And I'm gonna use technology as an example, right, synthetic voices. How can we use that to enhance our business or expand our business? How can we use it to help us do our jobs better? And I'm telling you, BOSSes out there, if you use Positron mm, okay, you cannot be hypocritical, right? Positron uses AI to help you do your job better, right?    And yes, there's a lot of discussion about rights and and licensing and yes, that needs to be addressed. Right? Which is what I've always been talking about. If you're on the ground floor with this stuff, you have a voice to be able to make sure that that will happen. Okay? So I think really, it's going to expand us as human beings. Right? And it's not gonna take over ,because human beings invented it. Right? And I like to believe that not everybody in the world is evil, and that we will ultimately use the technology to help us to build better things and to be greater human beings. Because nothing will take away the fact that we are humans, and we humans like to engage with each other. Yeah, yeah.    Lau: And we also like to innovate. And I think once you sit back and you stop innovating, then you're stopping the whole nature of what business is. I mean, building a business needs to be built from the ground up. Even if someone is handing you a business or selling you a business, you still have to put your stamp on that. And you have to figure out from an integral source about like, how do we do things? Like the best people who run businesses know how to do a lot of the jobs. It doesn't mean they're going to, but they're gonna delegate them. But it, they know how to do a lot of what their business runs on.   Anne: They're educated. Right? Educate yourself.    Lau: They're educated. So yeah, so the peeps listening now have to think, okay, what are three things right now that are related, directly related to my business that are my skillset that I'm learning and I'm doing that I could literally offer -- I could extend my business if this area goes down, if this area? Like I'm a really great writer. Okay. If you're a great writer, you should be able to write copy, you should be able to write particular scripts in certain genres that you love or that you're really good at. You should be able to sell those potentially.    Anne: But what if AI takes that away from you, Lau, then what? Then where's your pivot? There you go. Mm.    Lau: Well, there it is. You have to continue to -- it's like a tree. I always feel like, I know you feel this way too, Anne, in my business, my life isn't long enough to do everything I wanna do. Like I'm an idea a minute. I, I'm like an advertising agency idea minute kind of person. I'm like, oh my God, yes, I could create a library of this, and then I could do this and then I could offer this. Do I do it all? No, because you can't do it all. You have to make selections and prioritize along the way. But if three things went down, I'd take three other things and build them up. Because I feel like we are expansive. We're expansive of possibilities. There's so much realm we can do.   Anne: Yes, always think of the abundance, right, rather than what's being taken away. People who are stomping their foot and saying no, no to this technology, no to this evolution of what's happening in the industry. I'm sorry, but I'm not gonna stop AI. I'm just not as a single human being. I can have a voice and determine how I use it. Right? And how it will affect me and how it will affect my business. And for me, I am steadfastly committed to not having my business be in any sort of detriment because of it. I will use what I use to enhance my business, and that's it.    But I think we have to always be of the mindset that we need to educate ourselves in order to really think about how are we going to pivot and educate yourself continually think about what it is that you bring to the table that can be another avenue for you or another tendril of your business to start developing now. And it doesn't have to be all voiceover related, although I like to be in parallel. I mean, like you said, you're a good writer. You could write. I mean I organized events. I can organize events. We do a podcast together. How much fun to help other people do podcasts together? There's just a lot of things that I think that can happen if you really just put your mind to it.    Lau: I would love to see people really challenge themselves to take the time — if they're taking a lot of time -- they're fighting the good fight, they're fighting the battles, or they're upset or they're engaging in conversation, they're trying to work out the problems of having these innovations taking over their work, I get that. And to some degree it's necessary to do that, to process through what you're going through. But I'd also like to see people take the time that they're taking to do that to also innovate new ideas and really start to execute and implement those new ideas to see if they can be a viable source of joy and income for them. Because I guarantee you so many people are taking so much time to get angry or gossip or downtalk this or that. Number one, as you said, it's inevitable. We're not gonna stop it. Nor would we wanna stop it --   Anne: So much energy.   Lau: — necessarily, but the — yes. So much energy is going in the wrong direction.    Anne: Fighting (laughs) and trying to stop. And I think honestly -- like, I love that you said the word innovate. And I think that there are too few people that think about themselves as being innovative. Right? And we are, I mean, gosh, we are probably some of the most innovative, creative -- if you're a creative, you're innovative. That's the way I feel. Or you can be innovative if you're creative. Right? And that's where I think we need to stretch ourselves to grow ourselves as BOSSes. Think beyond the booth, think beyond the booth. How can you build your business? How can you grow your business? Doesn't necessarily have to always be within the confines of the booth. And innovate, I love that word. I think that should be like your challenge word for the rest of the year. Innovate. How can I innovate? Yeah.    Lau: How can I innovate? And there's a beautiful little piece of artwork that's in my office that I bought in my travels, and it says create the things you wish existed. And I love that. That's like one of the mottos or affirmations that I have found in my travels that really, every time I look at it, it inspires me to say, okay, I'm not gonna sit and dish(?) day and night about what I don't like and what's going wrong and why did I lose this, and how come I'm not making money at that? I'm gonna say, woo, hold on. Whoa Nellie, let's go to here and say I'm gonna do this. How can I make this work? How can I make this happen?    And that opens up the portal to a whole world inevitably that that door closes, that door opens, it opens up that whole world that if I didn't ask that question, if I didn't go down that path, none of that would've happened. If I stayed in this sort of negative vibe zone of just being really irritated that it didn't go the way I wanted it to go or I feel like something's been taken from me, or I've been violated in some way — I'm gonna empower myself to say, but wait a second, I've got all of these powerhouse sources within me that I can now grow that can take the place of that. That's how entrepreneurs really think in order to survive. Because not everything thrives and not everything lasts forever. And how they do the comeback. People like Cher and Madonna, how do they do the comeback every time?    Anne: Can I just say this? I know Madonna gets a lot of criticism. But look at a woman who knows how to pivot(laughs). She has lasted in the industry, right, for, 40 years. Right?    Lau: Right. And then great actors like Tom Hanks or whatever, how did they, how did they pivot when they physically change? They emotionally changed. How did they shift?    Anne: Meryl Streep, I'm just saying.   Lau: They're not gonna get the same roles.    Anne: Every new role, pivoting, evolving, still remaining relevant. I mean it's inspirational really.    Lau: Yeah.    Anne: So, yeah. Yeah.    Lau: It's totally inspirational because I could sit there and I could say, I'm really upset though, Anne. I'm very sad and angry that I don't look 25 anymore. I'm gonna try like heck to look 25, and I can do that. But wouldn't it be better to say, but wait a second, I'm 40 or I'm 60, and I'm gonna bring out the intense beauty and wisdom I have now that I didn't absolutely have when I was 25.   Anne: Sarah Jessica Parker. Right? I'm going gray. I'm just --   Lau: That's what it is.    Anne: Right. Like just to continue to evolve and continue to innovate, be relevant. And really, I think BOSSes, it's something to just sit back and think when you're on vacation next time maybe, and you've got some downtime, and really think about how you may pivot as times change. And sometimes you just don't know what's gonna happen. But I like to present myself, well, if this happens, I will do this. Or maybe I'll start pursuing educating myself here, because I see things happening this way. And I think it's hard to be a visionary, but I always try to be. I do know that after working 20 some odd years in technologies, that I cannot stop it.    And I say it's over and over again. You might think I'm a broken record, but I cannot alone stop technology from happening ever. And it just became a thing. And I think once you realize and you kind of accept that, it helps you to pivot, it helps you to to be innovative. It helps you to think about how can I utilize what I've got in front of me, not just technology, but utilize what I have, who I am and what I have in front of me to grow and to become better and to maintain a successful business.   Lau: And be okay with change. Be okay with things not being the way you know them to be. That's tough. I always found that difficult ‘cause I loved things that were familiar to me and things I knew. Just be okay with the shift and change of the pivot. It's like you're going to something new. It's not going to be replicating what you did before. And if you're okay with that --   Anne: Roll with the bumps.    Lau: — you're a little bit bravery, you're more courageous. Roll with the bumps, 'cause innovation is not always success. Innovation is trying, you know what I mean? It's taking chances. It's taking calculated risks. It does not say that you're going to be successful because you're pivoting. It means you have the opportunity to be successful.    Anne: If you are riding bucking bronco -- I always say this 'cause I rode horses as a young girl, right? And as a young girl, this was the sitting trot. Okay? And any of you horse lovers out there that rode, being able to sit a trot and be able to let go of your hips and roll — because a horse's movements are not always perfectly smooth. It's hard to anticipate sometimes. Or if a horse spooks, you have to literally be able to roll, roll with the changes so that you don't get thrown off that horse. Right? So, I don't know, maybe --   Lau: Is that where we get roll with the punches?   Anne: — the punches aren't as hard. Right? Is if you resist against those punches, right, it's gonna hurt a whole lot more. Wow. Good stuff.    Lau: Right.    Anne: Oh my God.    Lau: Right, right. I love it. It's so true.    Anne: Now we know you can do it. So I'm going to give a great big shout-out to our sponsor, ipDTL. You too can network and connect like BOSSes. Find out more at ipdtl.com. And also, I want you to imagine the world full of passionate, empowered, diverse individuals like we all are. As BOSSes giving collectively and intentionally to create the world that you want to see, a lot of what we just discussed today. You can make a difference. Visit 100voiceswhocare.org to find out more. You guys, have an amazing week. We love you. We'll see you next week. Bye.   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.com 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.

  When you're an voice actor, growing your business is not just about booking another job. It's a whole process of making your business work. That process is full of potential risks, big investments...and even bigger successes. In this episode, Anne & Lau discuss making money, investing money back in your business, and fears surrounding money. In today's world, it's not enough to just be a great voice over talent. You also need to be a savvy businessperson. And that means understanding the basics of finance, including how to invest in your own business & make sure you're doing it intelligently. Money can be a scary topic to think about, and even scarier to talk about. You're not alone if you feel scared. It means that you care!   Transcript    It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere 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.   Anne: Hey everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS podcast. I'm your host Anne Ganguzza, and I am here with the lovely and most wonderful VO BOSS co-host (laugh) Lau Lapides. Hey Lau.   Lau: Hey everyone. Hey Anne.   Anne: How are you this week?   Lau: Oh, fabulous.   Anne: Awesome.   Lau: As always. How are you? How are you?   Anne: I'm good, but you know what? I think it's time that we had a talk about money, and I know we spoke about raising rates before, but I think maybe it's because -- okay, so I admission, I downloaded Rocket Money for my iPhone, and I started to see like, where are my expenses going? What income's coming in? What am I paying on a monthly basis? And I'm just gonna start by saying that when you're trying to either cut your expenses -- and I wanted to start at least on that, if you find that you need to cut your expenses so that you can make a profit, right? Because, I mean, this is why we do VO, right? We are a business, we'd like to make a profit. It's good to find out the areas in which you're spending money. And it surprised me -- it, well, it didn't surprise me a whole lot because I've always said that a podcast is a labor of love. But I'm going to tell you that my discovery was that this podcast, with all the different things that I have going on and paying people to help me transcribe, edit, put out videos, do some social media stuff, cost me on average per year, just about $15,000 and that is not a small amount of money. (laugh) It's something, when you have a business, that's something you've gotta keep your eyes open and really look at and decide, is this worth my investment?   Lau: Yes. Absolutely. And that's, look, is that true of any business, not just our business? You really should be having some sort of a business model at the start, even if it's a skeletal one, having an idea of what's my growth? Where is my growth in the first three years, three to five years of my business? That's really the time, I mean, according to statistics, that most businesses do fail is within the first five years. So it is really important to say, okay, here's my basic model and here are the first year projects. Here are my second year projects. What do I think I'm going to gross? Like, where is my gross coming from? Where is my net? And just like basic financial language so that when you get to that powerhouse podcast, like what you have, you're not outta your mind going, what? How is that possible to invest that kind of money? Right?   Anne: Well, and I think it's something too though, and I spoke about this earlier this week on another webinar, how being an entrepreneur and having a, a voiceover business, it takes courage. It really does. It takes courage to get out there. And I know there's so many people that tend to get into this industry thinking, oh, I can work from home. All I have to do is go in my studio and record and I'll make my money. But nobody really thinks about the cycle of money. Right? Because there's an investment that has to happen. And I think our brains kind of shut that off when we first get started, because all we're thinking about is, oh, I just have to go in my studio and record, and I'll just make that money. But for every business to, I think, function successfully, there is money that you need to invest.   And it takes courage to invest money really takes courage to, especially if, let's say you're doing this full-time and you're just starting, and we're in that time period where maybe you're not comfortable yet or feel like you're making any kind of headway or profits (laugh) in the first few years. So Lau, I mean, you went even further than just a voice talent. I mean, you have a studio (laugh) like... and that is a considerable investment. And so what was it like when you were first investing in this like a physical studio, right? I mean, there's rent, there's (laugh), you know, there's equipment. What was it like for you when you first got involved in that in terms of was it scary?   Lau: Well, I'll be honest, as I try to be all the time, I was shitting bricks. I mean, it was terrifying. (laugh) I'm sorry, your engineer might have to take that one out, but listen, I think our audience can deal with that.   Anne: I think so too.   Lau: Yeah. I'll be honest with you, I was 40, I was not a young kid. I was already, you know, getting to middle-age, and I was offered a space -- this is how it happened for me. I was offered a space through my dad who was a big real estate owner, and he was an amazing entrepreneur unto himself in his own right. And he looked at me one day and he said, I have a space that's opening up, Lau. It's in a prime location. Location is everything, when you're looking at space, whether you're looking to live or own a business, I wanna give it to you, not give it to you, but I wanna offer it to you. And how do you feel about that?   And I remember exactly where I was. I was in a Dunkin Donuts, I know the exactly where it was, how I felt, and I could feel my heart, Anne, drop into my stomach as if you're on the edge of a cliff, like I could feel it like you're gonna jump out of a plane. And all I could say is in the most important times of my life with the biggest decisions, all I could say was yes. That doesn't mean I was like, knew what the hell I was doing. It just meant more of me wanted to do it than not wanna do it. And I knew, I knew in my heart it was now or never, that that was the window of time to do it. So taking on that level of financial investment, taking on prime territory space, all these things that we do need to think about is a leap of faith. A tremendous leap of faith.   Anne: Yes. I was just gonna say that, it's a tremendous leap of faith, and something that I think that -- you know, it's great to have a leap of faith and belief and a passion and a dream to follow it. But I think you also have to have the street smarts to do that in an intelligent way. Right? Because we're not gonna make investments if we don't have some money to back that up, of course. And before we can get to that place to where we might have money to invest, right, there might be places in our career where we can start to save a little money and put that away. And I've said this multiple times, that the most confident I was ever in my business was when I had a savings account, that I had enough money in there that I could make sure that I could pay the mortgage for the next three months, six months -- actually it was six months -- and I would feel okay if the work didn't come in, or if I needed to make an investment. That confidence led me to take the leap of faith and take the risks that was required for me to actually grow beyond where I was.   Because otherwise, I think we just sit here in our studio, and we sit there, and we try to get job after job and we audition, we audition, we audition. But where is the growth? I mean, you could audition your life away, right? But if you're not taking a leap of faith or a risk somewhere and making an investment -- and investment doesn't always have to be money. But I'm gonna say that for most of us, right, the money is like in your face, (laugh), you know what I mean? It's like, that's the kind of risky, scary stuff that it's like, oh no, I've gotta pay what? (laugh) And even if you're talking about a demo, right, or something, you're just getting started or a new microphone, it can be overwhelming, the investment, the money. And I think we're both here to say that, look, you're not alone if you're scared. Right? You're not-- or if you're nervous about that.   Lau: No, no. And you have to be, it's important to me because that level of fear, apprehension, that level of anxiety is also telling yourself that you care. You really care about what happens to you, what happens to the business, what happens to your money, what happens with safety and security. Like you're connected to that ,you care. You're not just saying, oh yeah, it'll be easy and fun. Let me just throw a hundred grand at it and let's see what happens. You're really connected to the outcomes in understanding that sacrifice is happening. You have to be ready to sacrifice to have a business, especially a brick and mortar business.   Anne: Oh gosh, yes.   Lau: Yeah. Like all of our wonderful restaurant friends during Covid really sacrificed and suffered. Well, so did we to some degree. Like we can have a home studio, which is amazing. But if you have any kind of brick and mortar, you have to be ready to sacrifice to keep that shingle up every single month. Every every month it has to be up. You can't just take six months off from it or a year off from paying your rent or your mortgage, or the heat, or I always say, you know, there's toilet paper, there's all sorts of ancillary services that you are providing if you have any kind of a brick and mortar that the public comes into. You have to have insurance. You have to make sure if God forbid, someone gets hurt, you're covered. You have to make sure that, you know, on and on it goes. Taxes are paid, property taxes, on and on it goes. So not to scare anyone, but to sort of keep it real, that even if you're in a home studio, someone is taking care of that home. Someone is paying that rental on that apartment. Someone is, and it's probably you. Right? So it is a level of sacrifice and understanding that I need to continue doing this in order to build this into a viable business, a real business that makes profit.   Anne: Yeah. And I think too, something that's very key is in terms of having the courage, right, to make investments, we're investing in a business that is very much a business about us. Right? It's very much a personal brand. This is about our voice. This is about us being able to perform a service with our voice, which is such a personal part of us. And if we see failure, I think it compounds it. It's not like, oh, I have a product here, a new formula. Right? But when it's our voice, and it's when it's all about us, and we're talking about making an investment in us and giving that money up to invest in us -- if it does not work, right, it affects us personally. And I think that is where a lot of the fear comes in for people coming into this industry.   And I'll tell you what, it doesn't go away. And I'm not trying to be a Debbie Downer, but the bigger you get, right, the more you grow and the more you invest. And so I'm gonna say from the beginning it was just about, well, let me invest in my coaching, let me invest in my demos. Then it became, I've got to invest in, create an S Corp or an LLC or let me invest into a better studio now. And then also I have to invest in other things. Now I've gotten to the point where if I haven't grown every year, I'm looking at my growth. And if I'm not growing, I have to figure out, well what do I need to do to continue that growth? And we can talk about outsourcing, right? I pay people, gosh, for at least 10 years, I've been paying people to help me do things. And the team, I have a team and and that team again is another investment in my business and in my growth.   Lau: Yes. I mean, we can flower this out for hours, this program because we can't even get into the level of detail as you grow. Like we both have a business, roughly both of us are at like the 15 year mark. So can you stay static? Sure. Can you stay in a comfort zone? Absolutely. And I totally am okay with that and respect people who say, I'm capped, I'm at my ceiling, I'm happy with what I'm doing. I'm happy with my services, but I'm not. Like, I'm insatiable in the sense of wanting to provide more value, to educate more, to lift the level of income, to go from, as they say now in the ether, it's very big. Go from six figure to seven figure. How do you do that? Well, you do that through scaling. So everything that you're talking about, Anne, that we built our our businesses on, which is the person, the personality, the personalization, which is what we try to bring to our copy as talent. Right? How do we personalize a real person.   Also, there's a sacrifice in that too. And it's a very hard gray zone. How do I keep the personalization and keep the boutiqueness of my product and scale? Which is automization, which is about, you know, you're in the whole AI world. It's about like, how do I get into a place where things are being funneled and things are being structured in a system? It's no longer high touch. Like I don't have to be a part of every transaction. And then at the end of the day, it's not about me anymore; it's about the process or the product. And that's like to wrap your brain around that, when you start a business that's so personal and so high touch, is just a jump. It's a jump. It's a transition that a lot of us are working towards making. Keeping it personal. Keeping it real for us. Keeping it something we love and care about, but allowing our control to get out of the way so that other systems and controls can come in. And keep providing value at a much larger level.   Anne: Absolutely. And I think in terms of money, (laugh) I say money, and I don't want people to think --   Lau: I like how you said that.   Anne: -- that Anne, money, she's obsessed with money, that Anne. But here's the deal for me, like again, I always talk about wanting to grow my business. And so for me, it becomes a challenge. And I've always been a girl that takes on challenges. And so you have to feel comfortable with money, number one. And you have to feel comfortable investing money to make money. Right? And then to be accepting of that money. And again, that goes back to like, know you're worth, charge an appropriate fee so that you can make that money, so that you can reinvest in parts of your business to continue to grow, and take that opportunity to just embrace the thought of money (laugh) in abundance. Right? You're always talking about abundance, Lau. And again, I'm not gonna get too woo woo here, but I think manifesting that worth, you need to manifest that worth out to your potential clients so that they say, oh yeah, absolutely. My goodness, can I pay you more money to do what you're doing, (laugh)?   Lau: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.   Anne: That's what I want. And really that's how it comes. And I think that as entrepreneurs, you have to not just think of yourself as a voiceover artist. That's why I'm always saying, I'm not just a, a voiceover actor, a voiceover artist. I am an entrepreneur, and I am as much in tune with growing my business as I am with getting the next gig.   Lau: Yeah. No question about it. And you have to figure that out over time. You know, I became someone who became most comfortable -- here was talk about being in a discomfort zone. I was in a discomfort zone opening a business and putting everything on the line. But I figured out about myself, which ultimately became my brand, was I was much happier giving value to someone else and growing their career and seeing them flourish than for myself. And that's a pure irony 'cause I was an actor for many years. I was a voice talent for many years. But that was a level of sacrifice that I was willing to make because I had to really honestly identify what is your niche? What is your niche? What do you offer the best? What do you do the best? You can do 10 million things, but what do you do the best? And I figured out it was, I like leading I like creation. I'm the idea creator. And I like executing those more than I like doing the talent piece for myself. And that took me years to figure that out. That was a revelation. I almost felt guilty about that because I was in such an actor's mindset for so many years.   Anne: Very interesting.   Lau: And I thought, why would you give that up? Why would you stop doing that? I've had clients that say, why aren't you doing it? I'd say, okay. Because I was building a business that was giving this value to other people and that satisfied me. That satisfied me tremendously. And I figured out that that's okay. Like that's enough. And it, not only is it enough, but you've got a lot more to build.   Anne: That's like coaching and teaching for me. Right? I mean, again, it's something that -- and performing as well --but I think that inherent, I like to mentor, to inspire, to help people grow their businesses, to grow their skills. And that to me gives the joy a lot of the joy in my business. And yes, money. (laugh), again money. And I say that unabashedly and unashamedly because I need to pay the bills. I do, I need to pay the bills. But it's not the top game. It's, I've gotta have joy first and then that money will come. I believe that. Because if I'm following my business, if I'm following my gut and my intuition to how I wanna grow that business, I'm always chasing the joy and the passion. And if that happens to be in my business, then yes, I'm going to yield a profit.   Lau: Yeah. And I think it comes down to too is women in our industry and in the world at large, we're always figuring out, you know, what does value mean? What is our value in the world and in this industry? Value is many things. It's monetary, it's actual process related. It's sacrifice and charity. It's, it's a lot of things. But at the bottom line, we can't be afraid of the money, and contracts, and negotiation, and saying -- one of the more famous campaigns of L'Oreal that I always loved was get this, and I'm worth it. You know what I mean? That was a L'Oreal campaign, I thought as a kid, I was like, ooh, that makes me cringe. It's like so arrogant to say that, whatever. But as you get older and you've build your business, you have to say, here's what I provide. This is a value to you. And it's worth it. Right? There's a worth to it.   Anne: Absolutely. And it's also, there's purpose beyond profit. Right? And I think that if some people might take a look at things like with big businesses and today, the big companies out there and say that greed is at the base of all of it. But I'm going to say that for me, it's not greed, but I wanna say that as I prosper, right, again, I want to give back even more. It comes from a place of, well I personally like think that wealth is more than just money. It can be mindset, it can be time, it can be a lot of things. But as my business grows and my financial wealth grows, I am willing to donate. I'm willing to share that, be philanthropic. And so I think a lot of times when people criticize billionaires and millionaires and say it's an uneven system -- but I'll tell you, there's a lot of billionaires that do good as well as make a lot of money.   Lau: Sure. Absolutely. And I can tell you the stats now is that 99% of companies in our nation, all companies in our nation are considered small business. And I started to research what is small business? Small business is defined as 500 or less employees. So I felt so satisfied knowing I was a small business. But I was in the company of most businesses.   Anne: Yes, absolutely.   Lau: Most businesses are small. And so there's layers of this sacrifice that you're looking at to say, okay, well if I need to make money in order to survive, make it a viable business, in our industry would say tag, what's our tag -- one of the best financial advisors who I love so much, Susie Orman, used to say it's people first, then money, then things. And I love that. And I sort of live by that in my own right, because it's, for me, relationships. It's about value, it's about -- but right behind it is money because I can't keep doing that and sustaining that without financial benefit, nor can anyone. And when we go back to the origins of our businesses, Anne, and when we're starting our businesses, and you have --take your pot of gold, you take your savings.   I like you, was a really good saver. I'm very frugal. I'm not a super materialistic person. So I would tend to save the money. I would take that pot of gold, take that savings and say, I'm not spending anything. Even though it's scary, I'm not. I'm investing in something that I know is viable. And that to me is the first step of having a real business and saying, I have the belief system. I have the belief system based on research, homework, relationships, and knowledge of what my skillset is that this can work and this will work. And as they say, failure is not an option. It's not an option. Don't give yourself an out. Like keep yourself accountable. I oftentimes say I am the toughest, toughest BOSS I've ever worked for.   Anne: Oh my God. Me too. I'm a real witch.   Lau: Tough.   Anne: Yeah. (laugh). Yeah. I said, oh my God, that I do that. I'm a real -itch.   Lau: (laugh) that big. Right. What is she making me do today? Right. But that's that accountability, it's the internal accountability that I know creates sustainability. That's what it does.   Anne: And I think -- one thing I always like to bring up is I keep this in mind. Mind your own business, your own business. And that means don't let others influence you on what your business should look like, how much money you should be making, that kind of a thing. Because in reality it is your business. And honestly, nobody needs to know. And as a matter of fact, I'm always really quiet. Number one, I work a lot in the area of the market that has NDAs. And so I'm very low profile on any work that I'm doing or any gigs that I'm getting. And I don't even like to necessarily report.   Some people put money, oh, I made so much money this week and clients. And, and that for me is not the way to really talk about my business because I think in that way, some people think maybe it inspires some people, but I also think there's a lot of people who aren't talking about that, that it makes feel bad. They feel bad about that. And I don't want any of you BOSSes out there to feel bad about your business because it is your business. And that the same goes for, I'm gonna say this, whatever money you're making, I mean, yes, there are concerns I have with certain online casting sites, but I will never judge someone for running their business the way they see fit because it is your business.   Lau: Me too. And that's, of course, we all know that's the biggest, one of the bigger sources of conversation especially in the early to mid-range market of people who are in the market. It's like, should I do this? Should I be on a pay-to-play? Should I do that? And here's what I say, I simply say this as a coach, I'm putting my coaching hat on, saying Listen, you have a business that you are running, and you have to sit down with pen and paper, and you have to say, what am I reaching for this year? What are my goals and how am I going to get them? And you need to leave everyone out of that. The circle you've created are there for you to come back to, to connect to, to befriend, to help. But that's not the time. The time is your inner search. My inner search is, I want to do this. I need to do this. How am I going to do this? When you start listening to too many voices and too many points of view, you get really confused. And at the end of the day, you have to cook your dinner, you have to eat it, and you have to live with what it tasted like.   Anne: And there's nothing wrong with supplemental income while you're building your business. I mean, in any industry, we've all got our talents. And so especially for me coming from the corporate educational world into an entrepreneurship with my own business, that's night and day in terms of (laugh). Oh my gosh. Before I didn't have to worry about who's doing the accounting. I just show up, I show up to my job, but do my job. I get paid every two weeks. Now all of a sudden, that is so not what I'm doing with an entrepreneur business.   Lau: A lot of folks are coming in and they're under this delusion of like, how do I get what you have? How do I come in at the rate that you're at? I say, I said, okay, well you have to do like 30 years and you have to do this, this, and this. Like side hustle was my middle name when I -- before I opened. Before I opened my studio, I literally was what they call in in California, you know this term, a highway flyer. What I would do is I'd get in my car and I'd go to six different colleges. This was after graduate school. Six, count it, guys, six, 'cause I was adjunct. I was not a full-time. And I would teach two to three classes per college per semester. Count it. I was up to 15 classes one semester. Right?   Because I was adopting children. I had to have cash for that. I was starting a business. I had to have cash for that. And you have to have cash flow. It can't be tied up. You have to have flow ready to go. I like to say right now I loved it'cause I'm like a type A personality. So I loved all that stuff. But to the average person, that's crazy. They'd say, wait a second, how did you do all of that? And you were a performer and you were a director, and, and, and? I said, because I loved it and I had passion for it and I was working my way up the ladder.   Anne: Yep. Absolutely.   Lau: So to speak. Do I wanna do that now? No, I don't because I'm at a different place now. But I can't come in saying, oh, how do I walk into this, Lau, and how do I get all the clients I want and be at six figures? And I said, well you gotta pay some dues. You have to pay some dues and it's not bad either. I had fun doing that. I loved it. I had a ball. I was like always testing. How much can I do? Where can I go?   Anne: Yeah. I'm right there with you. And I'm gonna say the challenge to me --   Lau: I miss it. (laugh)   Anne: -- that floors me. I mean that just makes me so excited. The challenge. Right? Rising up to the challenge. But it's not that I didn't curl up in a fetal ball (laugh) every once in a while and cry, just saying, guys. There have been times when it's frustrating and it's hard, and there's nobody there. Sometimes I'm like, why? Why do I do this? I can't even talk to anybody about it. Like I could be running into these issues. And I'm like, I don't know what to do. I've never experienced this before. How do I do this? And then there's no answers. And I'm like, (laugh), why is it so hard? It's so hard. But guys, most days I like to say I rise to the challenge, but I'm also gonna completely admit to you that yeah, sometimes I'll curl up in the fetal position and cry, but it's worth it.   Lau: But you know what? You know how you get out of that position? You know how you get out? 'Cause we all do that. When you email me and you say, Lau, what we just did made a difference.   Anne: Yeah.   Lau: And then I keep that. I keep every single one of those. I put 'em in my little e folder, I'll print a few out. And just when I'm like sobbing my eyes out thinking none of this is worth it, I look at that and I go, oh my God. But for this person, it literally changed their life. It literally changed the trajectory of how they think. To me, there's no better work than that.   Anne: I agree.   Lau: And, and I get to make money. And I get to make my own hours and my own structure, and yes, it'll drive you crazy 'cause most of us need structure and usually expect it from someone else. But it's so wonderful to have that level of creative and artistic freedom.   Anne: Agreed. Totally agree.   Lau: I'd rather work my butt off for myself. (laugh).   Anne: I can't ever work for somebody again. Pretty much. That's the way it works.   Lau: I can't either.   Anne: Except for voiceover 'cause it's one. And you know, get in, get out real quick. I mean I have some great clients that I keep coming back to, but yeah, absolutely.   Lau: Of course, of course. That doesn't mean you can't job in for an agency or job in for this. But that's not the same as running your own biz. When you run your own shop, you don't mind working really, really, really hard. 'cause you know you're building something that's a legacy for you.   Anne: Absolutely. Woo, what a great conversation. I'll tell you. So BOSSes, money, money, money, (laugh). Don't be afraid of it. Use it wisely. Invest it wisely so that you can grow your business. Lau and I certainly have the faith, we have the faith in all of you out there that this can be done. You can be successful. So don't be afraid of money. And also I'm gonna say that when you, BOSSes, you are BOSSes out there. And if you have a little bit of extra money, maybe you have a local nonprofit that's close to your heart. If you know a nonprofit that you would like to do more to help them and to give back, you can visit 100voiceswhocare.org to find out more. And a big shout out to our sponsor, ipDTL. You too can network and connect like BOSSes, like Lau and myself. Find out more at ipdtl.com. You guys, have an amazing week and we'll see you next week.   Lau: See you next week, bye.   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.com 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.

Your vocal brand is the key to getting noticed in this world of noise. It's much more than just the sound of your voice. It's who you are, what you believe in and what matters to you. Anne & Lau discuss what goes into a vocal brand & what you can do to develop yours. Vocal branding is all about uncovering your uniqueness in order to let it shine through in every project you take on. Take time to get to know yourself. What matters to you? Why are you a voice actor? A voice is like a fingerprint: no two are exactly alike. Once you've figured out what makes your vocal brand stand out, it's time to learn how to harness it. The key here is authenticity. And it's not just what you say—it's how you say it. Figuring out how to combine all these elements into one cohesive brand can seem overwhelming, but don't worry! Anne & Lau are here to show you how it's done.    Transcript    It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere 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.   Anne: Hey everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS podcast. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzza. Welcome to the VO BOSS superpower series with the one and only Lau Lapides. Yay.   Lau: Yay. Hey Anne.   Anne: Hey, Lau.   Lau: Love being back as always. Love it.   Anne: Superpowers, superpowers. I love that we named our series Superpowers.   Lau: Because we have so many of them.   Anne: Yes.   Lau: Like we can't even uncover, identify all of them.   Anne: Business superpowers. And I think that our superpowers, it's in all aspects of our business, right? So including our superpowers to be able to stand out from the crowd. And to be unique. All businesses have competition. And I know that people talk about VO -- VO is so cool because there's competition like technically speaking, but not really, because every single one of us has such a unique product. And I think it's important that we know how to bring out that unique product and not just know how to bring that out. Also, to be able to market that. And that goes right into our brand. And so a lot of what I do with students is I will tell them that I am going to not only brand them in terms of what genre should I be in, but vocally brand them, right? And that really is something that's not just a visual brand on a website, but something that it is absolutely related to their product. Right? A vocal branding.   Lau: Absolutely.   Anne: So what does vocal branding mean to you, Lau?   Lau: Oh gosh. It's such a big umbrella. It really is. I mean, the first thing that comes to my mind, Anne, is just having the knowledge of knowing as a coach, that no one in the world has the voice you have. Everyone has a unique sound, distinctively unique sound. Okay? They may have similar qualities, but they're distinctively unique. So number one, uncovering that uniqueness in your voice through specific qualities that you could maybe even poll, like pull your group, poll your team, poll your family and say, give me qualities that describe my voice. Because when I'm gonna look at specs of a breakdown for an audition, the client's gonna break it down for you. they're gonna give you vocal qualities. So that's one of the big ones I feel that really distinguishes your vocal branding from someone else's and says, oh, I know that. That's Deb. That's Susan.   Anne: Oh, I know that voice.   Lau: Yeah, I know that voice.   Anne: And you know what's so interesting to me is I find that there's a lot of people who come to me who will try to perform and sound like they think everybody wants them to sound like, and not enough about sounding like themselves. Because I truly believe, and I say this all the time, I truly believe that we are human. We wanna connect. We want to understand who you are. And that comes through, that shines through in your voice, that very unique voice. So unless you're doing a soundalike for someone, or even a character where you're trying to sound a particular way, I think that your vocal brand needs to be brought right up there, front and center, because I think that's what truly makes you unique. And it brings the acting out.   So it's not about the sound, right? It's about how do I bring the acting out? And that becomes a vocal brand for you because the personality is intermixed. I think personality has a lot to do with creating a unique vocal sound. Right? Your personality, your, your heart, your essence. I don't know, Lau, you always have great words for this. What would you say your ethos, I dunno, the ethos of your vocal branding?   Lau: The ethos of your vocal branding.   Anne: Yeah.   Lau: It's like the height. Like what is the apex of what someone is thinking about when they think about you? It's like they think about you with this word, with this adjective, with this action verb. Your name comes up. That's like, to me, that's the zenith of it all, is like, when they think of this, Anne Ganguzza comes up. When they think of that, this one comes up. And that to me is amazing. And in no way should that feel limiting to people. Like, oh, does that mean that's all I can do? Or that's all they think of me as. Well, they think of you as, as a product, as an incredible product that has this vocal branding. And that's the first and foremost that you want them to think about. You don't want them to be confused. You never want your audience to be confused. You always want them to think of you for doing the best thing. And with your vocal quality as a vocal talent, they wanna know you as something, whatever that something is.   Anne: And then whatever that something is, learn how to define that also in words because that words can translate to words on a page or words in an email that you are submitting with a demo to an agent, something that sets you apart. And it can also be different unique aspects of your voice. Like let's say an accent, right? A tone, if you have that really beautiful bass, baritone or that bright mom sound or whatever that might be. Bilingual, right? Can you sing? Like, those are all vocal qualities that can really help distinguish you from the competition. And so know what those vocal qualities are and be ready to be able to explain them to a potential client. Also showcase them. I think it's so important that these vocal brandings are basically shown or in a demo, right? So that people can hear that vocal quality. And if you have a good producer, they're going to know that and they're gonna know how to bring those vocal qualities out.   Lau: And you know, it's having a visual now of like a performer, a theater actor, a professional speaker who's in front of a crowd live, they're in front of a crowd. What's the first and foremost thing we see visually is their visual branding. So that might be a costume or wardrobe or particular visuals that we're getting on camera or on a stage. Right? Well, that's a big part of the kinds of roles they play, but that's not everything. We have to know what's underneath it. We have to know what's the internal process that they're using to bring out their personality, their persona, their humanity, the thing that we connect to. But that covering, so to speak, that like coming in and saying, I can sound like this. I can put this on, is great to have, it's just not the whole job. It's not the whole thing. You have to be able to do the internal work to really have the authentic connections to the process and then put the wardrobe on it, and then put the schmaltz as we say on it, the frosting on it. Right? But you have to have the cake first. You can't just have the frosting, even though we'd like to, you gotta build a cake first.   Anne: I'm always astounded when I work with different voices. Now, there are some voices who tonally, right, will have varying degrees of range tonally. But sometimes I think when students are just beginning, they think that that's what range is all about. And I beg to differ because range is not just a tone or I have a high pitch, I have a low pitch. I think really range for an artist an artist really comprises the tone mixed with the personality, mixed with the performance, mixed with the acting.   And so whenever people say, I want range in my demo, right, I will actually focus more on the acting first, rather than, oh, can you pitch your voice up? Can you pitch your voice down? It's so hard for people to do that because then they get so consumed with, I'm going to sound very low, or maybe I'm just gonna sound very high and I'll just do this for the rest of the copy. And so Lau, I know you've had lots of experience working with students do that.   Lau: Oh, oh my goodness, ton. And it's that what I call the over management, the maneuvering, every M word you can think of, the manipulation of sound, which of course, technically if you're a singer, if you're a rapper, if you're a speaker, if you're a vocalist of any kind, we do have to learn mechanics. We have to have a vocabulary that we can rely upon that helps with repeatability so that we can repeat deliveries for sure. But that still does not do that internalized work of understanding the language, the syntax, the cadence, the rhythm, all of that, which I believe is --   Anne: The story.   Lau: Yes. The story.   Anne: The story.   Lau: And whether you are religious or not, religious is irrelevant. There's a spirituality, there's something that we can't quite put our finger on that is larger than us. It's bigger than us that we can connect to, which creates a universal internal connection to your audience that they can't put their finger on either. It's just, it's real, it's authentic. Our friend Jim from Lotas talks about that all the time, authenticity. What is authenticity? What is that honest connectedness that we have? I'd like to think it's partly psychological, but it's also partly from the heart and the soul and the gut.   Anne: Oh yeah. Absolutely.   Lau: Right?   Anne: And that's where people, if they're nervous about synthetic voices, this is where we've got them .   Lau: Yeah. Yeah.   Anne: If you can really stand true to your authenticity and bring that out in your acting and in your voice, then that is what is going to surpass any synthetic voice out there. And know that your connection and your vocal brand has very much a place in voiceover now and for the future, absolutely. And I say this after, gosh, close to 40 episodes, talking to people in synthetic voices, knowing that there is a place for that. But there's very much a place for our unique vocal brand and our unique, authentic brand, authentic voice.   Lau: Absolutely.   Anne: Yeah.   Lau: And it's hard, if not impossible, to decipher exactly what it is. It's like when we see a brilliant performance, we hear a brilliant dissertation, we hear something rhetorical that moves us -- it's hard to completely put into words why we are moved to a call to action. Why we are changed, why we are cathartically shifted in a way. It's that beautiful recipe and combination of the visuals, the vocals, the internals, the connectedness to the audience that create that concoction that is so unique, that becomes persona. I mean, that's persona personified , as they say. It's, it's, that's your brand. Like your brand is how do I move you? How do I shift you?   Anne: Yeah. And I think it's one of the hardest things for people first entering into the industry to really accept and recognize. I know, I can't tell you the amount of people who don't really like the sound of their voice. They're true voice--   Lau: But yet they wanna make a living at it .   Anne: And they wanna make a living at it. And yet they're in voiceover and they wanna pursue voiceover because they think what everybody wants to buy is this performed sound that they have heard. I think we're such a product of our experience in listening for years. Right? When voiceover first came onto the scene, it was very much an announcer style. It was very much a, a unique style. And so hearing that, depending on your age, really, this does depend on your age. Kim Herdon actually in one of my workshops mentioned it too. And I thought, yeah, when you are being directed, a lot of times it is a factor how old the person is that is directing you. Because what they hear in their ears as a conversational or authentic read might differ from let's say, somebody that is a millennial that might be directing you.   And so I think no matter who's directing you, if you can bring forth the authenticity and your own unique style, I think that that is the place to absolutely start. And if you can bring that out, I feel like that's, you're at the height of your acting. It's kind of like, how many times have we watched a B movie? And it's so obvious, right, that the actors are maybe not as sincere or maybe they're not connecting with the audience. And so for those of you that are trying to figure out what your sound is, stop because it's not a sound. It's not a sound.   Lau: No, no, it's not. It's the land, what I call the land like how it lands on someone. How is it received? How is it thought of that's the most important? And the second is like great acting like Meisner exercises, like the second I'm thinking about myself -- which is natural. A lot of us will lose focus at times, think about ourself. But that's a really good gauge for us as business owners, as BOSSes, as delivery folks doing vocal delivery. The second I'm thinking about myself is the second I've lost contact with the other, the other.   Anne: Absolutely.   Lau: Whoever that is. It just be an admin. It could be an executive assistant, it could be whatever. But if I lose that level of focus, not only did I lose the information of what they're giving to me, but I also lost the authentic response of how what I'm saying and doing is landing on them.   Anne: Yeah, absolutely.   Lau: And then I don't have authentic queuing anymore. I lost my queuing ability. Anne: Yeah. And I think even when we're talking about niches -- again, I always talk about people starting out here and you're trying to figure out where you belong in the industry. Like, where do I fit? I think no matter what niche you're pursuing, commercial, corporate, explainer, promo, there is absolutely in every niche, there is a unique you in that. Even if, let's say promos, right? And they sound announcery. right? And oh, great, I get to be an announcer. Sure. But you've still got a whole lot of personality that's put into that announcer, and you're bringing a whole lot of you to that. Like, I'm just, makes me think of Joe Cipriano, like I could pick out his voice in a second because he brings his personality to it. It really is something that you have to be comfortable with. And I think that's a journey for a lot of students to become self-accepting and to allow -- and vulnerability, right -- that to come out in a performance.   Lau: Absolutely. And I think you have to be okay, okay, sometimes more than okay with whatever you're saying and doing, when it does land, and it's being accepted and it's being rewarded, being okay with that being enough. In other words, if I get into that mindset, yeah. But I, they haven't seen me do this and I don't love that as much as I love this da da -- take that out of the situation and say, look, they're seeing one potential within me of value. And they're loving that and they're valuing that. Let that be okay. Let that be enough. Go other places to show other sides of your voice and other sides of what you can do. But if that's okay, if that's what a big part of your branding is, because sometimes it's enough; people don't wanna know you as everything.   They don't want -- I'm sure we've all had that experience where we see a movie star that we know and love, and we are tracking them, and all of a sudden they're doing a role that they love. That's challenging to them. but we don't wanna see 'em in that role. It's like, it's almost uncomfortable to see them in that role because we don't know them as that. It doesn't seem authentic to us. It seems pushed or it seems weird to us. Does that mean they're not capable of doing the role? ? No, of course not. It just means we've compartmentalized in our brain their branding to us.   Anne: Sure, sure.   Lau: And that means something to us. I think that branding, for some weird reason can have a negative connotation like it's simplistic or superficial when it's not. It has a real lifestyle meaning to people of how they place you Sure. And compartmentalize you within their life, in their lifestyle.   Anne: I wanted to kind of tap into what you're talking about in terms of is there just one brand? Do you just have one brand and maybe not, maybe you can have mult -- I mean, I have multiple brands actually. And so each one of those brands though has a piece of me, has a piece of authentic me in that. And again, I think that that's one of the most important things that we want to emphasize here. And that vocal brand should be something that people can remember you by and then easily come back.   And that's the whole thing, right? Because we're talking about the physical properties of your voice and the physicalities of how we sound and what we can offer as a unique value proposition to our potential clients. Now, how are we going to market that? In my corporate narration world, I have a particular demo that really has my sound, my unique value pro -- I call it my unique value proposition for corporate. And I may sound different when I am doing e-learning, and in reality I am because I'm a different person, right? I am teaching when I'm an e-learning versus corporate, I'm selling, or even commercial, I'm a little bit selling. I'm trying to convince people. So because the context is different, you get a different part of me. And that part of me is still very much me, but it is also a different brand. So I think that for each of your vocal brands, you need to have demonstrations, demos that really showcase yourself in those particular niche  markets.   Lau: Right. You have to have that. That's a necessity. And from my experience, Anne, in my business, people come in, potential clients come in, prospects for a particular specific branding. Once they work with you in that, they start trusting you that yeah, you do that, you do it well. They're getting their value, they're getting what they need. They will open up to cross branding, which I call cross pollination, which means --   Anne: I love that, cross branding.   Lau: I offer, you offer three, four, five, six different services, whatever.   Anne: Hey, could you do this?   Lau: Yes. But they're not unrelated. Like, I'm not gonna clean your curtains, and I'm not gonna babysit your kids. Right? So they're not unrelated, they're all within this sphere. But they're much more open, and rightly so as I would be too, moving into those services once they are educated to understand what they need and what they want, versus coming in off the street for those services because they already came in for a particular brand.   Anne: Sure. And once they do that, I think it's important that you remain consistent in that brand.   Lau: Yes.   Anne: I think branding is just all about consistency, right? I mean, we've spoken about branding before. I mean, obviously look, I've got my headphones, I've got my glasses, I've got the whole red thing for VO BOSS. Visually there's a brand, but also there is that vocal consistency that comes to the show that you and I, we're giving of ourselves. We have our authentic selves. And that is a very important part of the VO BOSS brand. People don't listen to the podcast to look at my headphones. It's about my delivery, our conversation, our heart, our authenticity between the two of us. And that is, again, something that works in conjunction with marketing, maybe a visual. Right? And that has to be consistent for people, to make it memorable for people.   Lau: Yes. I would say it has to be consistent, but not necessarily constant.   Anne: Yeah.   Lau: Like we oftentimes think, oh, I have to be online all the time. I have to be posting on social all the time. I have to -- well, to some degree, yes. But do you need to be constantly doing that? Probably not. But you do have to be consistent in what you're doing so that it's gonna cause the attention that you want. Anne: I'm glad that you said that, because there's absolutely a thing of being too much into, right?   Lau: Yeah.   Anne: I actually, myself, even when we're talking about marketing and advertising, and I offer workshops, obviously the VO BOSS podcast -- how much am I going to be marketing that brand? And so you don't want it to be so much --   Lau: You're overdoing it.   Anne: -- that it becomes an annoyance.   Lau: Right.   Anne: But what's so interesting is -- I listen to Gary Vaynerchuk. I don't know if you do, but Gary is everywhere on social media. And his philosophy is that not everybody's on social media all the time. So therefore, the fact that he pushes it out so consistently and so constantly and everywhere means that at any given moment, somebody's going to be able to know his brand and understand who he is. I think you just need to be consistent in that, but not pushing on any one particular. Right? I think that can be something that's tiresome. It's like performance. Right? Anything that repeats really becomes like white noise and people will not pay attention to it anymore.   Lau: Yeah. Yeah.   Anne: So whatever it is that you are giving vocally in your brand or marketing in your brand, give it authentically, and make sure it's not the same thing every single time. Because then it will become an annoyance.   Lau: Yes. And I would say too, like check your ego at the door. Check it at the door. Because none of us are so big and brash and bold that we can't be learning every moment how to make our branding better, make our value better. Here's a quick example. I do my news blast that I send out, and I'm listening to my people. Am I doing it too much? Am I doing it not enough? Da da da da. I just had someone email me, someone who I've known for a while, and he said, listen, Lau, if you don't mind my saying, he emailed me -- if you don't mind saying there's too much animation in this, things are moving, I'm nauseous. I can't read what you wrote.   Anne: I'm nauseous from your email.   Lau: Right? Like, welcome to the inside of my head. I'm thinking, you know what I'm saying? That's like the inside of my head. And I had to stop and I had to say, right, right. I didn't catch it. I didn't think about it. Da da. By Monday I'm gonna fix it. So that doesn't mean that you're always gonna agree with everything that everyone says. You're not. But if you see it's sound advice, no pun intended, sound advice, you see, it makes sense. And you see it's making someone's world harder to get to know you and get the value --   Anne: Yeah.   Lau: Take out the firewalls.   Anne: Take out the homework. I always say, don't give --   Lau: Get rid of it.   Anne: -- people homework. Yeah.   Lau: Yeah. Don't be egotistical and say, well why? How could he say that to me? He doesn't like my pet -- I don't care about that. I care about him getting value from what I'm sending out.   Anne: Absolutely.   Lau: And if he cared enough to say that to me, I'm gonna care enough to take it under consideration.   Anne: Sure. Absolutely.   Lau: And in this case, case taking action on it.   Anne: Absolutely. I think that that's so important. And I also think it's important to not just be consistent, but also keep the market trends in your back pocket. Research them, understand what they are, and update accordingly. Really vocal trends change over the years, in a grand scheme sort of way. It's gone from announcery to authentic and conversational, mostly. And a lot of that, by the way, is driven by advertising. Right? What sells, right? Again, we don't like being told we're smart consumers. We don't like being told what to do. We like to be able to make our own decisions, and we often ask our peers.   And so that I think is the biggest reason why advertising and the vocal trends changed to a more natural talking like your friend, like, hey, I'd use this product because we don't wanna be told by some loudmouth announcer that we need to buy this product. I mean, we're offended by that. And again, it becomes how can you and this vocal brand service your potential client or your client? It's not about what you sound like. It's not about distributing the vocal noise out there. It's about distributing something that can connect with a listener and move them, inspire them, motivate them.   Lau: Inspire them.   Anne: Yeah.   Lau: Yes. And I would even add in technical, technique-wise over time, add a little hook for yourself in there. Something you may not always do, but you find you're doing consistently that works -- it might be a little glitch in the voice, it might be be a moment of pre-life. it might be a pick up swing on something you do.   Anne: Sure.   Lau: Add something that's yours, that's part of your signature, whatever that is. And just do it consistently. If it works, if it annoys people, they'll let you know. If it doesn't work over time, you'll know.   Anne: Right.   Lau: But do something that's unique to you, authentic to your persona, authentic to your process. And that's something that people will start thinking of you for as well. So many people don't even think, Anne, when they're doing an audition, they want it to be so clean that they don't even think a little, -- is good. Just like a little exclamation, a little moment of vocalization. You know what I mean? Anne: It's too perfect. It's too voice talent. It's too voice actors, too perfect. Yeah.   Lau: It's too edity.   Anne: I can't tell you the amount of times I would have a student, a lot of times this will happen with a male student who has a beautiful, like lower baritone, and at the end of their sentences they'll land it. And I'm like, you need to only give me that gift once in a while, and when I don't expect it. Because if you give me that gift every single word or every single sentence, it's gonna not be a gift anymore. And so you need to give that to me in an unexpected way that's going to capture my attention and not become the same repetitive. That's really what happens when people try to sound or mimic or imitate, unless of course you're doing an impression. But that's a different thing too. Like a lot of times people will be confused when I say that, but when you're a character, I find sometimes when people like character and they're character actors, they are able to bring authenticity to their characters more than they can bring to their own voice.   Lau: Yeah. No doubt about that. And sometimes their alter ego, if they consider it an alter ego, they're doing it all the time. They do it like a tic, it's great, they love it, whatever. Sometimes it can have more authentic appeal than their daily sound can, because their heart and soul is in it. They're so connected to the success of it.   Anne: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And that's the thing, their heart and soul is connected to it. And so I'm always trying to convince people that like, you may not be a cartoon or a very dynamically changing character, but for everything that you do in voiceover, you are. You are a character. It's a version of you. It's an excited you, it's a passionate you, it's a somewhat confused you or whatever is called for in the copy. Right? It becomes that -- or I always say, you own the company. Right? If you're trying to talk about your product and sell for a company, then you own that company. So you're always a character.   Lau: It's like the argument we have in the acting world for actors who are not vocal actors, they're actors who are, you know, on camera or stage actors. They're saying, am I becoming someone else? Or am I opening the door within myself to other experiences that connect to my real history? Now I'd like to think it's the latter because I think that most people who are in this field, who are successful, can bring that connection, whether they do it through a sense memory, whether they do it through an extreme empathy exercises, they don't have to have experienced it. They have to connect to the experience. And that's a totally different thing. And ironically, a lot of folks who go through the actual experience can't emotionally connect the way you can as a vocal actor.   Anne: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.   Lau: Right? But you have to have that conduit, whatever that conduit is, to the authentic connection, you have to have it and find it.   Anne: That is what I think so many people, they just, they're coming in to do their auditions, they run into their studio and they're good readers, right? And they read it and then they apply a melody to it that makes it sound like they're in a scene, but they're not really in a scene or acting, reacting, that kind of thing. And so I think for every piece of copy, you've gotta be so in the scene that you're not even thinking about what you sound like.   Lau: Yeah. And then it becomes mono patterned.   Anne: Exactly.   Lau: And we're thinking, why am I feeling sing songy? Why am I feeling in the pattern of this?   Anne: Exactly. Exactly.   Lau: Yeah. Right.   Anne: So vocal branding, it is absolutely a thing. It is absolutely something that I think all BOSSes out there, you need to know. Understand your vocal brand, understand who you are within that vocal brand, and then be able to market that vocal brand. So make sure that it's defined, and it can evolve, by the way. It doesn't have to always be one way. You can evolve that, evolve multiple brands. Make sure that you are able to bring that front and center proudly. And that will help to, I think, get you those gigs. Good discussion.   Lau: And dirty it up. Like, don't be so perfect.   Anne: Don't be perfect.   Lau: You don't need to be so polished and perfect. Because emulating real life is like we do make mistakes, and we do have rough starts. And sometimes that will get you a job. Love it. Great discussion.   Anne: Ah, yeah.   Lau: So good.   Anne: All right. So BOSSes, it may seem difficult to make a huge impact, but as a group, we can contribute to the growth of our communities in ways that we never thought possible. You can find out more. Visit 100voiceswhocare.org to learn how. And also great, big shout-out to my sponsor, ipDTL. You too, connect and be BOSSes. Find out more at ipdtl.com. Have an amazing week, guys. We'll see you next week.   Lau: Bye.   Anne: Bye.   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.com 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.

Raising your rates as a voice actor can be a daunting task, but it doesn't have to be. In this episode, Anne & Lau discuss tips for approaching money conversations with clients, moving past the fear around charging what you're worth and deciding when to raise your rates. It's important that you know what your time is worth and what kind of value your clients are getting from working with you. Your voice is an asset. By taking charge of these conversations & setting your rates accordingly, you can make sure that your business is running smoothly. Your clients want to work with someone who knows their own value and isn't afraid of asking for it. And if you need someone to talk you through the process, keep on listening…   Transcript   It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere 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.   Anne: Hey everyone, welcome to the VO BOSS podcast and the business superpower series with my special guest co-host Lau Lapides. Hey Lau. Woo-hoo! Always so wonderful to see you.   Lau: Always great to be back. .   Anne: Well, Lau it's a change of seasons and so I'm feeling like I've gone back and reflected upon my business, and it is the time of year where I make the consideration, do I want to raise my prices or not? And what a great discussion Lau, because it is so difficult. How do you raise your prices? How do you raise your rates? And how do you go about doing that with clients that you've had for years or new clients for fear of, oh my gosh, your rates are too high, or rates are too low. I thought it would be a wonderful thing to discuss today on how we can raise our rates, because as businesses, we need to be profitable, right? For the majority of us in this industry, we would like it to be a business and not a hobby. And so to be a business, we need to yield a profit and to yield a profit, that includes pricing yourself. So let's start with you. Talk to me about, first of all, how do you set your prices for your particular voiceover jobs, acting jobs? What do you do first in order to set a fair rate for yourself or a fair price to yourself?   Lau: The question of the year, I say --   Anne: Isn't it though?   Lau: Not even of the day, but of the year. I can hear all of your listeners. The BOSSes are moving a little bit closer, and listening closer. Now, it's a great conversation to have. So I really am thrilled that we're having it today. In my opinion, there's a lot of fear around this conversation. There's a lot of apprehension, a lot of almost terror, I'd say, in really giving yourself as a person and also your brand, as a business, a price tag. That's very difficult for people's brains to get around, especially creatives who are artists and women can have a tough time with that as well.   Anne: Oh yeah.   Lau: And I think everyone can have a tough time as they move through their business, not just in early stages either. Like, people that are at 10, 15, 20 years into the biz having challenges with this topic. I myself have had many challenges through the years. I think one of the first things that, when we take a step back and we look at the whole fee structure of what we are doing, we have to ask ourself what is our worth? What is our value?   And it's not, not a simple, oh, this is what I'm worth and this is my value. It's really something to journal about, something to think deeply on, to converse with people you know and trust, and to do some market research, to really go into the market, say, this is our industry, this is my space. The more I niche down in my space, the more I can research the industry going rates, and really just document that. I would take a little bit of time and document that and update that like every six months to a year, just update.   Anne: Sure.   Lau: Every six months to a year, get knowledgeable.   Anne: So starting what the industry rates are. And so I totally agree with you there. In order for you to raise your rates, you have to set your rates. And so that's the question, number one is before you can raise them, how do you set them? And I think a great reference point is, and we've mentioned this multiple times on the podcast, is the rate guides. GVAA has a fantastic rate guide, Gravy for the Brain has one, SAG-AFTRA has their rates posted. So that's a great benchmark to start to set your rates.   And I think we've mentioned this before, but I'll mention it again, whether you are new to the industry or you've been in the industry for 20 years, you can price yourself at the standard rate. Just because you're new doesn't mean that you have to price yourself at a lower rate than somebody who's been in the business for 15, 20 years. Because in essence, it actually helps the industry if you are pricing yourself at a fair going rate according to the rate guides.   Lau: I would agree with that. Totally agree with that. You took the words out, right outta my head. I was about to say, you almost do the industry in injustice when you go too far low and too far below what the industry rates are. Even though there may be times where you do that and you choose to do that, you need to do that and that's okay. But as a running rule, you wanna stay at the industry rates or above because you wanna drive the market up. You don't wanna drive the market down.   Anne: Exactly.   Lau: We oftentimes hear the sayings like it's a race to the bottom. What that really means is like we're all excited about working. We wanna get as much work as we can, charge them anything and just get anything for the business. And I think that there's a time and place for that. But for sustainability and longevity of a business, it just doesn't work. It does not work in any way. And you are devalued. You're immediately devalued in the eyes of that prospect client. So to really sit down and say, okay, whether I'm starting out or whether I'm running my business, you and I have been running our businesses for 15-plus years, is to say, what is my value today? How has that changed from a year ago? How have we grown? What are my products? How have I niched my products? And what are those products valued at in the market today?   I would start there. That's a good start right there. And then to start thinking about time. What does time mean to you? How much value is your time? How valuable is your time? What's your worth? Your knowledge, your ethos, your education --   Anne: Your experience.   Lau: Your experience, right? It's, that's where the subjective force comes in. What makes me unique? What's my value proposition different from others in the space doing similar work, helps establish that value.   Anne: Well, I think also one thing that helps us as freelancers is that I like to break it into different categories. You have the new clients, the ever evolving, I guess, cycle of new clients that come along. And for that, it's easy to set a rate or raise your rate. Okay? Because they've not had previous experience with you. So in a way that makes it easier for us to either celebrate or raise our rates. And it is up to us though, to take that step to do that.   I mean, I myself was guilty for back in the beginning, keeping my rates, keeping my rates, keeping my rates until I felt that I had built my business up enough to warrant raising my rates. But I do feel that every year is a great time to reevaluate your rates, and the economy too. You've gotta take a look at the economy. Now, we've got so many different things happening at this point in our industry.   We have the evolving economy, which is not doing great right now. So is it a good time to raise my rates? Right? We've got that to consider. What is the market willing to pay? What is the market willing to bear for a price of voiceover, especially now with synthetic voices looming on the horizon. So there's a lot of other factors that need to be taken into place, and if it wants to play into our fear, well, that's what does it for sure. Right? A lot of times the economy and other factors including competition from not only voice actors but now synthetic voices -- and so that just builds upon the fear.   If you weren't scared before raising your rates, now we've got a couple, a couple extra things that are being thrown into the mix, but I will say that because we are freelancers and because we continually acquire new clients, this is a good time to be able to set or raise your rate for the new clients that come aboard. And you know what? Here's the deal. If you decide to set your rate higher than you normally do or raise your rate, what's gonna happen is you will see if the market will bear it, right? If people are gonna say, yeah, sure, that's great. And not question the rate. And so when that happens, there's nothing better than that, because that gives you the confidence to really go forth and raise your rates for all clients.   So it's a great test bed when you get a new client to either set your rate higher or actually change your rate for the new clients. Now I like the whole grandfather clause where I've had a client for many years, and because they are a good client that continues to give me business, I will make a decision on an independent basis whether or not I will raise my rates for them. And then that becomes a different conversation, right? Because now that's where you've gotta like own up to saying, look, I appreciate you as a client, and I'm so thankful for the business and thankful for our relationship together. How do I say I'm going to raise my rights now?   Lau: Ooh.   Anne: Oh, there's the tough one.   Lau: Ooh, snap. There's what she did. Well, everyone has a different thought process. And again, you took the words out of my head because the way I tend to run my business is I tend to show loyalty and allegiance to current clients and typically stay at the rates that they're at. You certainly don't have to. And there are many businesses that will go up in rates on current clients. I just haven't done that quite as much. I keep them at the rate, grandfather them in, have the blank slate on new people with a new pricing coming in. And typically there just isn't any conflict of interest with that.   Oftentimes they don't even know the difference. They just see you coming in, and here's the interesting psychological value to that. All of a sudden you give a new pricing, and they may not flinch at all and say, oh, okay, great. And then you think, oh my gosh, I could have done that years ago.   Anne: Yes.   Lau: I could have done that years ago instead of playing all these psychological games with myself. To this person, the value is there. You are worth it. They're ready to go, and why wouldn't they pay that price? So I think to find good quality clients, the kind of clients that fit you, fit your business is so important. And to know that there are going to be clients that are not good for you; they're not good for you any longer, or they don't fit what your value is because they see it as a cost.   Anne: Right. Right. Exactly.   Lau: They don't see it as an investment. So I tend to use very strategic language when I speak to people. Is this your investment or is this a cost for you? And then educate them on what the difference is. And once they figure out that this is an investment, oh yeah, I'm glad you put it that way, then it is worth it to me. So sometimes it takes the little bit of education in there for them to shift their mindset to, well, you spent how much on a college education? You spent how much on your graduate degree? You spent how much on your online courses, what have you. Was that cost or was that investment? So this is the same thing. This is the same thing.   Anne: I love that you say cost or investment, because I think that clients who look at it as an investment are absolutely going to see your worth much more readily than a client that sees it as a cost. And it's also important, I think, for us as actors and creatives to understand that our voice is an asset. And I know I say it, yes, your voice is an asset, but what does that really mean? Right? Your voice contributes to potential millions of dollars in sales , right, for a client. And sometimes I think we forget that. We become so far removed from the product, the end product that we are providing the voice for that we forget our worth in terms of that.   So don't forget that your voice as an asset -- and this, I'll tell you what, I've learned this in my dealings with trying to talk to, let's say, synthetic voice producers or directors or companies that are producing synthetic voices -- to say that the voice is an asset, that it is worthy of compensation. It is worthy of fair compensation because that asset is what contributes to a company's brand. And don't forget that, BOSSes. Your voice contributes to a company's brand, which is no different than a marketing material or an on-air camera talent that gets paid a good amount of money to represent the brand of a company. So I think because we're in our studios, and we're like alone, we forget that somehow, that our voice really does contribute to a brand's value and a brand's ability to sell.   Lau: That's right. Absolutely. And quick anecdote on that one, just this past week I have a, a new agent colleague from LA who opened an agency and she was calling me to check in on a contract that she's working on for voiceover, and she doesn't currently represent voiceover. And she was going through what would be a fair rate for this talent, and she kept saying over and over and over again, I mean, these people are making millions off of this. They're making millions off of this. And we're talking about the difference between like, they offered $350, $350, she went up to $1100. I said, why don't you offer at lea -- oh my god, 1500 is like still so incredibly -- and her, there was a fear factor in there. I could hear the fear slip in. I said, what's the worst that happens?   Anne: They say, no.   Lau: You slide, you do whatever you want to do and feel is right. But my goodness, the truth is it should be actually so, so, so much higher than that. She just didn't wanna start at such a high rate compared to what the original rate they were giving her. She didn't wanna slide so high. But the truth is, it's so outta whack, it's so outta bounds in terms of what a company may be doing with that brand and creating gross versus what the talent is being paid, which is nothing, pennies, literally less than pennies.   Anne: There's something to be said for pricing yourself in such a way that it is value because you've priced yourself higher versus if you price yourself too low, then it's a perception of, well, okay, so that's a cheap price, right, for a cheap talent maybe. And that may or may not be the way that you want your brand to be perceived. So I always have said that I'm Tiffany's, right? I don't go on sale. This is my rate. And if a client chooses to accept that rate, then they are also accepting obviously that that is my worth and that I'm worth the value of that.   And I think that if they don't, it's okay. You have time to go and find the people that will pay you the rate that you're worth and value that charge or your increase in price. And it's a difficult, difficult thing, especially when you attack it from, well, if I raise my prices, am I going to raise my prices for everyone? And I don't think you have to. I think as we've discussed it, I've got people that are grandfathered in, and each one of those clients that I've been working with for a certain amount of time, each gets a special consideration.   Now, I might have worked with people for 10 years already at the same rate. And I think it makes it a whole lot easier when you propose to them that your rates, due to increased costs in running your business, your rates have to change. And this, for anybody that uses, let's say an audio editor for their work, and they're paying them as well, if they go up in price, and you're still charging the same, well, you've gotta recoup those costs somehow as a business.   Lau: Exactly.   Anne: I've got that. I've got people that I pay for services that are raising their prices on me. And as a business, I've gotta somehow figure out how am I going to accommodate that cost? Because as a business, I don't wanna lose profit on that because I wanna maintain or elevate my business.   Lau: Right. And there is a huge credence to the philosophy that I wanna price myself above the market rate.   Anne: Yeah, yeah.   Lau: Not to get into like scamming or anything like that. Nothing negative. Like, oh, I just wanna make as much money as I can. No, no. You wanna say, listen, here's my price, here's my value, here's my investment, and I'm giving you, as you said, the Tiffany's approach. I'm giving you that Tiffany's approach. So you're investing in that, and that, that actually psychologically tells people that your worth is so high, it's so much higher. So it must be worth the cost of admission. So I'm going down that road, I've been going down that road for a number of years now, saying, yes, we are a slightly higher than the average studio. Yes, we are slightly higher, whatever, because here's the value prop X, Y, Z. That's what we do. That's what we give. You don't want that, then we're not the place for you.   Anne: Right. Right.   Lau: So yes, being able to walk away, being able to say, this business isn't gonna work, this client isn't gonna be good. They don't see the value, that's okay. I think that's fine. You know, you don't have to sort of tear for every single person who comes your way. They're not always gonna be the right ones for you.   Anne: You bring up a good point there, and I've seen this as some discussion on the forums as well lately about some talent feeling that they have a need to school their clients on a fair price. And there's a way to do that that is respectful of a client. I think, again, you have to really put yourself in the client's shoes. Not all clients are in direct control of the money that can be paid for your services. Not all clients really do have the budget, and if they don't, I think it's well worth it for us to say or advise that you're not rude about it. Because not every company has the budget to pay voice services for whatever you might be commanding at the moment. So I think be careful when you are renegotiating with your clients back and forth for a rate.   I think for me, when it's a new client and I'm negotiating a rate, I always start on the higher end, which makes it easy to negotiate down. I always leave an open space in my quote, and a lot of times that's in an email that says, please let me know if this fits within your budget. And that sentence alone pretty much just opens the door for negotiation. And so then a client can come back to me and say, well, I've only been allocated this much for the budget, and then I can work with that. So I always kind of shoot higher anyway. And so that kind of works within my, let's raise the rates this year.   I think it's a conscious decision that you as a business person, right -- put the creative aside for a moment -- well, keep the creative to know what you're worth, but also put on your business hat and really put yourself in the position. Here's what I'm going to do, and stick with it and try to just get past that fear. I think that's the biggest thing that stops the majority of us from raising our rates or charging what we're worth in the first place.   Lau: Yeah. I think you just have to do it. Like you have to go ahead and do it. Look, what's the worst that happens? It doesn't work.   Anne: They say no.   Lau: You can go back. You can go back, you can change your rates, make it lower. Like no one's holding you against a wall. You can do it, but you've gotta try it. I, this gets into negotiation, Anne, a little bit, but I would say it's very important to, once you give that number, once you give that fee, to stop talking. It's very important to give it, to have a sense of just like you would deliver copy and say, this is what we do for this investment company or for this healthcare. We help you, we give you health. This is what our fee is.   Anne: Mm-hmm. And then wait.   Lau: And then stop.   Anne: Then wait. Say nothing.   Lau: What do they say in sales? Like the first person who speaks loses.   Anne: Exactly, that's true.   Lau: Because our nature as caring people, many are artists I wanna say, but you know, we're the lowest, we're kind of cheap, and we're not gonna take, and to sort of justify and give excuses and tell you why we selected that fee -- don't do it. Don't succumb to that seductive force of wanting to explain or self-deprecate.   Anne: Yeah. Yeah.   Lau: Or say, I shouldn't be doing this and I don't know why I'm doing this, but hopefully it works for you, and I hope you can do this. Don't do it. Don't do it.   Anne: Yeah basically --   Lau: Don't do it.   Anne: Here's my price. Let me know if it fits within your budget. And then I wait.   Lau: Yes.   Anne: If you start to pursue it or act desperate in any way, then that's negotiation skills. And I'm so glad in a way that I had to develop those early on because when I first got into the business, I waited a long time before I pursued an agent. And so, so until then I was negotiating for narration, you know, non-broadcast work. And so that gave me a lot of confidence. I could try things out, I tried rates out. And it's funny because people will ask me, well, what do you charge for this? And I'll be like, I pulled that right outta my butt. I pulled that number right outta my butt. But honestly, this's where it comes half the time because I've got a basis. But I don't necessarily know this client.   I try to validate the client first and see what other work they have and educate myself as much as possible and then give a number. And sometimes that number, there's no basis for that number other than it's just I took a benchmark and I priced it up a certain amount based upon my last experience. And basically it's all trial and error, and I've always left myself that window open for negotiation. And that experience has really, I think, educated me more than just about anything else in this industry, was the education of being able to negotiate.   And so for that you play a lot of games and you fight a lot of fear. And it takes just a few times for things to work in your favor. Always ask the client if they have a budget in mind, because that budget can also help you to gauge pricing. I asked a client once what their budget was, and they're like, oh, I can't spend more than $3,000 for this. And I'm like, whoa. That was like three times what I was gonna quote.   Lau: So much higher.   Anne: That was three times higher than I was gonna quote. And I said, I think I can work with that . So that sort of thing can really give you confidence to understand where your worth is and then also where you might price and where you might start to raise your rates. So every year I say, take a look at what you're charging people, 'cause I have a base guideline, and by the way, I don't advertise it at all. I think that it used to be a thing where some people advertised their rates, and I think in that kind of a tactic, it's almost like if you're gonna advertise your rates, you're looking to get people who are trying to get the lowest cost. Here's my rates, I'll do a commercial for $100, or you know, a 60-second commercial for $100. And I think if you're gonna do that, then you're playing the wrong game there. You're playing the lowest bid wins, and you've kind of limited yourself in terms of profit that you can make by publishing your rates. So it's more of a custom boutique service if you say, contact me or if you're interested, here are my demos. If you're interested, contact me and then start the conversation.   Lau: And that's exactly why it's important to stay quiet as much as you speak, because you're gonna pick up the cues of what that client is saying to you and you're gonna make your quick notes so that in your brain you can say, oh I can go hide her. I didn't realize that. Or I'm way too high. Am I willing to lose this client? Like you can start that conversation, that inner monologue going, if you're listening to the cues that are coming in.   And there was one more point I wanted to make 'cause you said something so cool and that was about control yourself. Like control your emotions, control how you react to things. Here's the psychology of selling. Is that like nothing should get me upset is the truth. Everything should be objectified just enough so that whatever comes out of them is not really about me. They're talking about my business. So they're not -- so I'm not just like an actor. It's like if I don't get the job, it's not really about me, it's about what I'm offering is not really right for that role. Well, it's the same in business. They're not really talking about me. 'Cause guess what? They don't know me and they don't know me at all. I'm a stranger. They're talking about their perception of this whole business that they may not know anything about. Or they may have had a, a big history, they may have been burned, who knows?   Like we don't know when they come in the room, what they've been through. They may have been through a lot. So you have to give them the benefit of the doubt that if they get irritated or angry or if they treat you inappropriately, you have to understand that they're coming in with a history. But don't fall into it yourself. Like we used to say in training, leave your trash at the door. You know what I mean? Like you, well you can pick it up on your way out, but don't put it in someone else's court. Because you lose your power when you do that. You talk about superpowers, it renders you incapable of diplomacy and neutralization, when you start to say, how could he say that about me? Or how could he downgrade me like that or whatever, you know?   Anne: That's what it is. I think part of it is the emotional aspect of it and keep the emotions out of the business. Take it out.   Lau: Take it out, take it out.   Anne: It's so hard for us because our product is so personal to us. It is our voice. It is who we are. It is our brand. And so when we get treated by a potential client and them, I guess, diminishing our worth in terms of no, I can't pay that. Or no, that's not in our budget, we have to not take that personally because it's not about us; it's about business.   Lau: That's right.   Anne: And some clients literally don't have the budget and we have to just accept that and not be offended, not be angry.   Lau: Mm-Hmm. And isn't it okay, Anne, that they don't want it, they don't like it, they don't agree with it? It's still a free country. You know what I mean? It's like they have a right to not think that's fair or to not wanna put the money into it. They have a right to do anything they wanna do. One technique that I use that I found just for my own sake, that preserves me in the process is whatever happens in terms of the fee structure and the negotiation and the chit chat, I always immediately redirect. If I hear something negative coming out, I immediately affirm it. I hear it, I hear you. And then I redirect it onto something positive, and nine times outta ten, it works really well.   So like for instance, I say, oh, my fee is this for whatever, for a demo. And they go, oh my God, that's expensive. And I'll say, well, you know, it's an investment. You're, you're investing in your future, whatever. And they'll say, well, I don't know. I don't, I don't know. Let me think about that. I'll say, great, think about it. I'm here for you when you come back. And in the meantime, I appreciate you sharing your story with me. That was valuable to me. And they go, well, thank you. That's sweet of you to say that. And then the conversation is redirected. And I mean that, I'm not just saying it as a sales tactic. I mean it from Lau that I'm gonna walk away saying I may or may not close a client. But I heard a really interesting story and I learned something from that conversation, and now I know something about what I can't do or what I can't do.   And so you have to have your takeaways too from the selling process. It's not just about the number, it's about I'm constantly reevaluating my own worth, reevaluating my own value, reevaluating how I view the business and perceive the human contact. And that's worth its weight and gold. Right? .   Anne: Well, it's so funny that you say that. And I have multiple aspects of my business where I, I, I mean, it's not just about voiceover clients. I have coaching clients, I have demo clients, I have VO Peeps memberships, I have VO BOSS marketing that I sell to people. And I'm constantly having to, if people are like, well, they're on a subscription, and they decide that -- end of year, it's always the time when people reevaluate their expenses and they're saying, well, was it worth it or was it not? And so whenever I get those emails saying, well, I'm looking to cancel because you know, I'm not seeing the value, I will always have, thank you so much for your feedback. I'm grateful for it. Here's my thought. Here's my thought. Think of this, think of that. And here's the value that we're providing, and we appreciate you and the value, and let us try to work something out. And I'll usually do that once.   And it's amazing how many times I can recoup someone by pointing out the value that they might have missed over the years or the month, or this is how we're bringing value to your brand. And so I think it's worth a shot rather than just saying, well, okay. I mean, I could just say okay and not care about it. But I'm always responding back with, thank you for your feedback. Thank you for your input. I appreciate that. I completely understand. It's hard at the end of the year for everyone. Here are some thoughts to consider.   Lau: Perfect.   Anne: And that is something that you can do for a client if you raise your rates with them. If they say no or they push back, you can say, thank you, I appreciate your feedback. And that's how you respond. Really, you have to just respond with grace. There's no other way really, and gratefulness for them being your client. But I say, yeah, stay firm with, here's my new rates. And I don't think that your rates should again, be outside of, you don't wanna go crazy and price yourself out of the market. I think that there's an acceptable range where you can raise your rates and it's not ridiculous. So I have vendors for me right now that are raising their rates and I have to figure out how I'm going to absorb that cost or raise my rates in return.   Lau: That's right.   Anne: But as voice talent, voice artist, voice actors, absolutely. I think it's worth at this point, or at whatever time, once a year to evaluate what you're charging and then consider whether it's time to raise your rates. Because we all need to progress. We all need to continue the profit, the economy, other things happen around us and we need to accommodate for that.   Lau: Yes. If you work on your plan, you work on your action plan for the year or for the quarter, you'll know what you wanna be grossing, you'll know what you wanna be taking in, and you'll know how close or how far away I am from that based on the rates that I'm charging right now and the volume that I deal with.   Anne: Look at the numbers, BOSSes. I know it's scary, but I think the first thing is look at the numbers. And I think that's probably the most scary thing for most of us, probably scarier than an audition or a gig that we really want. It's scarier to look at the numbers. What's your incoming, what's your outgoing, what are your rates now? And have the courage to step back, look at it, and raise those rates if you need to. So great conversation, Lau.   Lau: Anne, can I throw in one more thing for the road?   Anne: Yeah, absolutely.   Lau: Because. I just thought of this and I know you're like this and I know I'm like this. I think we care so much and that's why we get scared. If we didn't care --   Anne: Makes sense.   Lau: -- at all, we couldn't give a two hoots about what they think, whatever, we'll raise it sky high -- no, it's because we care and the good people deeply care about the people first. And so we're always regarding their feelings and how they view things and what, what makes life easier for them. And that's a wonderful trait to have. We just have to balance that with taking care of our selves as well.   Anne: Absolutely. Great point. Thank you, Lau. Oh, great topic. Absolutely great topic. And I think we all need to address it at one point during the year in our careers. So I'd like to give a great, big shout-out to our sponsor, ipDTL. You too can connect network and talk about money and rates like a BOSS. Find out more at ipdtl.com. And also I want you to know about a chance where you can use your voice to make an immediate difference in the world and give back to the communities that give to you. Visit 100voiceswhocare.org to commit. You guys, have an amazing week and we'll see you next week. Bye!   Lau: See you then! Bye.   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.com 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.

  Fear is a powerful force, and one that can hold you back from reaching your full potential. But fear doesn't have to be a bad thing. If you let fear in and learn from it, you'll be able to overcome the obstacles that keep you from achieving success as a voice actor. This may seem counterintuitive, but when you're afraid of something, whether it's a new genre, emerging technology, or a difficult conversation, you can use that fear as motivation to push yourself beyond your comfort zone. Bosses, you can't grow without fear. Listen up to learn how you can turn what you're most afraid of into positive actions that will transform your voice over career…   Transcript    >> It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere 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. Anne: Hey hey, everyone, welcome to the VO BOSS Podcast and the Business Superpower series. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzza, and I am so happy to bring back to the show, Lau Lapides. Hey Lau. Lau: Hey, how are you, Anne? Anne: I'm doing good, actually. oh, wait, I should start that over because I need like, ooh, . Lau: Ooh. Are you doing sound effects or no? Anne: I'm doing sound effects, Lau. I needed sound effects for today's -- Lau: I got one for you. Ready?  Anne: All right. (breathing sound) What's that? Lau: You know, that's the serial killer. That's Mike Meyers and all of that. Friday the 13th. Anne: Oh my God. See, so I don't watch horror films or scary movies. Lau: Gotcha. Anne: But what, that actually brings us to a great topic for today since it is near the holiday, the scary, spooky holiday. What scares you? What scares you, BOSSes, and how do you deal with fear? I think that's a really great topic. Lau, I mean, we've talked about fear prior to this, but we haven't really concentrated on it. I am a firm believer that you need to do something scary every single day, in order to grow.  Lau: I love that.  Anne: In order to grow. Lau: That's what the great Eleanor Roosevelt said, right? I do something every day that scares you. I would agree with that. I would definitely agree with that. And if it means just simply stepping outside your box, getting uncomfortable, we have these conversations every day, right, Anne, with the clients and each other, like how do we get uncomfortable to stretch ourselves and to learn? And yeah, to get a little scared, to get a little frightened, like get the dopamine kick going so that you can push yourself and really stretch yourself? Yeah. I think it's important to get scared. Anne: So what's frightening, do you think, for most new talent when they come into this industry and try to be a success? Maybe that's the scariest thing, right?  Lau: Yeah. Yeah. I think fear is the number one factor for failure.  Anne: I do too, fear of failure, right? Lau: Yeah. It can mean your ultimate success or your ultimate demise, and how you respect fear, how you treat fear, how you accept fear into your life, and then how you overcome it. I really think that you have to just grab a hold of fear and understand it's healthy to feel fear. Your survival fight or flight technique does kick in, right, when you're doing new things.  But to answer your question, I think a lot of things scare newbies. And one is, you know how the market can be saturated. It can be lots and lots of people that are working, that you may perceive to be ahead of you or professionals, and you're coming in and you don't know exactly what you're doing just yet. And feeling like that fish out of water can be a very scary experience. Anne: Yeah. Well, let's start with that, right? Not necessarily knowing what you're doing. I think that was in the very beginning for me, coming out of the corporate world or wherever you're coming from to get into this industry is maybe, number one, not knowing everything there is to know about the industry. And by the way, we all don't know everything, but , you gain experience over the years. Fear of navigating a business when if you have never done that before, I think that probably surpasses all of my fears. I mean, first you've got the fear, am I good enough to make it and to be successful? But then it's like, oh gosh, well, what do I do? How do I create a business? What do I even do to start? Do I need to have a DBA? Do I need to incorporate? What sort of things do I need to do to run this business and accounting? Like I've never done accounting, I've never negotiated a job. All of those things. And it all seems to just kind of happen at once in the beginning of your career. And I think that that can be overwhelming to some people. Lau: You know, when you said accounting, your eyes got really, really big. It was like a 1920s talkie. It was like accounting? Anne: Accounting. Oh my gosh. Lau: No!  Anne: Right?  Lau: But, but see, the physiological reaction you do have to ideas and concepts that really do cause this physical distress. And I would say failure overall, like the fear of failure. What if this doesn't go well? What if I am terrible? What if I don't make money? What if I can't get a job? What if, what if, what if? That's really scary to a lot of people. Anne: Right? And I'll tell you, when I first started full-time and we moved from the east coast to the west coast, I had said to my husband, Jerry, until I get on my feet, hopefully you'll get a job that can pay you a little bit better. And so it can kind of compensate, and we'll be able to afford the cost of living. And once he got here, literally, I think it was nine months, they laid him off. And that became very scary because I still was getting my wheels turning and spinning and making money full-time for the business. But once that second source of finance kind of fell , it was like, whoa. Now I was really scared because I felt like I had a lot of pressure to do well and contribute to the household because he was kind of taking care of things until I was getting my business set up. So that really put a lot of fear. But what was cool about it in a way, is that it motivated me. So fear really worked as a motivation for me to get my butt in gear. And if I was afraid of anything, like how do I market, how do I -- certainly took a step towards educating myself. And I think that is one way to really combat your fears, is to educate yourself on the thing that you are most afraid of, like accounting or running a business. Do I need to register my business? How do I register my business? How can I get voiceover jobs? How can I market myself? Well, I think a good thing to start with is education. And I love the internet. I love Google. Like people have called me Anne GanGoogle because yes, I use it for everything. Right? Lau: That's catchy. Anne: Yeah. I mean, you don't have to go to the library anymore, and all the young people are gonna go, what? What you used to have to go to the library? Yeah. We used to have to go -- Lau: What is a library? Anne: -- the library and check out books. But now at our fingertips, really, we have so much information, so much information that we can use to educate ourselves. And I think that's the first step to helping you to challenge that fear and get over that fear. Education, knowledge is power. Lau: Mm. Education is key. Yeah, I'm right over there because knowledge is power. And you do feel, we're talking about superheros, right? We're talking about how we get empowered and powerful in the industry, especially when you're new. This is true of anything. When you're new at something, you're learning, you're, you're trying to get experiential and it takes time. It's not an overnight success.  Anne: Yeah.  Lau: It really does take time. And just kind of understanding that, having the knowledge, having the education. Totally, totally good. And the fear, I mean, when I think about fear, I think of how does community, my family, my friends, my colleagues, how do they view me? What are they saying to me? I might be a little fearful. Are they gonna judge me? Are they gonna think this is for real? Are they gonna support me? Are they going to try to stop me or put a boundary in my way? I've met a lot of clients, and I know you have as well, unfortunately, that didn't have the support, and in fact had sort of axes thrown at them all the way through and dodging people just to get to where they want to be. They just didn't have the support system. So that is scary. That is scary, not having a tribe, not having that community surrounding you that supports you. Anne: Yeah, exactly. I think that in addition to education, having the support group around you, and it just brings me to the episode that we did about your VO tribe. So very important to have that support, especially because we work by ourselves. We're typically in our booths and coworkers are not around us. And so having that verbal support where if you've got a question or you're nervous, you can reach out to someone and get some support there. And family is very important, I think, because uh, , I think maybe all of us have had at least one member of the family that has said, what do you do? Like, what is this? ? What is that?  Lau: What is, why would you -- Anne: What is is voiceover? Yeah. I don't understand. So, I do think that the support of your family, first and foremost, is wonderful. And if you don't have that, the VO community is a wonderful community. I'd say be very careful and social media can be wonderful, but it can also be, oh gosh, it can also not be so wonderful. So , I think that if you have accountability groups or support groups on Facebook, people that you can write to, ask questions to, that's gonna be very helpful for you as well. I think that there's something to be said for, yes, it's great to have that support, but I think it's also something that if you can challenge yourself on a daily basis, like I said, try to do something every day that scares you a little bit. Like if you've never gotten out there to market or sent an email to an agent, I think that writing those kind of tasks down, things that scare you, and then attempting to maybe backtrack the steps that it takes to get you to that point and just try to attack one of those every day. Lau: Absolutely. And that is scary because again, it's new. It's something you're not accustomed to. You don't know, am I doing this the right way? What are they expecting of me? I think that is one of the areas that people stop. They just get stopped in their track. And I thought of another one, Anne, for you, this is very common, I see this, the fear of technology. And many of us fall into it at different levels, right? Like how technology driven you are, how knowledgeable you are about equipment. Are you good at setting up your studio? How do you upgrade and level up? I mean, these are all areas that terrify people. Really. Anne: I agree. I agree. And you know, technology, see, you hit my soft spot there. And BOSSes that don't know -- I mean, I think a lot of BOSSes know me, but if you don't, I am very, very much technology oriented. I worked in technology, I still work in technology, and I like to be on the bleeding edge of it, speaking of things that are scary. And one of the reasons I like that is because I feel like for me, I always take the stance that technology is there to help us progress, to help us advance in society. And it's not evil. You can certainly take that stance if you'd like, that technology is evil. But I don't think that either way you're going to stop the advancement of technology. I think technology would be, oh gosh, so much further if we didn't put a stop to it. If humans didn't say, no, no, no, no, no all the time, I think we would be further along in our technological advancements.  And I like to believe in the good of technology. And that includes, I speak the words of synthetic voices. We're not stopping them. They're coming. And I think we just need to know about them and know all that we can about them in order for us to really be able to manage our business. We have to be able to manage our business 'cause they're going to be alongside us; whether we partake in them or not, we're going to need to learn how to deal with them. So if they happen to take parts of the industry away, or people prefer the synthetic voices for maybe shorter news blasts or telephony prompts, whatever it may be, we need to evolve in our industry to kind of work alongside that. And maybe what we need to do is hone our performance skills in another genre. The first thing that I always tell my students is make sure that you are acting, and you are acting as human as possible. Because that's exactly the opposite of what the synthetic voices are at this moment. So we can offer a product that is unique to us. So work on your performance skills so that you can be more human than ever. And I think that that's one way to face the challenge. And also for any technological piece of this business that you're scared of or not familiar with, take a class. Lau: Yes.  Anne: I mean, educate yourself or outsource that. Just make sure that you understand enough about the technology so that when you outsource that you can manage the person that is taking care of your technology. And I'll say one thing probably most people like to outsource is their website. I know what a website is capable of. I know what I want in a website, but I don't make websites. And so for that reason, I hire someone to help me. But I know enough about that website that I can log into the website, I can go and make tiny changes on the content. Or if I don't know how to do that specifically, I have a methodology to make those changes. Right? I have somebody who can make those changes, and then I have a backup to somebody that can make those changes, so that I am never going to be at a loss for controlling that technology. Lau: Hmm. I love that. And at the end of the day, if you wanna be a voiceover talent, just the bottom line is, like you have to create a home studio. You don't -- Anne: Oh yeah.  Lau: -- have a choice anymore. The industry standard. The best practices that you're gonna have. Even minimal, but some sort of recording system at home that you can feel good about, you can feel strong about, you can troubleshoot, you can upgrade. I think the days of relying on going to other studios and having engineers do everything for you is passed, is passé. So as a VO talent, it's really a necessary evil, so to speak that, you know, enough base knowledge that you could cut an audition for yourself and feel good about it.  Anne: Yeah. Well, and just not worry that you don't have good sound. I had a wonderful series on BOSS audio with Tim Tippetts, and just the simple fact -- now he built this studio, custom built this studio for me. And I walk into it every day understanding that this is solid. I am not going to have any type of environment acoustic issues in this studio. The only thing that might go wrong at this point, 'cause the structure is solid and the structure is built. And that is a major level of fear, I think, for most talent when they get into the industry, is getting that space, right, acoustically sound and ready to produce broadcast audio. And so really, I can walk into the studio every day, and I don't have the fear that my environment is not working for me. And that is a huge relief. That's a huge relief. And that was something, again, I outsourced someone to do for me. And it took care of that fear. It alleviates the fear of that now. Now my fear is that, I don't know, maybe my cable is bad or my microphone for whatever reason. But again, that's another technological part that I understand that if something happens to that technology, I know how to fix it. Or if I don't know how to fix it, I can replace it with the backup. And I go back to -- I know I've had an episode prior to this with Erikka J about backups and technology and back up your backups. And that's always a good thing so that you're never in a spot where you cannot complete the job. And that causes fear. That causes stress. Lau: It does. And having people on your team, whether they're contractors that you can call in  people that you can delegate to help fix things. Oh yeah. Uh, folks, you know, that are reps that can call in for technical advice. Like you have to have that ready to go.  Anne: Oh yeah.  Lau: You can't wait until something goes wrong.  Anne: Absolutely.  Lau: Right? So, and it to alleviate the stress, alleviate the fear. I got another one for you. How about the fear of your voice, your vocal apparatus not working well? Anne: Oh yeah.  Lau: Not being able to have longevity  health or having health issues, related issues like allergies or asthma or anything coming into play. Because after all, we're just, and there's so many things in the world -- yeah. Acid reflux. We're human beings in the world. So we have to live every day and figure out, okay, how do I live as clean as I can? How do I take care of my body and my mind? How do I do all that? But when something goes wrong, see, this is where professional actors and singers really have it over the average person, like if sick with the flu or God forbid Covid, or they have a terrible allergy attack, they know how to overcome it. They have techniques. They have herbal remedies, they know what vocal rest means. They know how to work through the sickness. Whereas the average person doesn't. So I think that there's a fear in folks at all ages that, oh, am I gonna be able to get through a two or three hour session? Am I gonna be able to have quality sound from morning 'til night? Anne: Well, I think in terms of voice, am I going to be able to make a two hour session or a three -- depending on what you're doing, right, that's definitely a concern. If you're doing video games, you're doing efforts and you're really working that, that instrument hard, then there are, you know, exercises of course, that you can do to build those muscles up. And of course there are sometimes that you absolutely cannot help it if you are sick. Right? And you have a cold. And so in those cases, I think to alleviate any kind of fear that you're, you're gonna lose work, then work on those relationships with your clients. Right? So that if you are sick, we are all human. I mean, it's very understandable. And we did just say we're still going through a pandemic or we're, you know -- that's, that's very understandable. And I think that clients will be understanding if you've got a good relationship with that. And so I think to alleviate the fear there is, have good relationships with your clients and be authentic. Be human. Lau: Be human. And Anne, I actually had something happen not too long ago with one of our talents in our roster that is a wonderful talent, but he didn't make the right choice. And what was the choice? He was sick. He was sick one day. And he chose to go through a session with a client and the client listened to it. They knew he was sick, he was at his home studio so he could do this easily. And they said, we have to tell you, Lau, we're a little annoyed because he only has half of his voice. It's not what we hired and we don't know why he didn't cancel and reschedule the session. Now we got to go through it again. And he was fine. We didn't charge them more money. The talent was like apologetic. He said, I should have told you. I didn't wanna be a nonprofessional by not showing up. I said, It's not about not showing up. It's about communicating what is actually happening and allowing your client to make that choice. Let them make the choice. Anne: Oh, absolutely, your voice is your product. And so, it really becomes, at that point, I think professionally, remember that our voice is our product. And if our voice is not in good shape, you wouldn't deliver a product that is tattered and torn and worn and raspy. If you were a client, you certainly wouldn't want that. So you always have to be conscious of that fact. And that is, your voice should be in tiptop shape because that is your product. And the more professional thing is to, yeah, when it's not in tiptop shape, have that relationship with the client to say, look, I'm not feeling well and I just wanna give you a heads up. And I do that all the time with my clients, and they're very, very understanding. I've had clients wait like weeks, like a good couple of, if they have the time. I mean, if it's not a thing where you have to do a live session and it has to be done yesterday, but I've had some clients that have been able to wait a couple weeks, push things out because they value the product. They value the product that I give to them. And so, again, I think that that's something that to alleviate any kind of fear, work on those relationships, nurture those relationships, and yeah. You're gonna be fine. What other things, Lau, do you think voice talent are afraid of these days? Lau: Uh, well, I would say, uh, many voice talent create a healthy fear of doing jobs or taking copy that they would consider to be outside of their wheelhouse. They would consider to be not as comfortable for them. If they're like, let's say they're commercial talent, and they're typically doing commercial work and that's what they do. Sometimes they're not as open to the idea of doing, say character work or animation. 'Cause they say, I don't really do that. That's not in my wheelhouse. Or, I don't really do a lot of narration work. I'm not that kind of actor. I'm not that kind of person. Or they'll even say, I'm not an actor at all. I'm just a voiceover talent.  Anne: Yeah. Yeah.  Lau: Right.  It's so funny to me to say that because I consider every voice of talent an actor to some degree. Anne: Absolutely. Me too. Lau: But there is a fear of auditioning or submitting for jobs that are not within your branding or not within the kinds of jobs that you're typically getting. Like something bad will happen. They'll, they won't hire me and they'll call, call me a bad talent. I get, I won't get work in other areas as well. That's a fear. Anne: Yeah. I think absolutely, to stretch yourself outside of your comfort zone. And there's lots of great coaches out there that can help you if you want to explore a different genre and get good at that genre. And even with auditions, I always try to go with my gut when I see auditions and I say, okay, that feels like it's my wheelhouse. But yeah, every once in a while I'll look at an audition, I'll say, well, what the heck? Let's give it a shot. And it's so funny because a lot of times the ones that I just say, well, let me give me a shot, surprisingly, I'll do well or I'll get the gig. And so I think, you know, stretching outside of your comfort and you click that send and you're like, oh my God, I hope again, if you ever had one of those turn around on you, I think that would give you the confidence to stretch yourself outside of your comfort zone. I'm gonna name something else that I'm pretty sure a lot of talent, even talent that have been around for a while and have done this for a while, is negotiating a job if they don't have an agent on their behalf. Right? Or raising their rates. Right? Or sticking to their rates.  Lau: Wait a second, that's the best ever.  Anne: Right, right?  Lau: Especially for women, but yes. Yes for everyone.  Anne: And people always say to me, well, I don't know what to charge. Okay. First of all, we are entrepreneurs, right? I mean, in reality it is our business. And so it is up to us, unless we've got an agent working on our behalf, but for any other jobs, let's say I do a lot of non-broadcast, e-learning, corporate, you know, explainer, that style where I work directly with the client, and half the time, of course I have guidelines, right? There's always the GVAA rate guide, there's my own guidelines that I've been working with since I started. But if this is something new or it's slightly different and there's nothing, there's no standard written, I'm pretty much pulling that price out of the air, out of the air. Lau: Out of the hat. Anne: Out of the hat. And I'm always kind of verging on more than I think because I wanna start the negotiation high so that I can come down to the price where I feel like would be fair. And so, just so you know, we can be in this business for, I've been in the business for like, gosh, oh my God, 16 years already. And sometimes I'll have a price that I'll just have to pull out a thin air. And I'm guessing at it. And so know that, guys. I don't want you to think that all the pricing is all secure and within a chart. Sometimes I am just winging it. And once you get the client that says, okay, great, that sounds, when can you have it by then? That gives you the confidence to just continue on the negotiation battle. So always, always know that you are worth money. Please do not negotiate a low rate because you feel that you're new or that you feel that you don't have the experience because you have invested in your business and therefore you are worth the money. And so, yeah.  Lau: And you said the magic word, invest. I was thinking there's a fear of investment.  Anne: Mm. Oh gosh, yes. Yes. Lau: I'm terrified.  Not me, really. I'm just saying I'm terrified of spending money on coaching or scared of spending too much money on my studio, or I'm afraid of how much a microphone will cost. And there's a lot of fear around, how much do I need to invest? And you have to think of it like, is it a cost or is it an investment? Is there an ROI in this? Am I really expecting money to come back? Or is this just a sinkhole of just like throwing money in where I don't know what's gonna happen at the end of the day? So having vision about my investment and my return, and really being very mindful that that's what I want to have happen. Does it mean it will happen? No. But what it means is you're focusing your brain and you're focusing your intentional energy on that execution. So it's more likely that you'll have a positive outcome than going, but I'm afraid. I'm afraid I don't have the money, and I'm afraid, I'm afraid. So that was one thing. You know, the other thing too that came to my mind, Anne, was success. Anne: Oh my gosh.  Lau: A lot of people are afraid of success. Anne: Totally agree with you there. And I, and I wanna just say like for myself personally, right? There comes a time --you cannot grow -- I can attest to this, you cannot grow without investment and you cannot grow without a little bit of fear. And so the investment for me has come to the point where I am one person. I can only physically do so many things within the 24 hours of the day. Right? And so when I want to grow beyond that, then I have to think about outsourcing. I have to think about that as an investment in my business so that somebody can help free up some time for me so that I can do more voiceover jobs. I can coach, or I can do whatever it is that I wanna do to grow my business.  And then I have to be at the point where I say, all right, I have this level of success that I'm at now. I feel comfortable. I'm able to support my household. I'm feeling good. And just when it hits that point, I say, all right, what's next? Right? How am I going to grow? How am I going to expand? And I'm always get to these levels, right? And I always try to address it. I'm gonna say on an average quarterly, right? Within the year, what's next for me? And I right now am at this point right now where, what's next? And so I know what has to come next for me in order to continue to grow. I think about it, I'm like, okay, I have to go through a series of steps to get there and it's gonna be a lot of work. And I just go, oh God, I had so much work, but I have to get through it.  Once I get through it, I can then bump myself up another level. Right? So I just consider myself going up that stairway to more success. And so I know it's coming up the road for me ahead, and I know that it's going to be a lot of work, and it makes me tired right now. But I do know that if I don't do it, I will not grow, and I will not succeed further. And to me, I always love a good challenge, I think, I think the one thing for me, why I love entrepreneurship and why I love this business so much is that it allows us to just go as high as we absolutely can. There's no limit, right? Lau: Yeah.  Anne: There's no limit. I mean, and, and that's the thing. You have to allow yourself to think big and to think, wow, there really isn't a limit to how much I can grow. And to me's a game. It becomes a game. You know, a challenge. And I love a good challenge. For me, that's how I get through it, instead of the fear, right? I consider it to be a challenge and a game. And it's a game that I play with myself. So I'm not in any sort of danger of necessarily hurting other people because it's me. It's a game I play against myself. I mean, that's out of myself and working myself to craziness. But that's my whole goal, is to not have to work so much. And so that is going to help me to grow.  Lau: Right. And who's keeping score? I mean, at the end of the day, it's really about, you. You're keeping score. You're the one who's setting your goals, how you wanna achieve throughout the year and throughout your quarters. You're really the one who's paying attention to that because it's skin in the game. You have the most vested interest in the success of your business. And I always say, be careful what you wish for. You may get. Because if you get it, meaning if you get that job that you're auditioning for, you get that creative studio that you always wanted, well, now what's next? It doesn't mean you can lay back and chill and bask. It means like you have to push a little more. You have to move a little faster. You have to intensify your goals. In a sense that ceiling is just not even there. It doesn't even exist.  Anne: Exactly. Exactly. It just keeps moving up. So. Lau: Keeps moving up, right? Keeps moving up. Anne: Yeah. Love it. Great conversation. So BOSSes out there, face those fears. Fear is good. I believe fear, it leads to growth. Education, knowledge is power. And know that you're not alone.  Lau: I love that. You're never alone. Even when you're in your booth, you're never alone. Like who are you connecting to? You're always connected to someone who also has your vested interest in mind because they wanna have a successful product, they wanna have a successful process, and they want to have a relationship with you. So always consider the positive versus the negative, and that's gonna help you alleviate those fears along the way.  Anne: Yeah. Well, great discussion. BOSSes. Fear, you can conquer. We have the faith in you. So I'd like to give a great big shout-out to our sponsor, ipDTL. You too can network and connect like a BOSS and conquer those fears. Find out more at ipDTL.com. And also from our other sponsor, 100 Voices Who Care, here's a chance for you to use your voice to make an immediate difference in our world and give back to the communities that give to you. Visit 100voiceswhocare.org to find out more. All right, guys. BOSSes, have an amazing week and we'll see you next week. Bye. Lau: Bye. >> 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.com 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.

Nothing in this industry happens fast. You have to trust that things will happen when they're supposed to. In this episode, Anne & Lau share how trust can help you build your business and a strong, reliable network. Don't sabotage relationships before they even begin—if someone shows interest in working with you, take their word at face value and don't let fear of failure keep them at arm's length! Give yourself permission to learn and make mistakes along the way so that you can grow as an artist and a person. We all want our business to succeed, but sometimes things don't go as planned. That's ok! Negative experiences should teach you something and give you an opportunity for growth. Bosses, don't worry. You can trust Anne & Lau to lead you in the right direction. Transcript >> It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere 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. Anne: Hey everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS Podcast and the Business Superpower series. I'm your host Anne Ganguzza, and I have with me Lau Lapides. Woo! Lau: Hey everyone. Good to see you, Anne. Anne: Special guest, co-host. Oh my gosh, Lau, I have had the best time having you as co-host. Lau: I love it. I think you and I are like sisters from another mother. I love it. I think we got so much to talk about. So much to say. We have a great rapport. Anne: We do. We do. And you know what? I really have a lot of trust in you, and that is something that I feel, when people are starting off in the industry, they need to find someone to trust, a tribe, a coach, a mentor, in order to help them get through the process. And I think trust is a huge ask for the talent, but I think it's absolutely necessary for success. Lau: It is. I mean, you have to trust someone at some point in order to further your education and further your career. And really be able to also kind of ignite personalized relationships where you're forecasting to people, the right people, well-selected people, that you're gonna share thoughts that are authentic. You're gonna be helpful in their journey. You're gonna share things that are uncomfortable. I mean, that's really how we gain trust. And it doesn't happen overnight. It really is time. It takes time to gather trust. Anne: Yeah. And I think a big factor in trust is obviously the fear that seems to be very prevalent when people start off in this industry. The fear that they're not good enough, they're not gonna be successful. And I think it leads them to just not trust in themselves, not trust in other people they might have worked with or people on the internet. And I understand that in a lot of ways where you've gotta be careful, but I feel as though if you have a member of the tribe, you've got to just invest in that trust, to hope that they're guiding you in the right direction. Now, that is not to say that you should not educate yourself, right, so that you know who you can trust. Right? And kind of feel your way around that. And if you do not trust, I feel that it's going to inhibit you from being successful in the industry, because otherwise you're not gonna have someone that's gonna help build you back up or build your confidence up when you're feeling low, when maybe you're not getting the jobs that you're expecting. And I think a lot of times people make a big investment, let's say, in coaching or in a demo, or workshops, whatever they do. And immediately if they don't get a job, because they're not familiar enough with the industry, they immediately question themselves. They question the capabilities for anything and immediately feel like they need to get a return on their investment in the next week. Which I wish I had gotten a return on my investment in the following week after I did my training. But this is a process. And not only do you have to trust in yourself, you've gotta trust in the process. And that means researching coaches, researching talent out there in the industry that seem to have had some level of success. Reading -- I'm all about reading, reading, reading -- reading books, joining web forums, and finding out who are the respected people in the industry. And doing that education first. I mean, I know in the beginning when you first start coaching and creating a demo, and there's lots of people that talk about, oh, there's scammers out there that are gonna take all your money and create a demo, and then it's not gonna be a good demo, or it's not gonna be a professional demo. And I think that a lot of people are scared about that. But I also think that you can take the matters into your own hands. And again, research, research, research, research, join groups, read books, find the people that are well respected in the industry. Lau: Absolutely. I do think there's a level of trust that you have to have in yourself that is a leap of faith.  Anne: Yeah. Yeah. Lau: Okay. So let's say you're starting out, Let's say you're doing your research, you're reading, you're in the industry mags, and you know what's going on with conferences and you know what the best practices are, so to speak. But you need time to have that reveal itself, right? What we see and what we read and what we know and what we hear isn't always our truth through our own experiences. So you have to trust that you are smart enough, you're motivated and thoughtful enough. You're focused enough that you're gonna start to put your trust, engage who that tribe is as you put it together, and not get upset when you put your trust into something or someone and it doesn't work out, because that is called experience. And experience is not always happy and fun and positive. Sometimes it's making a mistake. And we have to learn from those mistakes. We have to work through those and not make those again and say, wow, I'm glad I made that mistake, because now I know it doesn't work and what I shouldn't be trusting in the industry, and really move through it. But if we never give our trust anything, if we're never 100% all in and know that we've got skin in the game, then we never really tested our theories, our methodologies, and our teachings. We never really tested it because we weren't willing to give it over 100% to see what great things can come of it. Now, I don't know about you, but like you're super successful. I'm successful. A big part of that success is testing, hit or miss experimentation. And what happened to the joy of trying things, of experimenting?  Anne: Absolutely.  Lau: It's like so many people need to have this guarantee from the start. What I'll save. Anne: The safety net. It's like the trophy. They need the trophy. Right? They need the trophy right away. And the thing of it is, is, and Lau, you and I have spoken about this, my overnight success took me many, many, many years. Right? And if you're just getting into the industry and you're upset because you're not booking a week after you submitted your demo or started auditioning, trust in the process, give it time. When I talk with my students, I try to tell them that it is not an overnight process, that it does take time. But I still feel as though some people just have to live that or experience that. There's a lot of people who never get past the making a demo stage, because I believe they do not trust in the process. They don't give themselves enough of a chance to grow and to grow into the industry and start to see that success, which is not gonna happen tomorrow. I'm sorry, you're not gonna get that prize gig tomorrow.  And it's okay. It is okay. You just need to again, have trust, have faith in yourself. I'll tell you what, Lau, I am a big believer, and anybody's listening to this podcast knows that I trust my gut. I live my life by my gut. And I run my business by my gut too, believe it or not. If it doesn't feel right, then I'm taking more steps to educating myself on to maybe why it doesn't feel right or what I might do to change it. As you mentioned before, just kind of take those little steps and change direction if you need to. Lau: That's right. That's exactly right. And just be okay with that. Be okay with not knowing. Be okay with sometimes trusting the wrong person or the wrong process or whatever, because that's how we grow, that's how we learn, that's how we shape it up. The problem comes in where you trust something, it doesn't work your way, and then you keep trusting it, and you keep trusting it. And you never learn from that pro -- You don't redirect and pivot.    Anne: Or -- yeah, exactly. You don't redirect or pivot or you simply let it scare you away. Right? Because you've been burned once. Lau: Yeah, or shut you down. Anne: I will have students that have come to me that have not had positive experiences with coaches or their demo production or whatever it might be, and it will make them very shy and very wary to continue moving on. And I always say, use those experiences, like it's okay, like you said, it's okay to maybe the person that you thought you trusted didn't turn out to be what you thought. Right? It's okay, learn from it. Turn that into a positive experience and learn from that and grow from that. And so I'm always trying to tell people don't beat yourself up over it. I mean, honestly now you know. And so boom, that was a wonderful lesson.  I'm always trying to learn lessons from things that didn't go quite right or what people might perceive to be failures. And I don't even like to think of the word failure. I just say, oh, okay, well that didn't work out. So what can I learn from that's, and how can I grow from that? And that will turn most of those experiences into a positive one for me so that I can continue to grow and progress forward. Lau: That's right. And be smart about how you trust. It's not about just, I trust this. I'm putting my trust in this. It's like, how do I trust? That famous presidential, you know, trust, but verify. Verify. Meaning do the due diligence, do the homework, make sure as best as you can, is this person who they say they really are? Is this process what it really represents? Is there testimonial? Are there accolades? Are there honors that I should be aware of that build the ethos, build the credibility so I can trust even more? I wanna do some verification. It doesn't mean that I'm putting them in the hot seat under a light bulb, duct taping them to a chair and grilling them. It just -- right? You and I've both been through that a lot. Right?  Anne: Exactly. Lau: You know, like a whole FBI scene. It's not that, but there is an intelligence in saying, let me do some background check. Let me just Google, like everyone has Google. Why can't you just go on Google and see, is this person have bad reviews or seem dangerous or I don't know. But the point is, do that little bit of homework to verify, to make you feel that much more comfortable in who you're starting to put your trust into.  Anne: Yeah, absolutely. And if you cannot take that little tiny leap of faith and then see where that goes, right, and grow from it, you're gonna be stagnant and you're gonna sit there with demo in hand and never really progress any further.  Lau: That's right.  Anne: But I will say over and over again, and you as -- Lau, with an agency in, in casting for so long, you must know how long it can take when somebody's first getting out into the industry to actually start being consistent in booking jobs. And even when you are consistent in booking jobs, every one of us has a time where there might be a lull in our business and really that is the place when you feel, oh my gosh, why am I not getting any work? I must suck. You know what I mean? Or that's it. I've gotta get out of the industry and they panic. Right? So many people panic and just trust the process. Again, find those people that you do trust that can help you through those times where you are starting to mentally -- I think the mental panic here can really be something that inhibits successful voiceover actors. And sometimes they'll say, well, alright, that's cool because more work for me. Lau: Yeah. . Absolutely. There's an ebb and flow to everything. You know? There's ebbs and flows, highs and lows to every single business out there. It's not possible to be super successful in making tons of money every single day or getting jobs every single day. That would be an unrealistic expectation. Anne: Lau, let me stop you right there. I love that you brought that up lot. Do you think that the majority of talent book something every single day? Lau: , I don't know anyone that books something every single day.  Anne: Yeah.  Lau: I just don't know anyone. And I know a lot of really busy VO talent that are recording all the time, but are they booking every single day? No, they're not.  Anne: Yeah.  Lau: They're editing, they're catching up, they're marketing, they're doing retakes, they're visiting their mom and dad, you know, but they're not booking every single day. That would be -- Anne: Right? Lau: I won't say impossible, but I'll say it's highly improbable.  Anne: Even people that are working every day, let's say you're, you know, in the promo genre or that kind of thing, where they say there's the golden handcuffs. Right? You are probably working, right, that same network job that just comes in every single day. I'm on a lot of telephone rosters, so I work every single day doing telephony, but it's because I'm on a roster that I expect that work, and I know that work's coming.  Lau: That's right.  Anne: But acquiring new work and getting new clients every single day, I agree with you. I don't know many people -- I think it's highly unlikely. And so that's one, I think misconception that people new to this industry might have. Like, oh, well, okay, I need to make so much. I remember constructing it like this, I would like to make so much money per month. Right? $10,000 a month. So what would it take to make $10,000 a month? Right? For 12 months, that's your six figures salary. So what will it take to book $10,000 a month? Well, if I could book 10 corporate jobs in the month, right, and do that consistently, then yeah, I'll have no problem.  Now that may or may not happen for a while. Right? That could happen very sporadically. You could get a few corporate jobs. You could get 10 jobs, 20 jobs in one month, but maybe the following month you may get one. And so because of that difference, right, in terms of consistency, that is where I think most people start to panic and lose their trust in the process of what this industry is all about. And again, it's kind of life as a freelancer, I like to say entrepreneur, right? But freelancer is the same thing. Right? So we don't know where our next job is coming from. And that really has to be where your trust in the process lies, or trust in a mentor, trust in your people that you talk to in your accountability group. Trust that the process will work out and that it will be okay. Lau: And the truth is, we don't see what's happening in the background of anyone's world. So those folks that you're perceiving are booking every day have tons of work in the pipeline. So they're lining up the pipeline of work like last year, like five years ago. Like it's not the booking of today that they're reaching out today; it's the reach out oftentimes from months, if not years ago, that are just landing through and coming through on their pipeline. So in essence, they've done the footwork -- Anne: They've planted the seeds. Lau: -- done the preliminary work, they planted those seeds to keep that pipeline full so that it looks to the outside world like they're booking every day. And you know, the other thing I want to say too, Anne, was that the trust of everything -- when I think about how many of our systems in our world are on trust systems, like even just going into a restaurant, you're ordering food and drink and all this stuff, and they are trusting you that you have money to pay for that. They're giving you the product first and saying, devour this, you're never gonna give this back to us. We know it and we're gonna trust that you're gonna pay for that. Right?  So we live in this trust system where we're providing a product, we're providing a service and we haven't been paid for anything. We're just trusting that if I have an agent, they're gonna work for me to get that money. If I don't, I'm gonna work with that client, and I'm gonna have that professional faith that they're gonna send me a check. Anne: And you have to have faith, yes, that your agent's gonna be doing that work for you. And let's say if you did not book through an agent, right -- I negotiate a lot of work myself -- I actually will have stated in my quote, prepayment is preferred, especially if they're a new client, an electronic payment, by the way. But if I am working with a big client and I issue an invoice, I am trusting that they're going to pay me within the the 30, 60, sometimes 90 days.  Lau: That's right.  Anne: And that is a trust in the process. Lau: That's right. And it's scary.  Anne: Yeah.  Lau: It's really scary because once in a while it doesn't happen.  Anne: Yep. Lau: Once in a while we get burned. And I'm just here to tell you guys, if you get nothing out of this podcast, just know that in your lifetime there will be times that you will get burned, and not to let that jade or make it simple (?) or scare you. You just know that sometimes you run into a bad situation. And what do you learn from that? What did you take away from that? Anne: Exactly.  Lau: What do you know now? Rather than getting angry and bitter, I'm gonna get better from that situation. Anne: Absolutely. Absolutely. Lau: But most situations are just not gonna be that. They're just not. They're gonna be trustworthy. Anne: And I think there's just the trust in so many things that you don't even think about. Right? I had trust in the technology, Lau, on that last podcast that it was gonna record us and it didn't. But that's okay. I'm not bitter. I am not bitter. We learned from that, didn't we? Right? So now we know what to do. Yeah. Now we know what to do. You know, it happens all the time. So I know that just seemed like a silly little example, but it was a true example of us turning that into a learning lesson. And I'm actually grateful that it happened because now I know what to do to alleviate it from happening again. And I'm grateful for that. Lau: And watch this, Anne. I'm actually gonna demo what the listener can do when they're in a situation where they're ethos -- I love using the word ethos. It's like a character building trust that we build as people and as professionals. When they feel it lowering, it's going down just a little bit. Because something wrong happens, something bad happened. So in the moment you could make a decision by saying something, and I'm really gonna say this to Anne, but demo it in front of the listening audience.  I'm gonna say, Anne, that happened because that was my fault on our side. We didn't realize we weren't going through Chrome as we typically do. We somehow lost our Chrome app, and we just logged right into the link without remembering that we have to go through Chrome to record on Riverside. So what does that cause? There's a cause and effect to that whole trust system. Anne now has to go to her engineer and pay them a little extra to fix that and save that problem. So how do we restore trust? Anne: There you go.  Lau: Because the morality, the morality is I am going to offer to pay that engineer to do that because that shouldn't be on you. Because that was on our end. That was our fault. It wasn't intentional; it was just a mistake. But see, this is how you wanna treat your peeps, your friends, your colleagues, your fellows. Whether they accept it, that's up to them. But to have the due diligence that saying, oh, too bad, I made a mistake. Go figure it out. It's like, well no, let me sort of rectify that. Let me see if I can offer something to make that better, to repair that. Is it life or death? Not life or death, but in the course of your relationships, attention to detail is really, really important. And when things go wrong and you make a mistake, 'cause we're just human beings, try to rectify it. Try to fix it, try to offer. Anne: Well, that's a wonderful example. And I like that. And I'll see you that offer because I appreciate the offer. Right? Our relationship, I value our relationship and I appreciate that offer. But I have already put that into my learning bin, right, where I've learned where I need to make sure that my guests on the podcast need to make sure they're going through Chrome in order to record the video and the audio. So that's great. So I politely decline and say thank you for the offer. But yeah, it's, it's a thing. And so I feel good about it. And so I want BOSSes who are just getting out into the industry and feeling scared or having expectations that may or may not correspond with what's actually happening to understand that, number one, just put that trust in it. If it doesn't turn out the way you expect, make sure that you think about what it is that you can do to learn from that. Lau: Absolutely. There's a learning curve in everything. Even if it's highly uncomfortable, something really bad occurs, whatever, just take the learning lesson and walk away and say, good. Now I'm gonna take this into my future relationships. I'm gonna know who I can work with and who's not appropriate to work with. And just move on from it. And that will ensure your level of trust in the next person. In other words, you won't be carrying your garbage, you won't be carry your trash from what went wrong here into the future. Anne, I think we're doing therapy. I think this is gonna save a lot of marriages to be honest with you. Right? 'Cause you wanna carry your last boyfriend's garbage into the new boyfriend's garbage.  Anne: That's right. That's right. Lau: Yeah? You wanna -- Anne: That's right. Lau: -- have a clear slate. That person, that client if you will, or that colleague, they have a right to earn your trust fully. It's not fair to them to place all the stuff -- because you were telling me earlier that you had a client that was having some trust issues about your services and this and that. And I'm thinking, oh, this reminds me so much of people who come in, you don't know where they're coming in from, and they just came in from all these bad relationships and experiences and they're putting it right onto you. Anne: Yep. Yep. Exactly. Lau: How do you handle that, Anne, when that happens? Anne: That's a great question. There's only so much -- I like to say, well, you know what, it's their movie, right? And so I can't let that affect me in any kind of a way or inhibit my growth. And so I will just say, well, it's their movie. They're directing it and I can help as much as I can. Just reinforce that things do not necessarily happen a day after you start in this industry and that you need to trust in the process. And other than that, other than giving that advice, I don't know of much else that I can do except to say, you know what? I'm here if you need me in the future, that's absolutely fine. I'm happy to help you through that. But I feel like if you want help and then you step back 'cause you got scared, right, then there's no other way I can really help you anymore at that point. It's gotta be your decision. Lau: That's right. And maybe that's the time, Anne, when you, and I would say to that client, you know, it's okay if this is not a good fit for you, if you need to go somewhere else. Anne: Yep. Absolutely.  Lau: Right? IE you should go somewhere else.  Anne: Right.  Lau: To work with someone that perhaps you have more trust in or whatever -- Anne: Or not. Lau: It's okay to give them permission to go.  Anne: Yeah, absolutely. Lau: Like not every client's a good client. Not every contract's a good contract. Not every job should be kept. Anne: Absolutely. And I think understanding and trusting in that gut feeling or that process again can help you to clear your mind. I like to have all positivity in my business and in my transactions and negotiations and so that will help me to clear that.  Lau: Absolutely. I got one more from the road.  Anne: Okay.  Lau: And the one I just thought of in terms of like fear and trust, 'cause they're entwined, they're they're entangled together is like the fear of not being able to trust because it's going to go bad. So in other words, it's like the Murphy's Law thing. Like I'm projecting it's not gonna go well, I'm projecting problems will happen. Manifesting. Projecting. And then it does. And then it inevitably does because you're sabotaging it. Anne: And that's the energy that you are focusing on. Absolutely. Lau: Yeah. 'Cause you're not wanting to trust or not capable of it yet or whatever. So you're gonna give it a purpose and a justification for why you can't trust it. Be careful of that. Self-sabotage kills a lot of relationships. Anne: Absolutely. Wow. Well guys, BOSSes out there, learn to trust. Take those bitty, bitty steps. Trust and learn. That's the moral I have of the story today. . Lau: Learning is good.  Anne: All right. All right. So BOSSes, I'm gonna give a great big shout-out to our sponsor, ipDTL. You too can connect and network like BOSSes. Find out more at ipdtl.com. Also, if you want to make a big impact and have a very simple mission, you can find out more at 100voiceswhocare.org. All right, guys. BOSSes, have an amazing week and we'll see you next week. Bye. Lau: Bye. >> 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.com 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.

Bosses, it's callback time! After a set of fiercely talented auditions last week, Anne & Lau narrowed it down to the 5 talents they felt had something special. Manny, Aria, Josh, Nicole, and Kelly are back and ready to read. After being thrown custom directions from your hosts, these voice actors rose to the occasion, making the final decision a difficult one. Although there can only be one winner, every experience in front of an agent, producer, and casting director is valuable. You never know what kind of impression you'll leave on them, so give it your all. The final decision came down to matching Anne & Lau's preferences with the client's needs, but you'll have to tune in to find out who that is… Transcript >> It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere 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. Anne: Welcome everyone to the VO BOSS podcast and the Business Superpower series. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzza, and today I'm excited to bring my special guest co-host Lau Lapides to the program. Hey Lau. Lau: Hey Anne. Glad to be here. Anne: Lau, we had an amazing live audition podcast. I am so excited for how that turned out. Lau: Oh my gosh, I can't wait to see it. And oh, what a, what a great time that was. Yeah, great group. Anne: And, and our appreciation, you guys, BOSSes out there, if you've not heard it, go, make sure that you check it out. It was our first ever live audition podcast where we had, uh, gosh, 12 people live auditioning for, uh, a particular for Expedia and, uh, with feedback and everything. And today, this episode is all about the live audition callback. So we had five people calling back, and we are going to have them come back for another round of reads, and Lau and I will pick the winner. So get ready, BOSSes. And so without further ado, hopefully people are there in the audience, uh, in the chat. Um, we have the roster, which will be Nicole Fikes, Aria Lapides, Manny Cabo, Josh Wells, uh, and Kelly White. Okay. So if you guys are ready, the first one up to audition for us again is Nicole. And Nicole, we are asking you to do the same script, which is the script for Expedia, starting with, uh, our colors. And, uh, we would like you to give us your unique second take. Lau, any particular hints, casting directions, specs? Lau: Uh, I would love to see the most coziest warmest, most relaxed read you can do, Nicole. Nicole: Coziest. Warmest, most relaxed. Okay. All right. Our colors, they have a way of finding us wherever we are. And with an Expedia membership, you can save up to 30% when adding a hotel to a flight. So we can go find our colors in even more places knowing we got a great deal. Expedia, made to travel. Anne: Thank you. Very nice. Lau: All right. Nicole: Thank you. Anne: Yeah. I'm gonna offer one little bit of redirection. Um, can I hear the end? Um, give me a little more, I, I'm gonna say a little more punch on in even more places, in more places. Um, and, and I really wanna hear finding the colors, come, bring that home to me. Um, a little bit of a, of a smile. More of a smile at the end, 'cause you got a great deal. Nicole: Yeah. Okay. And so still warm and fuzzy but just kind of a little bit more emphasis on the colors and even more places kind of line? Anne: Yeah. And you can just pick it up at so we can go find our colors. So you don't need to do the whole thing. Yeah. Nicole: Okay. So we can go find our colors in even more places knowing we got a great deal. Expedia, made to travel. Anne: Thank you. All right. Lau: Super nice. Nicely done. Thank you, Nicole. Nicole: Thanks. Lau: Love it. Anne: Now, in a real audition, Lau, how -- now in terms of if people are late or they're not connecting or, you know, there's -- I'm sure there's a grace period, I mean, everybody's human. So if there are tech issues or if somebody didn't hear that they're being called back at the precise time, how much time typically would you say casting directors will wait? Lau: Um, you know, I don't know. It's not like -- I don't think it's a hard and fast rule. I think it depends on the relationship they have with whoever's sending them in, whoever's submitting them, and if they know the talent themselves. The rule of thumb, generally speaking, is like, the less they know you and then, and the less rapport they have, the less they're gonna have patience for you and the less they're gonna wait. But here's the interesting thing, and I, I wanna share this with the folks in the background, 'cause again, they're not seeing any of the tech stuff that's going on. I just received a text right now from Aria who said, hey, could you please give me a second? I need to reset it and reboot. I would say in general, people don't like waiting, so they'll skip to the next person. And you know, as a courtesy, they will come back to you most of the time because they wanna find a good person. They don't wanna -- Anne: And that's, and that's fine. And I will look, I'll make the call here if Manny is available. Uh, you know, if Aria can't get back, Okay. Um, we can certainly take Manny and wait, you know, for later to, to get Aria on, which is fine with me. Lau: That's how, that's how it would be because if we were in a paid studio space by the hour. Anne: Yeah, exactly. Lau: We don't wait, wait for anyone. We just go on to the next person. Anne: Right. Uh, because yeah, this studio's expensive, darn it. . Lau: And you know, as, as we're, as we're saying this, the talent is emailing me because I have a direct rapport with the talent and she's saying, could you please have someone else go while I'm doing the tech setup? Anne: There you go. Lau: So I don't hold you up? See, that's exactly pro stuff. Anne: Perfect. All right, Manny, welcome back. So we're looking for your unique second read. Manny: My unique second read. Anne: You were super warm the first time. Manny: Okay. Anne: So let's, uh, let's hear something different. Manny: Okay. Let's do something fun. Anne: Okay. Manny: here we go. Our colors, they have a way of finding us wherever we are. And with an Expedia membership, you can save up to 30% when adding a hotel to a flight. So we can go find our colors in even more places, knowing we got a great deal. Expedia, made to travel. Anne: Thank you. Lau, any redirection there? Lau: I have a quick redirect just because I, I'm getting to know Manny and loving your sound. Now I would love to hear you deliver this as a standup comedian. . Manny: Standup comedian. All right, that sounds good. That's fun. Here we go. Our colors have a way of finding us wherever we are. And with an Expedia membership, you could save up to 30% when adding a hotel to a flight. So we go find our colors in even more places, knowing we got a great deal. Expedia, made to travel. . Anne: Nicely done. Lau: So good. Anne: Yeah, Lau: So good. Anne: Nicely done for, for doing that without a real joke in the script. So that was good. You channeled. And what I liked about that is that you channeled, uh, the comedic into the read even though there was nothing comedic necessarily in the script. So yeah, nicely done. Thank you. Manny: Mom, I'm an artist. I'm doing artist stuff, Mom, come on. . Anne: See? There you go. Manny: Killing me. Thanks, ladies. Anne: Thank you, Manny. Anne: And, and even that little like, improv bit at the end there, nicely done. Lau: So good, so good. Anne: That's a way to leave a nice, uh, remembrance, you know, in my brain. So love that. Lau: Anne, could I make a quick point that I meant to say before, but I didn't say before? Um, I wanted to make the point to everyone who's coming in, but also anyone who's listening in that even though this is a mock audition under educational umbrella, you are actually auditioning every single time you're in front of an agent, a producer, casting, or even coaches. And it's because we're all so connected to work all the time. So case in point, I'm already thinking of work for Manny right now. I'm already thinking of potential representation for him right now because it doesn't matter that it's a, a podcast or a class or a course or a coaching. What matters is we're actually having the real connection and the real stuff. So never like mark through like a dancer might mark -- do it full out 'cause whoever you're with, may be the next person to help you work. Anne: You've planted the seed, right? Lau: Yes. Yeah. Anne: You've planted the seed, so, excellent. Yes. Aria, so wonderful to have you here. We are ready for you. Now we, so I know last time we had thrown that wrench in the, in the loop there for you. Aria: Hey, that's okay. Anne: A completely new script. Aria: Yeah. I enjoy that. Anne: And so and so now because you, you know, were really a cold read there -- Aria: Yeah. Anne: Let's give us the most to spec read, warm, non-announcery, not deliver -- uh, you know, nothing, nothing performy, and tell us that story. Lau, any additional direction? Lau: Um, yes. I would like you to do two things at once. I'd like you to care immensely about what you're talking about. And I also want you to not give a shit about it at all. . There you go. Aria: . Oh, you sort of a birch tree. Anne: That's exactly what I was looking for too, Lau, perfect. Aria: I love that. I love that. That's like my whole thing, right? I care so deeply, but I also don't care at all. Okay. Our colors. See, they have a way of finding us wherever they are. And with an Expedia membership, you can save up to 30% adding a hotel or flight, so we can find our colors in even more places knowing we got a great deal. Expedia, made to travel. Anne: Bravo. Nicely done. Uh, way to take direction. I heard both care and not care in there at the same time. Aria: I'm good at that. Anne: Really nicely done now. Aria: Thank you. Anne: . That was the, Okay, so now that you can care and not care, uh, let's just give us uh, something completely different. A wild take from you. One more. Yeah, I got you. A wild take from you. Aria: Okay. Lau: I loved it. And also one more thing, be very careful of, I know you're not in a soundproof space right now. Be very careful of excess noise 'cause you actually clapped at the end. You did something to make noise. So just be careful of, you know, hitting something or any excess noise. Aria: Be careful of using your body, hitting something, excess noise. Got you. Echo. Our colors. They have a way of finding us wherever we are. And with the Expedia membership, you can save up to 30% adding a hotel and a flight, and even more places, you know, knowing you got a great deal. Expedia, ah, made to travel. Anne: Perfect. Let's hear that again. You missed a line. Aria: Yeah. Okay. Okay. So let's hear that again. Aria: Our colors, they have a way of finding us wherever they are. And with an Expedia membership, you can save up to 30% when adding a hotel to a flight. So we can go find our colors in even more places knowing that we have a great deal. Expedia, made to travel. Anne: Thank you. Lau? Lau: Yeah. I wanna make a comment about this. And again, it's like that oxymoron kind of thing. On one hand I love that choice and I loved how you, how quickly you did it. You didn't care. You just, you just, it was that improv in you. You just did it. You went 100% and I loved that. And actually you had a sort of European amorphous kind of non-real, real thing going on, which I like. Aria: Yeah. Lau: But just from an educational perspective for everyone, you wouldn't be able to do it for the most part, right? Because we are so much about particular appropriation that that authentic sound would be from somewhere and we would have to do the casting. Aria: And that's so funny that you say that 'cause I was actually originally gonna do like a Valley girl. 'Cause I was like, I feel like that would be a little bit more appropriate, at least for my age group than. Lau: No, but I think your choice was really right on in terms of the actor spirit. Anne: I think so too, in terms of making it more international. Lau: It was cool. Anne: And especially for the subject, but you're absolutely right, Lau. That's one thing that I was going to say, that maybe, you know unless you knew specifically that there was something in the specs that they were looking, and that it wasn't critical that it was, you know, from a, you know, a native speaker. Um, but I like the actor party knew that that gave that the shot for sure. Aria: Yeah. 'Cause you guys are so right, like, especially these days, like they want the authentic thing. Like I've -- even in acting, they're like, if you aren't this specific thing, I'm sorry, you can't play the role. And I'm like, it's okay, it's okay. Anne: Yeah. Yeah. Lau: So that, so I loved it, but I wouldn't be able to cast it. Right. Just like, you know. Aria: I just got that noted. Yeah. I appreciate it. All right. Awesome, guys, thank you. Lau: Thank you. Anne: Thank you. All right. That was fun. Yeah, absolutely. Um, Josh. Hi Josh. Josh: Hi. How's it going? Anne: Fantastic. Thank you. Josh: Cool. Anne: Um, Lau, any, uh, direction that you wanna give before he reads? Lau: Yeah, sure. Sure. Josh, I love what you're doing. Just give me a little bit more professor that is mixed with surfboard. So let's say he's like a, a UC, you know, LA professor that goes surfing during his lunch break. Josh: Sure. Dig it. Okay. Cool. All right. Uh, Josh Wells. Lau: I think you're a little low too. Is that me? Josh: Am I little low? Lau: I feel like your volume -- Josh: Well, I'm, I'm away from the mic, but how about here? Is this better? Lau: That's better. Josh: Okay, cool. Cool. All right. Excellent. Uh, Josh Wells, non-union. Our colors, they have a way of finding us wherever we are. And with an Expedia membership, you can save up to 30% when adding a hotel to a flight. So we can go find our colors in even more places, knowing we got a great deal. Expedia, made to travel. Lau: So I, I I mean, I felt like you're moving there, you're not there yet. You're sort of holding on. There's a held feeling to it. Like, I would want you to let it go. Let it go. Let it move forward. Ride the wave. Ride the wave. And be careful of the pausing too much. It has an unnatural feel to it. Josh: Dig it. Lau: So, you know what I'm saying? Anne: Yeah. I was gonna say, I, I missed the surfer, kind of channeling of the surfer. I wanted to, I felt like I needed a little more, more relaxed. Um, and then also I, I, I just, I have a personal issue with the word a because in a conversation it's usually you're adding a hotel and not A hotel. But that's, you know, that's just my ears here. Josh: Um, I've got the note before, I'll -- Anne: Yeah. So yeah, if you can give me a little more of the relaxed, you know, kind of like mm, you know, the half smile. Um, I'd like to hear that again. Josh: Okay. You got it. Our colors, they have a way of finding us wherever we are. And with an Expedia membership, you can save up to 30% when adding a hotel to a flight. So we can go find our colors in even more places, knowing we got a great deal. Expedia, made to travel. Anne: Thank you. I liked your ending. I like the different end on the tag there. Josh: Thank you. I appreciate it. Lau: Thanks Josh. You have a great cat that ate the canary sound. You had that really sort of wise cracking wise guy sound, which I really like a lot. I'd wanna play with that even more. Anne: Yeah. Lau: Yeah. Anne: And I would say, I would say for the, I still, you know, I'm in California, so it's the surfer, you know, I guess it's that me, I felt like you were almost leaning towards a little more like, uh, you know, Midwest sort of, Sam Elliott kind of relaxed. So work on the surfer. I think you've got it in you, for sure. Josh: Okay. Thank you. Appreciate that note. Anne: Yeah. Nice. I, I really like your tone. Thank you. Josh: Awesome. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Anne: Okay. Kelly White. Kelly: Hello, hello. Anne: Hi, Kelly. Lau: Hey Kelly. Kelly: Hey, how are you? Anne: Nice to see you back. Kelly: Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity. Appreciate it. Anne: Awesome. So, uh, Lau, do you have any, any specific direction you'd like? Lau: Yeah, so Kelly, keep in mind that we're going for a slightly younger demographic. So as we love the richness and texture and heaviness of your sound, we really feel like you might be able to go in that direction of the 30s to even early 40s sound of like something that is the fast moving person, multitasking person, young, professional person raising young children. I know you know nothing about that. I'm joking 'cause I know Kelly well. Kelly has small, young children, so target that on a busy day. Kelly: Okay. Anne: But remember that your colors, I, I wanna feel the, I wanna feel the colors, uh, being, bringing you home. Kelly: Okay. Our colors, they have a way of binding us wherever we are. And with an Expedia membership, you can save up to 30% when adding a hotel to a flight. So we can go find our colors in even more places knowing we got a great deal. Expedia, made to travel. Lau: Can I ask a question? If this is a busy mom, a young busy mom, what does colors mean to you? To her? What does that actually mean literally? Kelly: Um, just different aspects of probably her life. Just different things that she's doing, different things she has going on. Lau: Yeah. And the idea that she also wants to escape from it. Kelly: Gotcha. Anne: And find. Lau: And the colors of the ocean. The colors of the mountains, the greenery, the islands, the -- Anne: And find herself in more places than just her home. Kelly: Got it. That's right. Lau: Explore her, her inner world. Right? Her fantasy. Welcome to Fantasy Is -- give me more Fantasy Island, I think. Kelly: Got it. Our colors, they have a way of finding us wherever we are. And with an Expedia membership, you can save up to 30% when adding a hotel to a flight. So we can go find our colors in even more places knowing we got a great deal. Expedia, made to travel. Anne: Nice. I'd like to have -- I really like the way you slowed that down and, and emphasize the colors and you brought that home. Um, and I think knowing we've got a great -- knowing we got a great deal. I'd like to hear just that last part again so we can go find our colors in even more places knowing we got a great deal. That's like your, that's like your mom, like that's your mom's secret. Like you just got a deal, you just had a coupon, and you know what, you're excited about it. And so you're sharing that with us. Okay? And, uh, let's just, just hear that one more, one more time please. Kelly: Okay. So we can go find our colors in even more places, knowing we got a great deal. Expedia, made to travel. Anne: Nice. Can I ask for one more? Can I ask for an alternate on just, just the, so we can find our colors in even more places knowing we got a great deal -- can I get an ABC read of that? That would be three different ways. Kelly: Okay. So we can go find our colors in even more places knowing we got a great deal. So we can go find our colors in even more places knowing we got a great deal. So we can go find our colors in even more places, knowing we got a great deal. Anne: Thank you, Kelly. Kelly: You're welcome. Thank you so much. Anne: Nicely done. Kelly: Thank you. Lau: Thank you hun. Appreciate it. Kelly: All right. Lau: All right. That's everyone. Yeah? Anne: That is everyone. Wow. You guys all did an amazing job. This is gonna be tough. Lau: Actually, I think it's gonna be easier than we think only because we kind of get and know what that client wants. And that's gonna help us deduce down who we need to be picking along who we want to be picking. So what, what, what are your top thoughts on top, top people? Who are your top, top two? Anne: Uh, my top people I am going to say, uh, is going to be Manny, Aria and Kelly . Lau: Okay. And my top people are Manny and Nicole. Okay. So we've got Manny in common there, which is a strong choice. And, and what's even stronger about Manny is, and it's genderless. Like they don't care what gender, that's fine. But they want diversity talent. And Manny is, I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, Manny, I believe Latina and is bilingual and so can offer a Spanish read of this. So there's a, there's a super compelling reason why he may book this. Anne: And, and, and let's also talk about, you know, as we, as we mentioned before with our feedback, the fact that he was able to, uh, you know, take good direction, that's so, so very important, right, change up his read, which he did, uh, when asked. Also when leaving, when we asked him for the comedic read and I said, nice job, even though there's no comedic in there, he was actually able to leave us without sounding like too, like, you know, trying too desperate or trying to impress us. He did a line that was comedic that impressed me. And so I really liked the nuance of that and for me, that stood out and made him very memorable. Lau: Yeah. I mean, when he did that last mom thing, and I was like, wow, this guy is like really ready. He is ready Freddy. He is, There's no fooling around with Manny. Like, he's a super pro. And again, I'm saying this like, I don't know Manny at all. He was referred over to me last night for, uh, a VO Spanish audition that we got in from Miami. Unfortunately, he did not make that call because it was a time sensitive. So I said, and this happens all the time, I said, hey, I would love for you to come on our podcast. We're doing mock auditions today. He came on today in good spirit that he missed the actual audition, but not, not any fault of his. He just didn't, you know, he came in late and then came in today, and now I'm thinking, how can I work with Manny? Anne: Sure, sure. Absolutely. Lau: See, that's the way life is. So, Okay. So he's my top choice then. Anne: Yeah. He's my top choice too. And, and I'm gonna say, you know, my other picks, you know, again, I had for demographic, uh, you know, Aria, I love the voice, I love the demographic. I think that she's, she's, uh, great with that. She did give a complete different read um, you know, on either one. I liked her acting instincts there. Um, and so again, that sometimes, guys, it, it, it can turn out to be like just these tiny little things that can separate, you know, who we decide and not. And Kelly I liked because we asked her to do a lot there at the end too, and she came through with her three different reads, which I liked, uh, a whole lot. Uh, in terms of demographic too, I thought that she was appropriate. Um, I wanted, I wanted a little younger sound though that. Lau: I did too. Wonderful. I felt -- that felt just a little square, a little boxy for me. Like I, it had, again, she's got a good corporate feel. She's got a good businessy feel. Um, I wanted a-- I wanted more, it was a very staccato type of reads. I wanted more flowy-ness to it. I wanted more, more hangout energy. And also Aria was terrific, no question. I felt she's got age and room to grow. I thought she was a little too young for this one somehow. Anne: Okay. No, I would totally agree with you on that. Lau: But again, we're splitting hairs, you know? We're like going, okay, we're looking at union and non-union status, we're looking at diversity, we're looking at age, we're looking at all these different factors that separate people when really all of these people could be booked on this. Anne: Yeah. And just, you know, other words, you know, like for Nicole, Nicole really has that warm read down. I'll tell you. She really does. You know, I don't wanna leave this without feedback for all of, all of you. Um, because Nicole, you have that, that warm read. And that's something I think when you've got it, you know, go for it. When there are auditions that call for that warmth, go for them, because that seems to be a signature style for you. And then I'll, I'll say a little bit about let's see, who else was it that -- Josh. Right? Lau: And can I just say about Nicole before you leave that? See, okay. Again, listeners, you don't know what's in our head and how it's shifting so fast. Nicole was actually my first pick for this. But the, but the age, the diversity, diversity factor came in and this factor and that. See, and it shifted the game. It has nothing to do with, can Nicole do this job? Is she great and right for it? Of course she is. But there were other factors. Anne: I think everyone, every one of you could have done this job, No question. Um, and now we just talk about different factors in terms of demographic. So keep that in mind, guys, when you, when you let things get you down and you think that, oh, they didn't pick me, um, it has a lot to do with things other than just your voice or your performance. And also it could be like, well, I've worked with, uh, you know, I've worked with Manny before, and I just know he's gonna come through and give us whatever we want. Or, you know, I've worked with Nicole before, and you know, or my cousin knows Nicole and, and, and really recommends her or whatever it is, guys, don't let the fact that you don't get the gig, you know, you know, gets you down because there's so many things, so many, many factors here. Um, and like I say, all five of you I think could have done this job well. And what has shifted us, I think, is again, going back to what the, what the client wants, what we think is best for the brand. And always guys, I think if you can, can look up the brand. At this point, you've had some time with the script. Um, if you don't know the brand, go look at the brand. Look them up, Google's your friend, uh, find out who they're, who are they marketing to, What does their brand look like on the web? And try to really learn as much as you can about that brand because you're speaking on behalf of the brand. Not only are you telling the story of the script, but you're also speaking on behalf of the brand. So knowing -- the more you know, right, the more you know, uh, I think the more educated you are, the better, the better you're going to be. And sometimes, you know, it just, it comes down to, you know, splitting hairs like Lau said before. Lau: Yeah. And if you, even if you go, like, I just used this example the other day. Even if you go into like an Apple store and you're looking for a new Mac, and you go on the Mac, and you sort of test it out, you're going, okay, what's the capability of all this, all these programs? What is the this, what is the that? What does it look like? Is it easy to use? Do I like this pro -- da da da? What am I willing to pay for it? It's not that the Mac itself is not something that you could buy and love and enjoy and could work well. It's just the difference between this $1000 Mac and this $2,000 Mac, and what are the differences? So don't discount yourself or devalue yourself like, they don't like me, I'm not good enough. Whatever. No, you just may not have a quality or a program, if you will, that someone else has that we need for the job. Anne: And, and as we mentioned before, you know, there's a lot of, you know, can you sound younger? Right? That kind of thing. Like people, there's no way it, you know -- I may have a younger sounding voice given my age, but there's no way I'm going to sound millennial. Um, you know what I mean? And so like sometimes it's beyond your control also. Um, if they're looking for a gravitas, if they're looking for a texture and you don't -- I have a very clear voice. Right? If they want something that has more texture in it or rasp in it, that wouldn't be me. Um, but just knowing that can help you to just continue, I think always maintaining -- you know, be the best actor you can be because the things that you can control sometimes, like your voice, like the tone and the texture, and you know, there's lots of things you can do with vocal placement, with characters, but when it comes to this type of a read, where we're looking for authenticity, you know, it's, it's, we don't need you to go into character mode necessarily. Um, but we need authenticity. And that, that is, I think the, the, the thing that you can really concentrate on and practice and get better at as an actor. I think that's so important. Lau: And know knowing that, that self knowing of, of who you are and your brand, what your best qualities are, what your niche is, what is your niche market -- that honesty, that truthfulness will only set you free over time because it will free up a lot of your time so that you're not focusing on jobs that you're simply not gonna get because they can get the authentic read when that, you may not fall into that category. Just focus in those areas that are really your strong suits. Anne: Absolutely. Well then I think we've declared our winner, Lau. Lau: Woo. Anne: So congratulations to Manny. Lau: Yay, Manny. Anne: Um, you are our, you are our voice for Expedia. So congratulations, and thanks to all of you that came in and auditioned in our first podcast. Thanks to you guys who came back for the callbacks. I hope that you've gotten some value out of these, uh, two podcasts, and, uh, we hope to keep them coming your way. I think this could wrap up our episode. Lau: I love it. I mean, I love it. I mean, look at this, in less -- in just about two hours, little over two hours, we went through all the tech glitches, all the directions, all the preliminaries of auditions, the breakdown into the short list, then all the way up to the person who's gonna book the role. Anne: And you heard our brains, you heard us thinking and speaking out loud and casting. And so hopefully you all have a better understanding of what it takes to get cast and what's behind the casting, the casting glass. And, uh, yeah, you guys were all amazing. I really, really appreciate it. So with that being said, guys, I'm gonna give a big shout-out to our sponsor, ipDTL. You too can connect and network like BOSSes. Find out more at ipDTL.com. Lau, you're amazing. BOSSes out there, you're amazing. Thank you so much. Have a -- an amazing week and we'll see you next week. Lau: Kudos to everyone. Thanks so much. Have a great weekend. Bye. Anne: Bye. Congrats. >> 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.com 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.

Get in the hot seat! Anne & Lau put on their casting director hats as they host live auditions with members of the BOSS community. There is something magical about a live audition…especially when the casting directors switch up the script at the last minute. These auditionees were on their toes, reading cold & nailing it. Anne & Lau share their favorite tips for before the audition & reflect on all that went right (and wrong). Stay tuned to hear who got a callback + will be featured in next week's episode. Transcript >> It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere 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. Anne: Woohoo!. Hey everyone. Welcome to the Vo BOSS podcast and the Business Superpower series. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzza, along with my very special guest co-host Lau Lapides. Woohoo. Lau: Hey everyone. Anne: Hey Lau. Lau: Happy Saturday. Anne: Lau, we have a extra special podcast edition today. We are doing live auditions for the very first time, and I am so excited. Lau: I love it. I love it. It's my specialty. I can't wait, Anne, can't wait. Anne: And we are going to be having people come on doing live auditions as well as people in the audience and will be joining us later on for a Q and A. So I am so very excited. Now, live auditions. Remember back when before the pandemic, when we would go into studios and audition for direct -- casting directors? Ugh. Lau: And that required us to actually see other human beings and talk to them and maybe even shake their hand? Anne: I know. And you know what? And you know what? One of the most important things about that is, is that we would not see the script until we walked into that studio. And there was always the possibility when we actually got into the room, they would change the script on us. Lau: Yes. Anne: So guess what, Lau? Lau: What, Anne? Anne: The client has changed the script. Lau: Ooh. Anne: So for our auditioners out there, and everybody in the audience, I'm sorry, but we had to throw the wrench into the, the loop of things. And we now have a different script that we will be sending to you to live audition with. So I know that Carol is out there waiting to send that new script out with new specs, and we will continue on with the auditions. And I have to say, I just love, I love the Internet and I love technology because it allows us to really do something really cool like this. Lau: Yeah. It's totally amazing. Completely amazing. And you know, just a moment on that real cold impromptu, last minute script, because I know so many voice actors are like, what do you mean? What do you mean? What do you mean? Meanwhile, you have to calm down and take a breath because so many of us are either on a pay-to-play site, or we're on hold with our agent, or we're working with casting on a project, and it's happening fast. It's coming and going really fast, and you guys are really getting used to turning things around fast. So the idea of a cold script should not put you out at all. It should be kind of like a fun challenge for you and really in your wheelhouse as a pro VO of something that really you need to be able to do. Anne: Yeah. And I can't tell you the countless number of times I've been on a live session where, you know, in the moment they're changing the script. And so you really have to be able to have those muscles to be able to quickly adapt and give the client what they're looking for. So I will say that this was a, a kind of a, a completely different script , but you know, remember we are here for educational purposes, and we hope all of you are going to really enjoy and reap the benefits of this exercise that we're going to be doing. I will go through the specs. Because this is for educational purposes, the specs for this script, uh, are open to all genders and ethnicities. And I will read the specs out loud here. Our FVO is a great actor, there we go, who can effortlessly imbue meaning and nuance into the story. They have lived a rich full life, having seen the world with all its wonders and is able to speak about their experiences with confidence and authority while their delivery has a poetic cadence . And by the way, you guys are all getting this. Um, this is done subtly and with a light touch. They never come across as dramatic, performative or as if they are laying on the gravitas. They are natural and have an air of lightness to the read that balances out their connection to the emotion perfectly. And as always, nothing smooth, nothing polished or announcery at all. . So we've got, that's a big paragraph of specs, Lau. What do you, what's your thought about specifications and when talent, you know, read the specs? Are they, you know, are they trying to match those specs exactly? Or what's important, uh, when it comes time to actually doing this audition? Lau: Great question. And I'll tell you, there's a lot of theories and philosophies about your descriptions, your breakdowns, and how to handle them. One of my favorites as a coach that I use all the time is to ask the talent to not read the specs up front. Now, this -- I'm not talking about today, because today's session is a live session, and so time is of the essence. But if you were at home and you had a day or two days to turn around an audition, it's a really interesting and telling exercise to not read the specs at all and give your takes and give a whole bunch of takes. And then go back and read the specs and see what did I bring from my point of view, from my interpretation and what kind of matches what the vision of the producer is? Am I in that realm? Am I not in that realm? Anne: Excellent points. Yeah. Let's have Michelle come on in. Hey, Michelle. Lau: Hey Michelle. Michelle: Hi. Can you guys hear me okay? Anne: We can, we can. Thank you for being the first one. I'm excited. Michelle: Oh my goodness. Okay. I just I'm excited to be here as well. Anne: Okay. So would you like a second, because you just got it? I mean, Lau and I can just discuss one other thing quickly about once you're in front of the mic and you're doing a live cold read, Lau, what is your best advice? Oh, for talent? Lau: Oh, wow. That's, that's a great question. First of all, have fun. Enjoy it. You're gonna get very few of those, right, Michelle? I mean, it's just like an exciting, energized, kind of dopamine experience. And for those of us who live on high octane junkies, we love that stuff. It's real time interaction, which I love. And so I would say make sure you're breathing. Make sure you're nice and warmed up, and you take breaks when you need to take breaks. Well, you'd be given a break after you read -- and make specific clear, active acting choices, Michelle, like, don't, don't, uh, generalize it. Don't just fly through it for the sake of time. Really make specific choices that you can change. And you should always have a good two to three really unique interpretations that you could do if they said, yeah, that's good, but can you change it out? You can change it out. Michelle: Got it. Thank you. Lau: Awesome. Anne: So when you're ready, feel free to slate and audition please. Michelle: Michelle Dillard. Our colors, they have a way of finding us wherever we are. And with an Expedia membership, you can save up to 30% when adding a hotel to a flight. So we can find our colors in even more places, knowing we got a great deal. Expedia, made to travel. Anne: Thank you very much. Michelle: Thank you. Anne: Okay. Onto our next auditioner. Uh, on my list. I have Ryan, I hope it's Geiser. Lau: Hello. Anne: Hello, Ryan. Ryan: Oh, cool. I'm in. Lau: Hey Ryan. Ryan: Hi. Lau: Welcome. Ryan: Thank you. Uh, so I'm Ryan Geiser, non-union, MCVO. Um, our colors, they have a way of finding us wherever we are. And with an Expedia membership, you can save up to 30% when adding a hotel to a flight. So we can go find our colors in even more places, knowing we got a great deal. Expedia, made to travel. Anne: Thank you. I was, uh, taking notes, just so you know that if I'm not responding right away, I'm taking notes. So thank you very much. Our next contestant , our next auditioner, I have, uh, Rosie, uh, Roberson? Lau: Yes. Anne: All right. Rosie. Rosie: Hello, everyone. Anne: Hello, Rosie. Nice to see you. Rosie: Well, I'm glad I got in . It's a little tricky there. Just let me know when to start. Anne: Okay. Well, we're ready. Rosie: Our colors, they have a way of finding us wherever we are. And with Expedia membership, you, you can save up at 30% when adding a hotel to a flight. So we can go find our colors and even more places knowing we got a great deal. Expedia, made to travel. Anne: Awesome. Thank you very much. Okay. Our next, I have Manny Cabo. Manny: Hey ladies, how are you? Anne: Welcome. Manny: Welcome. Anne: Thanks for, thanks for joining us. Manny: Oh, thanks for having me. This was a last minute thing. I was, I just got off Covid for like two weeks, so believe me, this is a breath of fresh air. Anne: Oh, lovely. Well, I'm glad you're feeling better. Manny: Yeah, me too. Anne: All right, well, we are ready when you are. Manny: All right, let's do this. Here we go. Our colors, they have a way of finding us wherever we are. And with an Expedia membership, you can save up to 30% when adding a hotel to a flight. So we can go find our colors and even more places knowing we got a great deal. Expedia, made to travel. Anne: Thank you so much, Manny. Awesome. Next on my list, I have, uh, Josh Wells. Josh. Josh: Hi. How's it going, Anne? Nice to meet you. Hi Lau. Anne: Hi. Nice to meet you too. Welcome. Thanks for joining us. Josh: Yeah. Super excited. Anne: We are ready when -- we are ready when you are. Josh: Heck yeah. Cool. All right. Josh Wells, non-union, Our colors, they have a way of finding us wherever we are. And with an Expedia membership, you can save up to 30% when adding a hotel to a flight. So we can go find our colors in even more places, knowing we got a great deal. Expedia, made to travel. Anne: Thank you. Thank you very much. All right. Um, up next, we should have Kelly White. Kelly White. You are next for the live auditions on VO BOSS. Kelly: Hello. Anne: Hi, Kelly. Kelly: Hi there. Nice to meet you Anne. Hi, Lau. Anne: Yes. Wonderful to see you. Kelly: Thank you. Anne: All right, well, we are ready when you are. Kelly: Okay. Kelly White. Our colors, they have a way of finding us wherever we are. And with an Expedia membership, you can save up to 30% when adding a hotel to a flight. So we can go find our colors in even more places, knowing we got a great deal. Expedia, made to travel. Anne: Fantastic. All right. Who do I have next? I have Alicia Hiller. Alicia: Hello. . Anne: Hello. Welcome. Alicia: Good -- good to meet you. Hi, Lau. Anne: Yes. Thanks for joining us today. All right, we're ready when you are. Alicia: Alicia Hiller. Our colors, they have a way of finding us wherever we are. And with an Expedia membership, you can save up to 30% when adding a hotel to a flight. So we can go find our colors in even more places, knowing we got a great deal. Expedia, made to travel. Anne: Fantastic. Thank you so much. Ah, Aria. Fantastic. Real cold read. All right. So we are ready when you are. Aria: Okay. Our colors, they have a way of finding us wherever they are. And with a new Expedia membership, you can save up to 30% when adding a new hotel to a flight. So we can go find our colors in even more places when we know a great deal. Expedia, made to travel. All right, cool. Thank you, guys.wor Anne: Thank you. All right. Um, and now Carole. Carole, we're ready when you are. Carole: All righty. Thank you. Our colors, they have a way of finding us wherever we are. And with an Expedia membership, you can save up to 30% when adding a hotel to a flight. So we can go find our colors and even more places knowing we got great deal -- knowing we got a great deal. Expedia, made to travel. Anne: Thank you. Carol. Just remember a lot of times we have auditions with instructions, right? It's important to just go through those instructions too. And I know like you know, there's a lot of people who like, you know, and the forms we'll talk about, well, you know, should I get SourceConnect and then, you know, or should I wait until I get my first client? And this would be one of the reasons why , why you wanna make sure you test out all those tech things first. I am proud to be able to to give you this technical -- these technical issues to help you to learn because you know, it's all our mission, right, Lau -- our mission is to educate. Lau: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I'm like, you know, I'm not a negative Nelly at all. But I'm very much a realist and I say to folks, even if you've used your program, even if you've used your booth a million times, get in there early. Because anything that can go wrong probably will. And you wanna be able to have time to troubleshoot that and not miss out. So it is a good lesson. It is. Anne: Nicole. Nicole: Hi. Anne: Hi. Welcome. Nicole: Thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm excited. Anne: Yes, absolutely. Well, we are ready when you are. Nicole: Okay. Our colors, they have a way of finding us wherever we are. And with an Expedia membership, you can save up to 30% when adding a hotel to a flight. So we can go find our colors in even more places, knowing we got a great deal. Expedia, made to travel. There you go. Anne: Thank you so much. Nicole: Thank you. Anne: I remember being in the LA area, and of course, Lau, I mean, maybe if you ever had to run into the city to do a live audition, right, traffic, traffic. And so when the audition time was slotted right, you would I -- you would pray that there was no traffic jam that would be holding you up. And if you did hit a traffic jam and you got there late, sometimes you missed the audition. Sometimes you got there way early and that therefore you had the script. So I kind of like how we're really mimicking this. You would, you know, you'd be able to practice with the script a little bit longer if they had a, if you had a line in front of you. So, you know, I feel that there's all these -- this tech issues are kind of mimicking the traffic that we would hit when we would be, you know, in the car on the way to the studio. And thankfully now, we can, you know? Lau: The, the one, the one element of this that I think is really different and unique to the circumstance, that is sometimes we can't help tech glitches when they happen, and sometimes we can. And so just kind of knowing the difference. Like I'll give you an example. For instance, if someone knows that they have to be on a laptop and have to go through Chrome in order to do the audition, it's really on that person to go on a laptop and go through Chrome. That's something that could be avoided, but all of a sudden my transmission is bad because the hurricane, all of a sudden, you know, my lights go out. You know, that's something I can't help. So I think being able to determine what I sort of have control over and I sort of don't have control over -- and then the other thing too, and this is just me, you and I are exactly alike in this way, Anne, I will leave four hours early to get to an appointment, knowing that if I'm three hours early, I can do my work, I can have coffee, I can shop, I can do whatever. I don't wanna do the last minute thing ever. Like that really stresses me out. And so just for everyone coming in, like leave yourself plenty of time. Anne: Oh, fantastic. Stephanie. Stephanie: Hi. Anne: Welcome. Stephanie: Thank you. Shall I? Anne: Thanks for being here. Yes, we are ready when you are. Stephanie: Okay. Our colors, they have a way of finding us wherever we are. And with an Expedia membership, you can save up to 30% when adding a hotel to a flight. So we can go find our colors even in more places, knowing we got a deal. Expedia, made to travel. Anne: Thank you so much. So Lau, I have my notes ready and you have your notes ready. Let's talk. Lau: I do. And I am wondering whether it's now or maybe later, if we could also go over some of our top kind of rules of the road in this kind of an audition. We talked a little bit about it throughout, but like, what are our top, you know, 5, 6, 7, 8 things that we wanna see people be prepared to do or not do that happened today? Like, because here's the thing, from the talent's point of view, they see nothing. Like they know nothing and see nothing. You, I ,and Sean we're doing this whole massive thing -- and Carol -- this whole massive thing to make this session run. Anne: Right, behind the scenes. Lau: I would love to share a little bit of that so that again, we can go back to what is in my power to change and control and prepare for and what is really not. Anne: Fantastic. Lau: Are you okay with that? If we like just throw a few rules of the road in? Anne: Yeah, absolutely. So let's go ahead and start, Lau. Lau: Okay. I'm gonna start. So one of the things that is -- and again, I'm sharing this educationally, I don't want anyone to feel like we're chiding you or, or, or, you know, cussing you out or anything. It's not about that. This is about education. So that when you're on the real deal in the real scene, a lot of this will sort of dissipate, and you'll be able to work streamlined like a pro. So this entire time, and you'll see my head was down a lot when you see the video of this -- why? Not because I was falling asleep, because I was constantly texting, constantly emailing and helping people troubleshoot all along the way. Now I'm not the tech person to help you troubleshoot. I was expediting those emails and texts over to Anne, over to Sean, over to Carol where they needed to go. In the real world, you won't be able to do that. This is not the real world. This is our educational fun forum. But in the real world, there will be no one to text, no one to email, and no one to help you tech troubleshoot. So, simple things to avoid, I really want y'all to avoid is knowing the device you have to be on, knowing the, uh, uh, application or the program you need to be on, testing it through, preferably the day before rather than the day of. And also being in a solid space where you've got some audio integrity. You're not in the middle of a huge room or in a car or in a big living room to get the best quality that you can get. So those are all, in my mind, things you can somewhat control so that you can get to the next step, which is your talent, your work, your audition. Many of you couldn't get to it fully, 'cause I know most of you. You just couldn't get to it fully because you were so concerned about the tech, about all the tech stuff that was going on. Anne: And, and also, I do wanna say that those instructions were sent out a couple of days in advance, even though our, we changed the script on you. The instructions were sent out. And, and look, most people, if it's going to be a technical, you know, if it's going to be something technical like this where you're joining, uh, remotely via, you know, SourceConnect, ipDTL or some other form like Riverside, it is definitely advantageous to, uh, to test that technology out. You know, it's always wonderful to have a group of, you know, of, of colleagues that you can work with at any given time and say, hey, look, can you help me test? I mean, there's a lot of you know, forums and groups out there that say, hey, I need to do a SourceConnect test right now. Can you help me somebody test with me? So make sure that if this is something that you need to, to do, to do it in advance. And especially if, you know, a lot of times we're asked to record as well, and this could just be something maybe we're recording in, you know, through, uh, SourceConnect Now, or we're recording locally or whatever it is, Make sure that you hit that button and test it in advance. And so not having the technology throw your performance, which I'm sure it probably did for some of us a little bit, and I feel like, I feel like I might have heard that in some of your reads. Um, and as well as, you know, everything that you can possibly do to make that session go smooth. And also, you know, trying not to let that show when you get in the room to actually do the audition. Right? It's in and out and no excess. Nothing necessarily in terms of like, not too much small chat because -- Lau: Anne, you took it outta my head. You took it right outta my mouth. That was my next point, was like, there used to be an ad campaign many years ago for a deodorant, never let 'em see you sweat. That's where like, we're an actor. We're an actor, we're an actor. And what do actors do? They have to act. And that doesn't mean in the role all the time, that means as a business person, like you have to make your client feel like everything's okay. Anne: Oh yeah, absolutely. Lau: Don't worry about it. The sky isn't falling, even though it may not be okay. And you may not be able to audition and they may be disappointed. Don't let them feel like you are disappointed, you're upset, you're worried, you're scared, because that, that mirrors onto them. And then that, that becomes a, like a, you know, a, a slippery slope as they say. Anne: Yeah, absolutely. Lau: You know? Anne: Absolutely. Lau: But then being said, Anne, I do wanna congratulate everyone for the ones that -- actually most people were able to get in and show up and do -- almost all. And I just wanna give you a huge round of applause in kudos for doing that, despite your issues and your tech glitches and your confusion and your craziness. Look, you did it. You showed up. You went through it. That's the pro that we wanna build onto. Anne: Yeah. And I, and I wanna say thank you, really. I mean, this is, this was the first time that we've done this. And I think that it's, I like to believe that it's educationally valuable to, you know, the community. And I thank you for being a part of that, uh, from the bottom of my heart, really. Um, I'm really proud of all of you. Number one, it's a Saturday. So thank you for coming out and doing that and then dealing with tech frustrations. And so let's talk a little bit, Lau, about selections. Do you, do you -- Lau: Let's. Do you want to create our shortlists? Anne: I think we should create our shortlists. So first of all, I'm gonna say uh, you know, for, for a lot of the people, I feel that because it was a cold read, there were a lot of reads that sounded a little bit cold read. Um. And so if you had time, right, if you were not the first person, literally, or even if you were the first person, like the, I think my suggestion would be out of the mouth immediately once you get that script. Um, you know what I mean? Get that, get those words out of your mouth because that becomes muscle memory. That's gonna help you make it not sound like a cold read. It's gonna help you get the context of the script quickly. And remember, we are storytellers. We need to tell the story. Even though this was a short script, there was a definite story there. And I needed to feel, above the words coming out correctly, I needed to feel the warmth, the emotion, the point of view. Lau: Mm. I love all that. And as an actor, I mean, I think, you know, we have to choose very specific, very quick actor choices. We don't know if they're gonna work. We don't know how they're gonna land, but we have to be connected to something that's real. We have to know who am I speaking to and what am I connecting to. I like to use props. I mean, I'm a big prop -- like even if I'm, you know, if I'm doing a, a makeup ad, I might have my lipstick ready to go. You may never see it, right, 'cause I'm a voiceover. So you may never see it, but I feel it. I smell it. It's in my hand. There's something, you know, visceral about stuff that is real, that I can hold, I can use, I can feel. I like that. And engaging the body as well. So whether I'm sitting, I'm standing, whatever I'm doing is like, how does this translate within my body? Where's the energy coming from? You know, some of you came in with really warm, rich, textured sound, and that felt right to me. It felt like a way to go. It felt like a path. And as I watched you, I could sort of see where that vibration was coming from. I could sort of see where that was coming from today. So I think not disconnecting your head and your voice from the rest of your body and your spirit is super important. Anne: Now I'm also gonna point out that, you know, part of the specs and, and I think part of what I think innately most people are looking for in this style of, of script is something, you know, uh, not, uh, nothing smooth, polished, or announcery at all. Okay? So that's hard when you're doing a cold read. So the sooner I said, the sooner you can get that script outta your mouth -- and by the way, if you weren't one of the first few that came on board, you know, maybe that's something you were doing in the background right? Until we called you, because we definitely had enough time now through this whole process where people towards the end had a good, ample amount of time to kind of get a feel for that script, you know, and, and really, and do and, and just really feel the copy, understand the copy, know what story you're telling. Natural, and again, I'm looking at some of the specs that we were looking for, you know, natural, not performative, not laying on the gravitas, um, an air of lightness to the reed, which I liked. Um, there was some really nice light reads in there that I liked. Um, what else can I say about, you know -- and I think following the specs is one thing, but then adding something different, right? In addition to making it that non-announcery, telling the story, there, there, I think trying to incorporate something that's a little bit different, a little bit unique, uh, something that you think no other talent is going to give, right? That might surprise us. So I had a couple of, you know, as I was typing madly my notes, a couple of melodies that I heard in there that were really nice, There was like a, a, a lilt on one of the words or maybe a little point of view that was different than I was anticipating, which made me stand up and take notice. And guess what I did, Lau? I actually starred those, uh, those reads. And those are the people that I am, I have on my list to call back. So. Lau: They got Anne's gold star. That means something. Anne: They got my stars. Lau: That means something, right? I love that. That's great. I love that. Oh, there's a point I was just gonna make and I forgot what I was gonna say, but, but I'm hearing you on what you're saying, Anne, because I think that the, that that disappointment, if you will that word disappointment of, I'm ready, I'm prepared, I'm doing this -- wait a second, I'm not doing that. I'm doing something else. Whatever that is, that disappointment, that surprise, that let down that, that confusion, like, it's really important to feel that and be in that space. Certainly as casting as you are, as agent as I am, we're constantly dealing with that. Just when I think it's one thing and I know it, it turns into something else and I don't know it. And typically it's because of priority. So if someone switches a script or someone switches an audition, it's typically, typically because another audition came in that's much more time sensitive. So we have to, I might love say Manny or Kelly or Stephanie, but I also kind of love them for this new one that came in. So I want them to put that on hold just for a second and take this script and do it. So being able to improvise, impromptu, shift fast, interpret fast, I think is really important. Anne: Yeah. And, and before we actually I think reveal, because you and I, I mean, I have my list and you have your list, so we need to agree upon five people that we're gonna be calling back. Uh, I, I really just wanna say that, that it's something, that's something different, right? Uh, the more that you can practice reading your scripts, I mean, I can't say enough how, how important it is to just find different scripts, read, practice all the time, audition -- it, it just helps you to be stronger. And get feedback from, you know, from coaches and, and people that you trust that have been in the industry, that can really help you to, to, you know, uh, perform better and make those bold moves, and workout groups I think are so important. Um, like I have my VO Peeps group and every month, you know, we are working out, and, and, and I know that Lau, you have the same thing. Uh, those are so important to help you get that practice under your belt so that you can -- you need to experience all the different styles, all the different reads in order to make mistakes and grow from them. Lau: Absolutely. Anne: Think it's all about growth, all about growth as an actor. And, and if you're not doing something every day that is voiceover, that is, uh, you know, looking at different scripts, scenarios, practicing, working, uh, I, I think you're, you're missing the boat on growing as an actor. Lau: Right, right. And I think it's also the how we deal with stress. How do we balance, how do we manage time? How do we manage our crazy lives when this stuff comes in? Because you -- you know, I always say be careful what you wish for. You might get it . And when it comes in, it always comes in at the most in inopportune times. It always comes in at the time when you're the busiest, and you're working, and you have events, and you have kids. It always does 100% of the time. So you kind of always have to set your life up that I can go in the space, I can do this quickly, I can make it happen even though I've got a whole bunch of layers going on around me. They don't need to know about it. As we always say, uh, leave your trash at the door. You can come get it on your way out. Don't bring it into the studio. Um, and, and being able to really practice that, really practice that skill along with your actual delivery skill. 'Cause it's a whole other skill, that's an executive functioning skill. That's like, how do I manage 25 things at once and how do I make those 25 things all feel important and all feel like I'm not getting crazy? Like, that's, that's a functioning skill that we have to practice and we have to really work on every day along with the actual acting skills. Anne: Yeah. Right. Lau: That is, we work -- Anne: On, Oh, I'm sorry. I, I was just, I was thinking, I was thinking, uh, while you were talking. Now as we reveal -- Lau, I'm gonna have you read, you know, maybe a list or a couple of people that you, that you kind of have selected and we'll see if we agree. Lau: Yeah. Actually, can I ask you, Anne, just to crosscheck, how many out of our list do we have that actually auditioned? Or maybe I should say how many did not audition? 'Cause it seemed like most auditioned. Anne: Three, uh, three did not. Um. Lau: Okay, great. Yeah. So we had 12 -- Anne: Well, actually, actually two out of the list did not, and then you added, uh, Brit, so. Lau: Okay. So we actually had 12 or 13? Anne: Yep. We actually had 12. Lau: Fantastic turnout. Anne: Out of the original list we had 13. Yeah. Lau: Don't you think that's -- Anne: That's fantastic. Lau: That's a fantastic turnout because we always have, in any audition, a percentage of people who do not audition. There are no shows where they just don't audition for many reasons. So that's actually very high, that level of -- Anne: And they didn't even know their script. Well, they -- Lau: And they didn't know anything and they still showed up. Anne: Yeah. That's good. So. Lau: But see, I think that's a testament. I wanna, I wanna make mention, I think it's a testament to Anne, to myself, and to the nature of this whole group, this whole community of how much we trust each other, we care for each other. And you're just getting to know Anne, many of you, and, and she's part of our community now. And like, like-minded people hold each other up, motivate each other, inspire each other, and through the difficult moments, get each other through it. And that's exactly what happened today. Exactly. And so I just wanna call attention to that from a, a, a social and, and professional friend network, but also a community, sort of inspirational, motivational, holding each other through this. You guys did that, even though you may not have talked to each other. You may not have met with each other. You did that in the space, you did that in the online space. And that's -- Anne: And in the chat. Lau: -- so important to do. Absolutely. The chat. That was great. Okay. So how many, Anne, you think are we gonna shortlist here? Would you say six? Anne: I've, I've got five marked. Lau: Okay. Anne: I've got five marked. Lau: Okay. Anne: Um, so that I'd like to hear, and I, and I just wanna say one other word. Not only was it how I wanted to hear that script in terms of the specs, because consider I am the client or I'm, I'm with the client or I'm representing the client, how I wanted it to be that non-announcery warm feeling with all the, with all the feels, uh, in that description. It's also water. I feel like the voice also, if it hadthe sound that I was looking for. And so there are some that I feel out of the five, I feel some did one better than you know, the other. Um, but they all had something that made me put them on the short list. Lau: So, Okay. So, uh, uh, first of all, everyone had something that I could potentially work with. I would just wanna say that I'm not just saying that to butter people up. I'm saying everyone has a unique quality that I could really direct and work with, but based on what we were looking for and what our vision is, here's some of my top peeps. Okay? I'm just looking my list. Okay. So Manny is one of my tops. Okay? Anne: Agreed. Lau: And I have Kelly, who's one of my tops. Anne: Okay. Lau: And I have Nicole. Anne: Yes. Lau: And I have Aria, and I have, uh, Josh. I wasn't sure how many we're looking for. So -- Anne: Five. Lau: So that's, that's five. I have more. But we'll stop at that. We, we'll stop at that. Anne: Okay. So I have -- I agreed with you on Nicole, Manny, uh, Josh, and then I also had, uh, marked Alicia and uh, Carole. Lau: Good. Three outta five ain't bad. . Anne: Yeah. So, uh, we definitely have the three. Now let's just discuss. Let's just discuss because I think, uh, for me, Nicole had a nice hush that says some of the, the notes that I wrote about Nicole that I really liked. And, and Nicole was also second, so she didn't have a ton of time to prepare. Um, and she came through even with that. Now -- Lau: And you know what I loved about Nicole is when she delivers, there is something that is transfor -- transports me when she speaks that I'm in a different world. I'm in a different mode, I'm in a different world. There's something a little bit magical about her sound that I caught right away. And about her essence, because we were meeting her and seeing her on camera, there's very calm, sort of meditative, logical head on the ground feel to her. And I, that all kind of went together as this really lovely package of someone who I felt really safe with, I felt really good with. Anne: Awesome. Uh, uh, Manny, like from the first few words, I kind of had him marked already. He started off, he started off with a real warm, nice, friendly, uh, not announcery style. And that's what I really, you know, I immediately wrote, you know, stars there. Lau: Yeah, he's super pro. He has a pro sound. There is a polish there without sounding overly announcery. Um, there's a clarity there, and there's also this kind of like sexiness to it that I didn't expect, uh, because I wasn't looking for that. So there was this, uh, appeal to it that, that I really liked. It was almost essential appeal without asking for that, which I liked. Um. Anne: Uh, fantastic. Lau: And he seemed very sure of himself. 'Cause I had not met Manny at all. Anne: Very confident. Lau: He was brought over by a dear friend. And we literally met today when he came in, and I just, I just loved his presence. I just loved his confidence, and I just loved his kind of chill, laidback, but professional guy persona. He had a persona that was very strong that I heard his sound. Anne: Yeah, I agree. I completely agree. Um, Josh, now I have Josh. Um, there was a word of course I was typing so furiously that I couldn't type the word correctly, but he had a word in there that caught my attention, and it was the timbre and the lilt of the word. So as I was mentioning before, sometimes it's just something a little bit different that captures your attention. Um, and so that's one of the reasons why I marked him. Uh, and then, so there's where our three agree upon, and so now we just have to talk a little bit about our ex, our next two. Lau: And I wanted to make mention about Josh too Because Josh, and I don't know, I don't know if this is age related or, or what, but there's, he's right in the middle. There's an interesting gray zone that he's in between that cool -- Anne: Yes, I agree. Lau: -- surfer dude, laidback guy. And someone who's a little bit more professional and on it, someone who's a little bit more with it, the guy in the know. So he has that standup comedy, funny, fun appeal to him, but he has the serious enough that he can land it and have some ethos there. Anne: Agreed. Agreed. Lau: That's why I love Josh. Okay. Um, okay. The two outside of that, yours was Carol and Alicia. Anne: Carol and Alicia. Yes. Lau: You know, close second, this is what people spend fighting behind closed doors about for like hours or days is like you're kind of fighting over people who are all talented. Anne: And that's it. I think, you know, and, and here's the deal, here's where it comes in. So Lau and I are gonna discuss who those other two are gonna be. And, uh, this is probably what happens in most casting , right, offices or whoever's fighting you for the client. And we'll just go back and forth, uh, on the reasons why, you know, we either want this for the callback, right? And, and even what during the callback we'll be figuring out, well, you know, what is the reasoning for any one particular voice? And sometimes you just don't know what that is, and it's not always based on performance sometimes. Lau: No. It's just sometimes it's just like an instinct, a feeling, an impulse. And, and in my mind I'm thinking some of these people are like, oh, okay, so if this person can't do it, they're booked, or they get sick or whatever, then this person could easily go in. Totally. So it isn't the case where I really love this person and I really don't love this -- It's not always that case. Anne: Yeah. Yeah. Lau: There's a lot of like, gray zones of people that kind of fall in the same grouping, but that just don't make it to the booking, you know? Um, so Carol's voice is fantastic. I mean, it's very, to me, very corporate sounding. It has very businessy, corporatey, flight attendant-ish, finding the exit kind of sound. I like it. I love it. It's, I felt it was a little bit too objectified, a little bit too removed for the level of warmth that I was, was looking for this 'cause it is travel. When I think about travel now, and I think about number one, trying to reach the younger people, the younger generation, I think about a slightly, you know, not younger -- younger is a mythical word. It's just like a slightly more, more energized or more youthful kind of thing. Anne: Sure. I get that. I get that. Lau: And then also a, a, a little bit of like boxy or squareness in terms of it. Anne: But now when I, of course, Carole, as you said, more corporate and of course, you know, I'm very attuned to the corporate ear because I do a lot of that myself. Now, I'm also gonna say for Carole and thinking of travel, I was thinking, oh, she would make me feel comfortable on a plane, like if she were the flight attendant and so Expedia. So that was one of the reasons I thought it fit. But I'm going actually, and I'll cede you Aria because I love Aria. Lau: You'll raise me Aria. Anne: I'll raise you Aria because even though I didn't check her, I do love that voice. She's got that youthful, that youthful style if that's the market we're looking for. Um, she, you know, we did give her a different script immediately. Like she literally had no time to even voice it and have it come out of her mouth. So I have to take that with, you know, a little bit, uh, you know, a grain of salt because she really didn't even get it out of her mouth, except that was the first time. So for me, I had written that it was a little fast, but I understand why, because it was the first time coming out of her mouth. Now if I'm going on my gut and saying, you know, could you convince me, Aria, um, yeah, you could because of, because I like the timbre, the tone of her voice, the demographic is there for the script. And, uh, so yeah, that's my, that's my thoughts. Lau: And, and you know, I just wanna point out that, you know, if we don't forget about who are really, who's our target demographic for this, and is like both of these women could absolutely deliver this script. But when we get back to, you know, who the client really wants us to be looking at, it's really that, you know, 18 to 35 demographic. Because let's be honest, that's most of the people that are on like Travelocity, Kayak, Expedia, and going up-up-up -- not to say the 40 and up are not doing it, but for this particular one, one of the goals is to kind of find someone who has a bit more energized or youthful presence. Anne: All right. You've convinced me. Lau: So anyway, so that's one issue there too as well. Okay. Anne: Yep. You've convinced me. Lau: Okay, so Alicia kind of fits that. Anne: Okay. Lau: Alicia kind of fits that. Anne: Oh yes. Lau: Um, and I love her quality. She's got a rocky, dirty sort of like textured young sound. So I do like it. I, I felt like it was a little slow, like it wasn't as energized. Anne: Yes, I agree with you there. Um, and I wasn't, I wasn't thinking slow in terms of the read, but more contemplative and thoughtful. And she was another one who had a really nice different sound on the word -- she interpreted the word color toward the end of the script a little bit differently than most other people too, so we can find our colors. And I feel like that the, the operative word obviously in, in any story that we're telling, right, there's some operative words in there that really need to kind of hit the, the listener. Color is one of those words. And she really had a different, a slightly different pitch on the word color, which is why I I marked her. So. Lau: Right. Now, here's the thing that you and I both skipped over. And you guys listening in, this happens all the time. Um, you guys both, ironically we both skipped over the fact that the client does want diversity for these roles. And I don't know how I could skip that over, but I got excited with the switch out of script, but -- Anne: Well, we did change, we did change it for this purpose to all genders and ethnicities. But you're right. I mean, diversity is something that has to be a consideration and -- Lau: Right, authentically, right, diverse. So whereas like someone like Kelly, who I know very well and is a total pro, and can do this in her sleep fits that bill in so many ways and the voice is so layered and rich and textured -- Anne: Oh, I agree with that. Lau: -- and seasoned -- Anne: I agree with that. Lau: You know, it's, we're gonna have to go back and forth on, you know, the age thing and the youthful-ness thing because she's much more of a mature sound in my mind. Anne: My only, my only comments, I mean I did, I did like Kelly, I, my only comments was that she was a little too fast on the read I thought on that. And so, but you know what I'm -- Lau: But we can direct her. Anne: I could -- okay. Lau: Where she's directable. Anne: I feel that she -- all right then, then. Alright, so then I think we have our five then. Lau: And you know how I know she's directable, for those listening in? Because we know her personally. We have a relationship with her. Anne: Okay. Now -- Lau: Normally I couldn't say that if I don't know her. Anne: That's what I'm gonna say. So, and only, and only in this instant, right, if, if you know a casting director, here's an advantage, right? Um, if a casting director has heard you before or hired you before or has worked with you before, you know, it's, it behooves you to have, you know, a, a, an excellent relationship. Or when you work with them, make it as smooth as possible. Make it easy for the casting director. Make it easy for them to work with you, and they'll remember and have you coming back. So. Lau: And quite oftentimes, the casting, we see this all the time at the agency, we'll come back to the agents and go, love it. Great. Good. Need some retakes. It's too slow, I need it, da da da da. Right? And then we can go back to those people and we know that they can do it. They're capable of it. They're willing to. Anne: Yep. All right, So then we have our list, our callbacks. We're gonna call these five people back. Nicole Fikes, Aria Lapides, Manny Cabo, Josh Wells, and Kelly White. Congratulations. I would like to give a great big shout-out to our sponsor, ipDTL. You too can connect and network like BOSSes. Find out more at ipdtl.com. You guys were amazing. I can't wait for the next episode. Lau, love you. Thank you so much, guys, and we'll see you soon. Lau: Great job. Anne: Bye-bye. >> 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.com 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.

It's time to build some rapport. Anne & Lau share their tips for making quick connections + how to turn it into a meaningful relationship. The truth is, relationships are what drive our careers—and they can do more for us than just pay our bills. They can provide emotional support, professional connections, and even opportunities that we may not have otherwise had access to. In a world where the internet opens us up to millions of potential connections, building rapport is more important than ever. You share yourself online for a reason: to further connection! We're all so busy, and we know that it's hard to find the time for things like cultivating relationships. But trust me: if you're not building rapport with people, you're missing out on a huge opportunity…and we're here to show you how it's done. Listen up! Transcript >> It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere 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. Anne: Hey everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS podcast and the business superpower series. I'm your host Anne Ganguzza, and I am excited to bring back to the show Lau Lapides. Hey, Lau. Lau: Hey. Hey Anne. Anne: How are you? Lau: I'm fab. How are you? Anne: I am amazing. And I just wanna say again, thank you so much for doing this series with me. I really am loving all of the conversations that we're having. I mean, such amazing conversations. Lau: I love it. Anne: I feel like our relationship is just growing and we're nurturing it, and I just love it. And it makes me think about how important it is to network and to grow relationships in our businesses. And I thought it'd be a great topic to talk about today. Lau: Beautiful. And I'm always ready to talk about the superhero in everyone. Like, I love finding those superpowers, I know you do too, those hidden superpowers that are in all the VO talent that we meet work with. Anne: Absolutely. So there's a lot of ways I think, to network with potential clients or your clients and build relationships. What are your thoughts about when you're new to the industry? How do you start to even build a relationship with your potential client or reaching out to clients to develop a relationship? Or even let's say your agent, there's so many things we can talk about. Lau: That is the question of the day, isn't it? And that's a biggie that we all get, and it's hard to answer only in the sense that it's so large. It's so overwhelming. It's such a universal question. I always sort of break it down from the get-go, 'cause I feel like in my brain, if it's in small nuggets and little chunks, it's much easier to digest. So the first step for me is really defining what is the difference between building a rapport with a potential client or a producer or casting, and the difference between that and already having an established relationship. I think that many have to kind of go back to the drawing board with that and know what the difference is. I simply define it by saying, listen, building rapport is your instant connection. It's your instant impact. What is the effect that you're having on your listener, your audience, your potential client? And it happens really fast. It's like 10, 15 seconds. It's really starting to happen. And the evaluation process in our business is very quick, is that everyone well knows. It doesn't take forever to sort of sum someone up when I'm building rapport. So we have to consider that warm up period, that prep period of like, how do I wanna go into this meeting? How do I want to set a tone when I go to the conference? How do I want to prep and present when I'm walking into a space, even if it's an online space? Anne: Sure. Well, I was gonna say it can even be digitally as well, right? How you present yourself or have an initial outreach. Let's say even an email, so to speak, you're starting to try to reach out and build rapport with a potential client. And so it's really like an introduction of yourself and a reflection of who you are as a business. And so I think it's important to really maybe have a strategy on maybe how to do that, depending on who it is you're reaching out to. I would think that building rapport with, I think somebody new that you've never met before, let's say an agent or a potential client, would require some sort of a strategy that within, I would say 10 or 15 seconds, you can make an impression on someone in a positive way obviously. We've talked a little bit about, and I know on other podcasts, I've talked a little bit about cold emails, which it's really important how you introduce yourself so that you're not off putting to someone else or appearing to be, I think, to self-centered or too much about me, me, me or I, I, I, and I really believe to really start to develop a rapport with just about anyone, I think you have to come from a centered heart of service. You know what I mean? How can I help you? What can I do for you? If you wanna build, I think a positive rapport with a client and be authentic. What do you think? Lau: I think that's perfect. And, and our business is a business. It's like any other business out there. You know, I would say we never know who we're next to in the airplane or in the elevator, in the restroom or we're in life; we're living life. And so anyone we're near that is in our sphere could be a potential client. We have to always be thinking about that. Like, woo, how could I make an effect, an impact, impression on this stranger, so to speak, someone I don't know at all, and in a minute or two, all of a sudden we have an instant connection. So there is sort of like a magic there. There's a mystical piece in there that you have to make happen. Like you have to take agency for saying, I am going to assert that I'm not going to wait. Anne: I love that you said that. I think honestly, if I wanna think about our relationship, right, I met you for the first time when we were on a judging panel together. It's like literally we were in a professional environment on a panel, and I was so impressed with you. And I was like, immediately, I'm like, oh, I have to meet this woman. I mean, and I just felt, I did feel like an instant connection. And I think a lot of that has to do with maybe similar personalities. But the first thing I did was reach out to you, and I'm not just saying, oh my God, this was, you know, oh, I saved the day or I did, you know -- no I reached out with, because I was so impressed and I genuinely said, oh my gosh, I really wanna meet you. And let's talk because I just think you're amazing. And I think that's something that you can think about as a business if you wanna reach out to someone like a potential client. Oh my gosh, I love your product. Or I've seen the work that you've done, and I think it's amazing. That's like kind of a good way to build, I think, strong rapport with someone. Lau: Absolutely. You know, what's amazing too, is that we were online, like many are online. We were online. Here's the fascinating thing. We didn't know each other at all and we hadn't met and we didn't even speak to each other. And yet I think we could feel something, that energy shift, and you and I couldn't move fast enough. I don't remember if I emailed you or you may emailed me, but we literally were on that same wavelength -- oh, have to connect, have to connect, and, and within a day or so we were connected. And then I feel like I have known you for years. Like I literally -- Anne: Me too. Lau: -- we haven't met in person. You're in San Diego area and I'm, I'm in the Boston area, and we're 3000 miles apart. And yet we can still have that mysterious energy through building rapport together. So it really is quite impactful. And it shouldn't be underestimated at all, how you can build -- it could be a one time exchange or it could be a lifetime of moving into the relationship space together. Anne: And then developing and nurturing that relationship as you go on. And it's interesting 'cause it made me think, I started off by saying even digitally, right, we can create rapport with someone that could be a potential client of our business. Also the way you present yourself online in public. Right? And we can talk about in person as well, but online, if you are putting out content, which so many people, you know, in this business, we say, you gotta get out there on social media. You gotta put out content. Let people understand who you are and your brand. When you are doing that, when you are putting content out, you are theoretically, I'm gonna say building the blocks for building a relationship with a potential client. So things that you're saying online or putting out there, I think you have to also be a little bit careful about because potential eyeballs are on that content. And so if you're going to be saying, I don't know, things that may be negative or combative or maybe very controversial, remember that there are other people that you may not even be aware that have their eyeballs on that. And that could build maybe a negative rapport. Lau: That's right, that's right. Anne: If you're not careful. I think that assuming, I guess I'm gonna go in the digital realm, assuming that what you say is only seen by the people you think. I mean, I think it goes a lot further than most of us even realize. Lau: Right. And I, I think you identified something so pivotal in the, the differentiation between a rapport and already establishing relationship. Which I like to think of simply as it's based on time and based on trust. We may have a very strong rapport together, very, very connected, but we don't have time on our side. I'm not talking about you and I. I'm talking about in the general business world, we don't really know each other well enough. It's only through action over time do we get to know what our value system is, what our principles are, how we work, how we function -- that takes time to unfold. So the stronger your rapport, I'd like to believe the quicker you can start building a relationship together because -- Anne: I like that. Lau: -- the masks start coming down, you start to reveal more. There aren't as many filters on because you're slowly developing some trust together, and that's incredible, but we can't always expect that. It just isn't always going to happen. Anne: Right. And a client that you've developed that, you've got a good rapport and that over time you've developed that trust -- I think when a client trusts you, that's when they come back to you again and again and again, and that is what can help to really grow our businesses. And I think each one of these relationships is something that you have to consciously really think about and nurture and work at it. I don't think it's something that you can take for granted at all. I know that I don't take any of my clients, my jobs for granted. I'm grateful for all of them. And I think coming at it with an attitude of gratitude also helps to nurture that relationship and, and build trust. I think trust is so very important to establish over the long haul with your potential clients or, or people that you're working with in the industry. For sure. Lau: Right. And I like to say too, it's a feel good kind of thing to create because not only is it important to have over time to retain a client and to make money and have a viable career and get your ROI, but also it feels good. It should feel good to know that I am delivering something that someone needs and is satisfied within their timeline. And that they are going to come back to me. And there is that reciprocal kind of energy that is a part of the reason why we're in this industry, is that we want to know we're satisfying. We want to know we're pleasing. We want to know filling, filling the need, solving that problem -- Anne: That we're loved. Lau: -- so to speak Well kinda. Anne: Right? Don't we all just wanna be loved? I used to say that all the time in the corporate world, right? Part of the reason why I think so many people, at least when I was going through the corporate world, were so stuck in your jobs and you feel like, ugh, I'm stagnant at moving. I think it's, we just wanna be loved. We just wanna be appreciated for what we do and for us to have some acknowledgement of that. And then when that happens, then it becomes a very reciprocal, mutual give, take, give, take relationship. And so it's really not any different in our own businesses. Lau: It really isn't. And if someone does for you, Anne, a live testimonial or they record it for you, they say, Anne is great. She gave me this and I'll never forget her. And I love her -- It's obviously marketing power to do that, to have your case study, to have your testimonial. But when you look at that, when you play that for yourself a year later -- and I can't speak for you, I'm speaking for myself -- there's this innate, deep sense of satisfaction that I may or may not remember what they paid me, but I absolutely remember the experience of working with them. Anne: Yes. Lau: And that, that is their outcome. And that we made something that is immaterial, so to speak, real. We made it real. I think there's a surreal nature to what we do, 'cause it's not always time, a physical product. A demo is a physical product. But other than that, it's more exchange and process and craft and acting. It's hard to come down to qualify what that is exactly. And then when you hear it from that client or that talent, I mean, I'm getting a little verklempt right now. I'm telling you, like I kind of wanna cry right now because it is life changing. You've helped them find their sound, their voice, their identity -- Anne: Oh, absolutely. Lau: It's just awesome. It's awesome. Anne: It brings me back to my teaching days as well, you know, with my students. I mean, I got to help shape some of their lives as they were being educated and going through school and I've watched them grow up. And it becomes one of those things where it's like, ah, it's just such a feel good heart situation. And I think that that really means a whole lot when it comes to doing something that brings us joy. And so, you know, developing, nurturing those relationships that can really give back in a way that's more than just money. Right? We talked about in our, one of our last episodes, businesses with purpose. Well, I think that feeds into it really well. And part of the purpose is to, I think, develop a good rapport, those good relationships. Now online -- I started off by kind of talking about it online -- I think in person just accentuates the relationship building or accelerates the relationship building because then you've got that, you know, we're looking at each other in -- on a video right now and, and we're hearing each other, but when we actually get to physically meet each other, then there's that other energy. And so I think when you're trying to develop a rapport with someone that maybe you're just meeting at a conference -- there's so many of the voiceover conferences these days now -- it's important to also have that physical rapport, developing a physical rapport with people that is, I think, open and embracing opportunity to meet and really share with other people. Lau: Absolutely. I do think the brilliance of being online now, if you never get to meet your other party in person in a room, which many of us just can't. You know, we live too far from each other. We're never gonna unfortunately see each other in a room. It's incredible to think, my gosh, I am developing a whole relationship with this person online, and we've never been in a room together. And it reminds me of how some of us feel about some of our A-list movie stars or some of our A-list pop stars. Am I really gonna be in a room with Tom Hanks in this lifetime? Probably not. I hope so, but probably not. Can I feel like I have a strong relationship with him over the years of supporting his work? Anne: Sure. Lau: Of connecting with his characters, of loving what he has to say? Yes. Anne: Yeah. Lau: And so sometimes that just has to be enough and it's the, the digital relationship, the online relationship that we can connect with that has to go as far as it can go, because we're just never gonna see those clients in person. Anne: And that becomes some of my wonderful colleagues who are in animated series or in video games that are beloved and have fans that are out there that the same kind of thing that have developed a, a relationship. I just watched the movie Elvis last night. So that whole thing just kind of, it makes a difference what you're putting out there. Now here's the question, because sometimes I feel that what you're putting out there digitally and/or even online with, through video or even in person, can there be too much, can you share too much? Can there be a place where maybe in a professional business, we've gone too far and overshared? What are your thoughts on that? Lau: Yeah. That's the question of the day, honestly. I really do think the more I learn about online media, the more I'm learning that that can be personal, but it can also be generational. Because we have millennials and up and coming Gen-Zers who are digital natives who grow up with that in their hands and share every and everyone else, every single moment of their day and will contextually mix that in with their businesses. And that heightened level of personalization is not only accepted, but expected. For me, I find it jarring, to be honest with you. Like, I don't necessarily wanna report what kind of eggs I'm having in the morning. I just don't but I've had some of my audiences, including like my own children go, okay. But just so you know, like we care about that. We kind of wanna know. It's not irrelevant to us. That's like part of you, and if we're gonna work with you, then we kind of wanna know that. So it, to me, that's a lot of generational gap in there. Anne: Yeah. Yeah. You know, I'll tell you, so I guess personality-wise, I've always been kind of an open book. I was always the talker, and I think a lot of voice artists, maybe those people, the talkers in the family. But I've never necessarily had an issue sharing with people. But I also think that I'm strategic when I share and where I share. And I think that when I'm looking online, when I see a share that might be a little, I don't know, maybe a little TMI or a little -- Lau: Little provocative. Anne: And I wonder how does that fare with your potential client? And again, because you might have a millennial that hires you, and I get that. And they wanna see or feel, or hear an authentic you. So when I put myself out there, I mean, I try to be as authentic as possible. I mean, and when I'm talking on the VO BOSS podcast, I'm pretty darn authentic, but it doesn't mean that I always have to be like every single minute of the day overly authentic, because I think that I have certain clients that may not want to know certain things about me. Because it would affect whether they would hire me or not. And I think that's the biggest question, right? If I share too much or if I have, let's say I'm distressed and I'm sharing that I'm distressed on a day that maybe I'm supposed to be doing a live session with one of my potential clients, right? And now they understand maybe that was why the session didn't go so well. Or maybe because they already know so much about me that maybe they won't hire me again, right? Because it affected me to the point where my performance was affected. I don't know if I had a bad day and you know, I'm sharing it and I share a lot, and I have that potential client, maybe they're not gonna wanna work with me after that. Lau: That's the risk we take. I mean, can't please everyone all the time, you know? I mean -- Anne: Yeah, that's true. Lau: -- the truth is what pleases one audience is just going to maybe repulse another audience. And I think the more we can pivot and shift and switch up to different audiences is just about the best that we can do. But I'd rather be pliable a little bit. Like I don't wanna be that person that says, oh, I'm 40, I'm 50, I'm 60. And this is the way I do things. And I'm not open to anything else because this is my people and this is -- I kind of wanna be able to relate to different generations. I wanna be able to meet people where they're at, even if I'm not great at their level of -- their mode communication, I want, I wanna be perceived as someone who is trying and who cares about it and who wants to reach them and what they need, which is gonna be very different needs than what someone who's 20 or 30 years their senior is going to be. So I like that flexibility. That's what I'm trying to say. I think in networking and in building rapport and deepening relationships, the more flexible you are -- I would say, think of your relationships as like an architect. If you had a beautiful building, it was a very tall skyscraper type of building, how does that fare in a city like Tokyo or San Francisco, that's getting earthquakes all the time? We're getting conflict all -- in problems all the time. We have to have a super concrete, strong foundation. And then the higher up we go, we have to be able to flex in the winds. We have to be able to literally blow back and forth. And I like to think of us as business people and as networkers, as people that have very sturdy foundations, but that can flex with our clients and, and mold and different directions, you know? Anne: I love that. Yeah, I love that analogy. That's just a wonderful analogy. So let's talk about a lot of conferences are popping up, and especially now I'm noticing a lot of them. And we were talking about it earlier. I think everybody's ready to get out there after the pandemic -- I say after the pandemic, I mean, I don't even know how to define it anymore. I just know that everybody, I think after two and a half years of this is ready to just get out and hug people or see people and get that physical connection, which I can completely understand. As a matter of fact, I'm gonna be going out a couple times this year to conferences. And so in terms of, let's say building a rapport or even nurturing a relationship, maybe you're gonna meet somebody finally -- I'm gonna meet somebody at one of these conferences that I've been working with for two and a half years -- what kind of tips do you have for building rapport? Or what would you do in terms of in-person networking tips that we can give the BOSSes out there? Lau: All right. Let's talk. I mean, there's some of them that are fairly simple that you and I have seen over and over and over again, mishaps. Like for instance, how many times have we gone to a conference or a networking event and we're meeting people and they have no business cards? They just, oh, I'm sorry. I have nothing to give you. I ran out. I forgot them. I -- whatever it sounds so insanely simple. And yet having something on you that is hard copy, that is old school hard copy like a business card still is pro, still is a professional rapport building tool rather than just writing it down on a notebook or piece of paper. Anne: I wanna make a point, 'cause I am gonna go to this conference coming up in, in October. And I said to my husband, I said, 'cause my husband does events at shows. And I said, so do people still use business cards? He goes, oh my God, yes. 'Cause I was like, or do I use like here scan my QR code? You know, digital? Now I wanna say that usually there's an app that goes in a conference that you join the app and then you can put all your contact information in the app and then share it with other people. I think being able to have both, I love the touch feel. It's again, like why do we still have books? Because I love to touch and feel the books. And I think we are gonna be appeasing anybody that we might meet again, like you said, we, we're gonna be flexible. I think have both. Make sure you're logged on to that app, have your contact information. You can share it that way, or have that touchy feel business card. And I think that that really would be a great way to, to be prepared. So I'm like, all right, I'm gonna get business cards and refresh my business cards now. And I do like the touchy feel. Lau: I do too. Anne: Take it outta my wallet. Lau: I do too. Anne: I remember, gosh, back before it used to be like scan my QR code or here's an app for the conference, It used to be a thing. You must have cards. And we would all be like, oh my God, you don't have your business cards at this conference? You really need to have a business card if you wanna be considered a professional. So now I think if you can kind of be flexible and have both available, I think that's a good way to prepare. Lau: Yeah, I agree totally. And I also don't wanna alienate a potential friend, client, contact because they're just not techy. Like they don't do the scanning thing. They don't know much about it. They're not into it, but they're brilliant. And they like run a great business. You know what I mean? So I don't wanna be the one that makes them feel out of it, out of the scene because they don't know how to do that for instance, that would be one reason to have plan for sure. Anne: Yeah, absolutely. Lau: I also wanted to point out like prepare how you want to enter the space. I think a lot of folks just kind of run in, and they're stressed out, and they're running late and they're, they're just there. Think about, you know, I always like to say, visualize the room, visualize the room. Who will be in there? You should be able to see many people who will be in there before the event actually happens to have an idea of the caliber of folks that are coming in, what the presentations are, so forth and so on. But think about the traffic. What kind of traffic may be coming in? Who are the people that you want to target in terms of your, your perfect client, your perfect connection? And really make a list, like jot it down, you know, make notes in your phone, however you do it, so that you walk in and you have a strategy in mind -- Anne: And you're prepared. Lau: You said that earlier, you're prepared. You're not just kind of floating around and seeing who comes to you and who -- you are really kind of assertive, 'cause you only have a certain amount of time. Even if it's a two or three day conference, you're gonna wanna sit in on shows and webinars, seminars. And you're gonna -- time gets eaten up very fast at those events. And there's oftentimes a lot to seen a lot to do. So map it out, have a strategy in mind, say, I wanna meet these three people? Who are they, and really have that ready to go. Anne: Yes, absolutely. Now here's a question which I know a bunch of people, if they are at a conference, and there are agents or casting directors there, what do you consider appropriate for people that come up to you and introduce themselves because they might wanna be represented by you? 'Cause that's a tough one. Sometimes people will not go up because they're timid or people will go up and be overbearing. So what is your advice for that as an agent or a casting director in terms of what do you consider to be professional? Lau: That's an interesting question. I honestly have not to been to many conferences in person since COVID to really -- when you're on online, you know, you're sort of protected. The automatic digital boundaries already there. So you're kind of protected by that. Whereas in person, I haven't really experienced that, but I'm gonna imagine there's a groupie thing that goes on. There's a groupie mentality. Like if I were to see some of my favorite people like Rob Paulson or Debbie Derryberry -- I mean, I have relationships with them, but if I didn't, I wouldn't wanna run up and like crowd them and be in their space. I'd wanna pay attention to protocol, pay attention to structure. So there are very specific protocols and structures when you go to those events where you're gonna see them on a panel or you're gonna see them where they stand in a line and you're gonna take a photo with them or whatever. Okay, agents are very similar in that. Oftentimes they're in a workshop or a panel or they're invited guests. And if they're not in a structured setting where you're gonna ask them questions, there's a Q and A, you can talk to them, I wouldn't recommend running up to agents or casting and like smothering them. Anne: Right. And giving them a demo or giving them your contact. And I think again, you have to kind of go like, well, approach them as to like, what do you know about them? And I always say approach was not the I, I, I, me, me, me, but about, oh my goodness. I have another voice actor that I'm friends with. And they've talked to me about how wonderful you are and I really appreciate meeting you. And that's it, nothing like, I don't don't think pressing like, are you accepting new -- I feel like that's just almost too much sometimes. Unless you've got the indication from the agent that they're looking for more people to put on their roster. Lau: Right. Anne: I don't know. It's read the room. Lau: Read the room, read the room. And oftentimes they're there for a reason. Like they're there not just to educate you, but to find people. They're there to field new talent for their roster. Oftentimes it's like innate, that's the reason why they're there. So don't crowd them. What you wanna do is you wanna listen to what they have to say, take notes on what they have to say, refer to what they have to say and follow their contact information that they provide to you, and that day, like I wouldn't wait -- we talked about windows of time -- that day, while you're at the conference, go to a spot -- Anne: I really enjoyed your presentation. I really, yeah. Lau: Boy. Yeah. Yeah. I just sat in. And when you talked about this, I was really impressed. Anne: I love it. Lau: I'm a talent I'm seeking representation. It's wonderful to hear you. That's it. I wouldn't do more than that because you don't need need to. Right? You, remember you don't have a relationship. You're building rapport. Anne: Absolutely. Absolutely. Wow. Great discussion today. I love it. I love it. Thank you so much. So I am going to say thank you so much, Lau, for today's conversation, and BOSSes out there, you can have a simple mission, but yet a big impact: 100 voices, one hour, $10,000, four times a year. If you wanna find out more, visit 100voiceswhocare.org to join. Also big shout-out to our sponsor, ipDTL. You too can connect and network and build rapport like BOSSes. Find out more at iptdl.com. You guys, have an amazing week, and we'll see you next week. Bye! Lau: Bye! >> 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.com 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.

Are you feeling the energy of newness & hope that we do? Anne & Lau are getting ready for the new year and all that comes with it. Before you jump to goal setting, take a minute to think about what has happened this year & what you want to create next. Reflecting on your accomplishments is an empowering exercise that can help you feel successful & inspired. It is also essential to take a look at the industry as it is now & research any predictions about the near future. Understanding the demands of the industry will help you build your goals and business plans around what will serve the current market. Now BOSSES, it is time to goal set. Think big, but not unrealistic…and if you need help, listen up because Anne & Lau have your back. Transcript >> It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere 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. Anne: Hey everyone, welcome to the VO BOSS podcast. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzza, and today I am so happy to have back to the show the one and only Lau Lapides. Hey Lau. Lau: Hey, I love how you took a breath before you said my name. Yay. Anne: I did . You deserve that extra drama, that extra drama pause. So. Lau: Thank you. I love that. Anne: Awesome. Well, you know Lau, it is coming to a close, the year of 2022. Lau: Unbelievable. Anne: Yeah. And of course 2023, with that comes the new year, resolutions, goals, all those good things. And I think I wanna kind of take a step back and not just talk about 2023, but I wanna reimagine what your business and what the BOSSes out there, reimagine what your businesses could look like in 2023, maybe in a little different light this year. Because I think, I feel like people are feeling more comfortable now. They're getting out, they're seeing each other. I think there's a lot of hope and renewal in the air. I mean, I'm feeling it. And for me, I've taken a look at what's going on this past year and the industry and how it's shifting. And I think we really need to take a good look at our businesses to see how we can maybe shift and evolve and reimagine our businesses in the new year. Lau: Mm. No question about it. And this is the best time. I'm always saying, you're winding down. You're tying up loose ends. You're excited about any holidays that are happening. And even if you don't celebrate holidays, it gives you permission that everyone else is to just relax, be with family, take it easy, but then also to plan. Anne: Yeah. Right? Lau: To think about quarter one in the new year, where do you wanna be? Who do you wanna be? And what does your vision look like of your business? Anne: Yeah. Lau: That's exciting. I love that time. Anne: It's so exciting. I mean, and I really like to have that time to reflect. And I'll tell you what, you and I, we are soul sisters, right? We work, work, work, work, work. And the other day I literally, I had to go to a doctor's appointment. Maybe not the most fun thing in the world, but it got me into the car. And it got me on a long ride 'cause there was traffic. And I actually really like that. And I miss that in a way because whenever I would drive, I was able to think, right? Because I can't be typing at my computer. I have to just sit there and think. And I came to the realization, Lau, that I have been in business for myself for 15 years. Lau: Wow. Anne: And you think I would've thought about that before. I mean, I kind of knew it, but I just, it hit me all of a sudden. Lau: Awesome, awesome. Anne: Wow. That is something to be proud of. And I know you have been in business just about as long as I have. Lau: Mm-hmm. Anne: Full-time, your own business. And I think that number one, before any BOSSes start to think about what they are going to do next year, right, and create goals, I think you should stop, reflect, and give yourself credit and realize your accomplishments that you have so far. Because that, I think gives you a great baseline to jumpstart a new year. Lau: Absolutely. And you know, I was thinking about you saying that you were in the car, and that's that autonomic thing in your brain that you know how to drive the car. You don't have to think about it. So you can go into your imagination, you can go into processing things, and you've got the privacy. You're alone. And here's the thing, we're moving forward. Most of the time, unless we're sitting at a light or backing up, we're moving forward. So if you drive, if you bike, if you walk and you're moving forward, and you're thinking about your life, think about your business as moving forward. You've got this kinesthetic energy that's happening as you're thinking about what's to come. Anne: Mm-hmm. Lau: And we're meant to be in action. I know I'm one of those people, Anne, and I know you are as well, that I am better about working and getting things done when I'm in action. Anne: Yeah, absolutely. I agree. Lau: I'm not as good on the outside of it. I'm better on the inside of it. Anne: Well, you know what else too, when I am though, in that moment where I can be quiet and reflect, I also like to watch or listen to other creative things so that I can learn and be inspired. And so, believe it or not, I was listening to another podcast, and it wasn't anything to do with voiceover, and it didn't even have to do with business, but it was people in the creative arts. And when I listen to them banter back and forth about what they do on a day-to-day basis, or that maybe they're interviewing somebody that's in television or the movies, and it always gets me thinking outside of my bubble. I really think that most of us voice talent. We stay in this bubble, this safe, comfortable bubble of, this is my industry, this is what I know, and this is how I need to go forward. These are the steps that other people in my industry have told me. And I think that you really need to step outside of that once in a while to get creative inspiration. Like I love watching good movies. I love listening to new music. I love listening to anybody in the creative arts talking about their career or what they do to inspire themselves or to get ahead or to grow themselves or their business. That inspires me and gives my business new ideas. Lau: Mm-hmm. Absolutely. I'm right there with you. And just last night I was watching a program on PBS about the American Musical Theater. Anne: Mm-hmm. Lau: And the Jewish influence on that thematically, like the Jewish people that are coming in and influencing that. And they talked to Mel Brooks, and they talked to Stephen Sondheim and they talked, and here's the theme. They came up with. The great musicals were all revolving around hope and joy and happiness, you know, "Put on a happy face" and "Singing in the rain" and all. And I'm telling you, I was crying my eyes out with joy. I was crying my eyes out because I wanted to remember that what we do in our industry should be around joy rather than around negative. Anne: Yeah. Lau: You know, we can still have agendas, we can still have purposes that are serious, that we really care about. We wanna uplift and we want to support, but overall, I know I wanna have a joyous outlook about myself, my business, my clients. Anne: Absolutely. Lau: My world. I want, I wanna go in with the upward mobility rather than downward. Anne: Yeah. Upward. And along those same lines is really understanding what it is that you do and how you contribute to the world and society and within your business. And I think that we talk about this all the time, know your worth, know your worth. But I think we, we talk about it in terms of just knowing your worth in terms of what do I charge? Right? What do I charge for this voiceover job? I want you to think broader and grander than that. Like, how does my voice fit into the very small piece of the pie that can affect people on grand levels? Do you know what I mean? My voice that fits into a documentary or something that's uplifting, or a meditation or, or however that works in a creative, entertaining spot. How does that fit in? And how does it overall affect not just you and your business, but society and the world? And when I think you start to realize where that sits, you start to value yourself and your business even more. And that helps you to create even grander goals that can be achievable, not grand goals that are not achievable. It gives you inspiration that you can achieve this. Lau: Yes. And that there is an outcome that you are responsible for. And the outcome is surrounded by impact. Anne: Mm. Yes. Lau: Like what kind of impact and outcome does your audience, your client base, the people who surround you, what are they going to feel? What's the affect? What are they going to learn? What's your logos and education around what you bring to them? And how will they be persuaded? You know, like how will they move in a direction or a new direction based on what you're giving to them and offering them, which is you're offering them value. Anne: Yeah. Lau: You're really giving value. So it's not just about setting your rates and setting your pricing. Anne: Sure. Lau: It's about saying, take a step back. What value am I really giving to them? And how long lasting is that value? Anne: I totally agree with you. And so in looking, I think, BOSSes, before you start to make those goals for 2023, and you start reimagining, start taking a look at what you do now and start looking beyond just the surface of -- for me, for example, I don't necessarily do documentaries every day of my life or impactful commercials every day of my life, but I do voiceover every day of my life. And every single piece that I do voiceover for every single piece of copy has a meaning and has an impact to someone out there. And I think we don't often look beyond the words. Right? And the end of the job and the paycheck. I think we really have to say, what is it that we are contributing? And also, I think if you are really thinking about the overall impact, it's gonna help you with your performance as well. Your performance is gonna mean more artistically. And also, again, I think everything just falls into place because again, as I was mentioning before, if we look at the evolution of this industry and how things are changing and evolving, technology, it keeps coming. Right? It keeps coming. There is the potential for a large amount of disruption in our industry because of technology. If you remember, I think the first was home studios and then ISDN, right? Or ISDN, that was a technology that led to home studios. And then home studios led to more and more people in the industry. And then after that, I'm thinking, what else is changing in the industry? Online casting sites, right? Pay to plays. That was technology that, it disrupted our industry. And technology, by the way, doesn't just disrupt our industry. Technology disrupts every industry. And again, there's another movement for, I'm gonna say it, synthetic voices. And I know that people don't wanna hear that, but yet it is coming. And so as businesses and when we are trying to imagine our business moving forward, we need to be aware. We need to keep our eyes open. And we also need to think that if synthetic voices are coming, we need to be even more human in our craft. Right? Even more human, to make the impact to differentiate ourselves from the other product that may be coming. And also possibly consider having an additional product in your service. Right? Maybe a human voice. Well, obviously a human voice, right? But maybe think about how a synthetic voice might play into your business. I'm not gonna say that I am out there taking away jobs, but I'll tell you what, they're not gonna stop for me. . Lau: Exactly. Anne: And so for me, I wanna hone my craft so that I can give as much human Anne to my performance and make an impact with that as I can. And so that gives me lots of goals for next year, lots of goals. Lau: Tons of goals. It's never ending goals. And I think there's the nature of human beings, not just in our industry, but to sort of have resistance against change. Anne: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Lau: Like anything that looks scary, unknown, change -- will that take my job? Will that take my value away? Will that take my worth away? Well, our job, I think as human beings is to say, no, I have to re-envision what my value and what my place is, and then I have to offer that. Anne: Yeah. Lau: If I sit back and I put up the resistance wall and I become super toxic, and start low talking everything and downgrading everything -- listen, as you said, it's not gonna change because I'm upset about it. Trust me on that. Anne: Exactly. Yeah. Lau: So when in Rome -- like you have to figure out, how do I carve out my business and rearrange that to fit the new waves that are happening in the industry? And if you really look closely, there's going to be positives. There's going to be pros, there's going to be great stuff. And then there, there will be cons too. Anne: Yeah. Lau: So I always found like you, I need to stay positive about it and really do the due diligence of figuring out how do I swim in this market? What do I have to offer? And what do I need to change and re-envision in order to still fit into the industry? Anne: Right. And I think it's important, again, just to reiterate with some different words, but saying the same thing, it is the market. We are a business who provides a product to a market, and we need to pay attention to that market. I can't just be a voice actor and say, but I have an amazing voice. Hire me. Lau: Right. Anne: It doesn't matter how great my voice is if the market is not demanding it. Right? And that's just business 101. You have to understand what the market is looking for, and then as a business, offer something that will serve that market. Lau: Yeah. I mean, if it's any consolation and you view it all as a commodity, and that we are a product, in essence, go out and look at every single product on the market from an Apple computer to Tide soap to your car, to your house, whatever. It doesn't stay the same. It's all new. It's improved. Anne: Yeah. Lau: You've got new ingredients, you've got new packaging, you've got environmentally friendly, you've got da, da da, da, da. It just doesn't stay the same. Like, I'm this laundry detergent and it's good. And take it or leave it. It doesn't stay that way. It has to change with the mindset, the vision, and also the generational influences. It has to shift and change to appeal to those target demographics. And it doesn't mean that it's not good anymore. It means that it needs to move in the direction where that audience figures out what the value is. Anne: We can't, "get off my lawn!" We can't do that. Lau: No, no. Anne: We just, we just can't -- we may be getting older. And it's interesting because as I -- Lau: What are you doing on my lawn? Anne: Get off my lawn. Lau: Get off. Anne: As I mentioned, I've been in the industry for 15 years. I have seen a lot of change. Lau: Anne: Again, when I mentioned when I started home studio was just a thought. Lau: Yeah. Anne: It wasn't a requirement. Online casting sites hadn't begun yet. And really, if you're not, again, watching and looking and educating yourself, you're not gonna be able to move forward. Your business is not gonna be able to move forward. So if you're a voice artist and you love what you do, and you wanna remain a voice artist, then I think you definitely need to take some time. And this time of the year is a great time to do it. If you haven't been writing down your accomplishments -- So I'm gonna say before you write down goals, I have a wonderful planner that I write down weekly, daily accomplishments, things that I've done. And it's something that, a place that I can go to look back at. And it gives me a nice benchmark to say, oh yeah, you know what? If I'm feeling down and I feel like, oh, it's a slow week and what's going on, I don't feel like I'm making any progress -- I can go look at things that I've written down and say, wow, you know what? Like the epiphany that 15 years, wow. That's something to be proud of. Lau: Look how much you did. It's very easy to forget about it and brush it aside when you're busy and stressed about the up and coming projects. But when you really take the time to look back on everything, oh my goodness, you go, did I do that? Oh, . It's incredible. And you should be proud of that. Like you should take the time to celebrate it. Take the time to really go, oh my God, that's me. I did that. Like I always say, we're the alchemists thinking about creating a business out of nothing. Anne: Right. Lau: There's nothing there. It's air. And then you fill it with a thought and you conceive it, and then you start to plan it, and then you start to execute it. And then when you do it, you go, oh yeah, I just did it. It wasn't a big deal. Yeah. I got to do -- well, you forgot about the whole process -- Anne: It was a big deal. Lau: -- leading up to it. Anne: Exactly. Mm-Hmm. Lau: A huge deal getting there. Anne: It's interesting, as I was thinking about that, I'm also writing like, what are the biggest myths about starting a business in the voiceover industry? And one of the biggest myths is that you're born to be a business person or born to be an entrepreneur. And I think I'm the first one to negate that because I wasn't born to be an entrepreneur. I learned everything as I was going along. And so in reality, that's an accomplishment. Lau: Oh yeah. I don't even know anyone who, even if they're born into families of entrepreneurs and they're studying in an entrepreneurial, you know, MBA track, they're not naturals at it oftentimes. They have to learn, they have to absorb, they have to be in the surrounding, they have to be in the mindset, the thought process. And that's not even to say, are they brave? Like, do they, they have that risk taking, that calculated risk taking thing. Are they willing to work really hard? Are they creative? Do they have a creative brain? I mean, that's all stuff that is part of your makeup, part of your chemistry. But you have to have the exposure, the teachings, the environment to help cultivate all that. Anne: BOSSes out there, if you haven't already gotten a pen and paper and started writing down these accomplishments -- because if you are here, if you are in the industry, if you've started your business, that is an accomplishment. And that is something to jumpstart, springboard off that for reimagining your next year. And I've got some, you know, hefty plans for myself, more so than I think I did this past year. I mean, I always like to think big, but this year I'm really starting to evolve and change, and I think get off my lawn kind of talk. I have been planning for my retirement for the last five years. The wheels have been turning. I wanna make passive income so that when I retire, I can travel and I don't have to be taking my mic everywhere with me and enjoy my retirement. So I've always been planning year after year after year, what can I do? How can I evolve my business? How can I grow it? And part of that is sitting down and looking at my accomplishments and then figuring out what new things do I wanna do for this next year? And I think because I've seen a bigger change in the industry this year, more things out in the industry that are affecting the industry and trends and where they're going -- and I think next year I want to be able to offer more to my clients. And so I'm going to have to really dig deep and figure out what parts of my business do I wanna change? Do I want to upgrade? Do I want to, I can't be Anne Ganguzza more than 24 hours a day. I just don't have the time. And so now I've gotta really figure out a new way to rework the business so it's more efficient. And I can put more of my, I guess I wanna say my genuine self into it and not have to spend hours doing things that maybe I can outsource or have another method of getting them done or maybe go a different direction. Lau: Hmm. No question about it. I think that that's the way to go. And when your BOSSes are ready to do that, delegating, growing your team, going from solopreneur to really businesspreneur, entrepreneur, whatever is important when you're ready for that step. And that's a courage step. You have to have a lot of courage and faith that you've reached that certain benchmark, but you need to get to the next level up. And in order to do it, you can't be everywhere all the time. You have to have others helping you. That was hard for me, honestly, Anne, because I'm the type of person, I don't know, maybe I'm a control freak and I'll say -- Anne: No, I hear you. Lau: Maybe I'm a control freak, but I like to touch everything. You know what I mean? Anne: Yeah. Lau: I'm like a toddler. I like to touch that and touch that email and touch that. Anne: Yeah. Lau: And I'm learning that I don't always have to do that. Anne: Yeah, absolutely. Lau: And sometimes, and this was like a huge ego thing, and BOSSes, you might be able to relate to this, the idea that it won't go well or it won't be of high value if I'm not involved with it, is really not true. It's just not true. It's your insecurity potentially. Anne: Yes. Absolutely. Lau: Being worried about things going wrong versus that client really getting their value, enjoying themselves fully with another coach or with another engineer, or with another whatever you do like all the millions of jobs. I always say job number 82, you know what I mean? Anne: Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's something to be said when you do outsource. I mean, I've had, gosh, I wanna say I've had my second hired employee is still with me. Wow. She's been with me for, I'm gonna say nine years now. Lau: Wow. Anne: Think about that. Nine years. Right? Lau: Nine years. Anne: I have been employing, I mean, I have at least nine people on my team now, but they've stayed with me. And that's yet another thing to think about. If you're outsourcing, you have to manage, right? You have to manage employees, you have to delegate, you still have to delegate so you have a little bit of your piece of the pie. You have your hand, your fingers in the pie there. And it's something of an accomplishment to have an employee that is loyal, that wants to stay with you for that long, that you can hopefully motivate and inspire. And it's, it's not just about the money for them. Because I realize that if I want quality work and the type of work that I'm so control freakish myself, right? It's gotta be at a level that's way up here -- if you want your employees to perform at that level, then you have to respect them. You have to treat them well, you have to pay them well. And that also is a big challenge because we are our own business and to invest money, right, again into ourselves for performance training, for demos, for marketing, for outsourcing, it's always, I think, a scary thing for us to spend our money. Right? Our well-earned money. And so again, that's another thing that I can have on my accomplishment list to say I have been a good boss to my employees. And they have not left me in the dust. They've stayed with me. We have a wonderfully respectful, productive relationship. And I'm very proud of that. Lau: And you should be proud of that. That's amazing. And in a world where most bosses just don't care, like workers are dispensable, oftentimes they're not even recognized. It's like you're a number in a lecture classroom kind of thing -- you have built a core business built on value and warmth and a family friendly environment and really nurturing, really just nurturing your talent and your clients, and really making sure you've got a caring, watchful eye. Hard to find that. That is invaluable. Like that is priceless. You know what I mean? To be able to do something like that. We pride ourselves on that too. And I recently said what you said. I said, oh, I've been an amazing boss. Like, I'm incredible. But here's the double-edged sword. I have been the toughest boss that I have ever worked for. I'm much tougher on these than I am on the people that work with me and for me. And that's an issue. Like it's good that you're able to drive yourself. It's not good that you drive yourself crazy. Anne: Oh, I completely agree. I completely agree. And you know what's so interesting? I think that because our product is really a very personal, part of our personal brand, right? It represents our personal brand, whether we are hiring somebody to help market, for us to help engineer, for us to help communicate to potential clients for us, they are representing our brand. And so by default, I like to say, of course, I'm the most caring, warm boss out there. But part of it is also because they're representing my brand, right? And I wanna make sure that I get tip top work, right? Top-notch work. I know myself, I'm not gonna get top-notch work from workers who aren't paid enough. Right? How can I preach the value of knowing your worth if I don't pay my employees what they're worth? Right? How do I get them to care about me and my brand? Because if they write an email and say the wrong thing or come off on a different level or a different way, that is impacting me and affecting my business. And so I have to make sure that my employees are on the ball all the time. And, and I think that's part of the motivation too, for treating your employees well. And I always think you should treat your employees well anyways. Happy employees are gonna be ones that really serve your company and will stay with you for the long term. Lau: That's right. That's part of your envisioning and re-envisioning of your business, that I'm working with the best crew that I can work with. I'm inspiring them. I'm offering them the resources they need. I'm educating them. I'm taking care of them well financially and emotionally, but I'm also motivating myself in a new way and getting courageous about that. Like what's the next step? Let me be honest. How do I level up personally and professionally? How do I get to that next place? And I'm telling you, it can be a leap. I'm going through it myself. It can be, after 14 years, it is really crazy to like take a leap to go from whatever it is, whether it's the six figure to the seven figure mark. Anne: Sure. Absolutely. Lau: Or to go from this level of client to that level of client, or it's very, very unsettling to do that. Anne: And I'll tell you another thing. I always think about at this time of the year, right? Next year, am I going to raise my prices? Right? Lau: Hmm. We were just talking about that. Yeah. Anne: And I think that, Lau, that's a whole 'nother episode, but it's something, BOSSes, I want you to think about, right? Are you going to be raising your prices? And in economic times such as these, right? When there's a recession or the looming recession, how much are you going to, are you going to change your prices for new clients? Maybe your existing clients, you'll give them a grandfather clause where they get the same rate. But I do think that every time I change my prices, I have a little mini heart attack because it's scary even for us, right Lau, when we -- Lau: Oh, yes. Anne: It takes courage to do things like that, to raise your prices, to hire someone, to fire someone, anything when it comes to your business for growth, it takes courage to grow. Lau: It does. Anne: And I'll tell you what though, I have all the faith in the world for 2023 and the BOSSes that listen to this podcast, that you guys are gonna go write down those accomplishments so that you can have a springboard to really, really reimagine what your business will be like in 2023. And think big. I like to think big, but don't think unrealistic because I'm ever hopeful that I really do believe that when I do reimagine my 2023, I will always make it so it works for me. Because I certainly don't like, I don't like to fail. I mean, I do fail all the time, but I don't like it to look like a failure. So I just say, oh, I changed my mind. So . Lau: Yeah, exactly. Anne: But again, it's all about growth. Lau: Exactly. Anne: And I think that if you have done this for any amount of time, or if you're just getting into it, taking risks and having courage to grow your business -- you don't have to say, oh, I'm gonna go from $1000 a year to $100,000 a year. You don't have to make some crazy grand goal. As a matter of fact, most of my growth has come from goals that I kind of worked backwards from. And so they were step by step by step. And so each one was incremental in a realistic way, so that I never felt like I was losing or a failure or I couldn't make it. Lau: Exactly. And and you know, we have fancy terms that we use now that really justify those moves. Like changing your mind is now called pivoting. We pivot. Anne: Yeah. There you go. Lau: Because it either doesn't work or it's not what we thought it is, or it's just not panning out for whatever reason, or we no longer wanna do it. It doesn't satisfy our overall goal. So we pivot in a new direction. So as you're able to transition and pivot and move, I would say, stay in action, move forward. Keep envisioning and re-envisioning, and don't be apologetic if you need to change course, if you need to pivot like you do, Anne, like I do every single day. That's really part of the game. And if you're gonna be in it, you need to keep that action moving forward. And just go for it. Like don't hold back. Go for it. Anne: Well, I am Inspired, Lau, by you and I thank you, Lau. This is our last podcast episode of this year. We are continuing next year, which I'm so excited for. Lau: Yay. Anne: But yeah, so I have to say I am truly grateful and appreciative of having you these past few months as my co-host and absolutely love growing my business with you and growing VO BOSS. And for the BOSSes out there, I wanna say it's been an amazing year. Thank you so much for supporting us. One last thing, big shout out to our sponsor, ipDTL. You too can connect and network like BOSSes and reimagine your 2023 with ipDTL. Find out more at ipdtl.com. I have all the good feels for next year for all of you. Keep listening, we love you, and we'll see you next year. Lau: Thanks everyone. See you next year. Anne: Thanks, BOSSes. >> 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.com 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.

What's the deal with representation? In this episode, Anne & Lau break down the basics. They share what agents do, how they can help with your career, & why you should (or shouldn't) sign with one. Lau shares her experience as an agent & what she does on a day-to-day basis while Anne gets answers to common questions voice actors have about having an agent. Agencies are businesses, but they have the power to help you find work, making them a potentially valuable part of your career. Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all answer to the "do I need an agent" question. It depends on the kind of work you are looking to do & what your goals are. We know there are many ways to BOSS with and without an agent, but if you want to learn more, we've got you covered. Transcript >> It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere 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. Anne: Hey everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS podcast and our business superpower series. I'm your host Anne Ganguzza, and I'm excited to bring back to the show my very special guest co-host, Lau Lapides. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome. It's a good day, Lau. Lau: It's a great day. It's always a great day to talk voiceover. It's like we could, I was just saying we could talk forever. This podcast should be like day and night. It should never stop ever. 'Cause we could talk so much about it and life and being a human being and all the things we care about. There you go alongside that. Anne: So I do wanna say that we recently just met and really clicked and of course I'm super excited that you are now representing me. And I thought about it because I love the fact that I think you get almost as excited, if not more excited about providing me with opportunities than I do about being repped by you. Lau: Totally. Anne: And I thought it would be a great time to talk about, should we get representation? What's the deal with representation or should we not? Because I get that question all the time from my students. Lau: Oh my gosh. I do too. It's an ongoing conversation. It's a great discussion to have; all questions are good questions. There's no answer to it. I don't think there's a specific answer to it, but the discussion's really important to have, and you're right. I do get really off on getting the work for others. I love you do the feeling. And I was trying to think back when I was a performer full time. I dunno if I felt that way about even myself. Like I was always kind of that agent manager type, you know what I mean? I was just kind of like that Jewishy producer myself, you know, kind of thing, New Yorky thing, whatever that is. I love it. I love it. Not just for the work itself, but for the process of being able to get someone inside of something that they're on the outside of. It's almost like a secret. To me, it's like a safe, like I get to help someone find the combination to the safe. Anne: Oh, I love that. Lau: And get inside of it and discover what the treasures are. Sometimes it's money and sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's just a whole bunch of like a portal of a world that you weren't in before. It's Narnia's closet. That's what it is. Anne: I love it. Well, I have to say I've done casting myself, and I always love that let's fit this voice talent to this job. And it's wonderful when it comes together like that. Lau: It is, it is. Anne: And so I think that it is having agents is a wonderful thing. However, agents solely represent a portion of where I get my opportunities from. And I always try to explain that to anybody who like, when they first start getting into the business, they're like, when do I get an agent? I need an agent. I'm like, well, I literally was working in the industry for about four years full time before I got my first agent. I think it's helpful to really understand the role that agents play in helping to get work for voice talent. So let's start with you, Lau. Tell me a little bit about your role as an agent and what types of are specific genres that you specialize in. Lau: So I have now been in an agent capacity for about two and a half years. So I'm still relatively young in the agent world. I was a coach and for many years, still am, and a performer myself, still am. But I mean, that happened well, we were right in the middle of the COVID and you know, as a business thinker immediately, I start thinking, what problem can I solve? Who needs, what, who needs what, what's missing, what's missing. So we're Boston based in the new England market. I said, oh, I don't know of any voiceover divisions. We don't have a department in an agency that's voiceover. We have some great studios that will do casting, but we just don't have that like a New York, like an LA has that. And I sort of aspired to be like the big guys. I always said, well, now we're in a global market, right? We're in the middle of COVID, we're locked in our houses, everyone's still doing voiceover. And I said, what can we do? So I wanted to open this division, and I ended up pioneering the MCVO and opening it under the umbrella of Model Club. That's my colleague, Tim Ayers who owns and operates Model Club. So it was a really interesting, unorthodox way of working where this company, my company Lau Lapides started to become a contractor to a licensed agency to start a division that we had the knowledge of how to do that. So we went ahead and did that, started stocking the roster. And I sort of have been around agents for most of my life. Anne: That was stocking the roster, not stalking, right? Okay. Lau: Stocking, like adding people in, adding voices in like -- Anne: Stock. Lau: Yeah, stock. Anne: Not stalk. Lau: No, not stalk. All right. I have to articulate that one really well. Right? . Anne: I think that was that New York accent Lau: It was that New York accent. And I had to learn as I went, to be honest with you. I think this is the kind of trade that people who go into casting or go into agency work are working with agencies and working with casting. And they're apprenticing and they're learning how to do it as they go. You can't learn it in a classroom. It's not that type of thing. And so I was learning through the years how to do these things by kind of doing it. And this was a fit and this was kismet. And then I launched it when we launched it. You can imagine we had immediate response from talent all over the place -- Anne: Oh, I bet. Yeah. Lau: -- who wanted to submit because it's exciting simply to have a voiceover agency or voiceover division. And so that was kind of cool and exciting, and then figuring out how do we connect to breakdowns and how do we get some of the best auditions, and how do we connect the dots with current clients, whether they're regional clients or national clients, and just sort of spend time figuring that out and doing that. But we were lucky in in the sense that we started getting great auditions almost immediately, like -- Anne: That's great. Lau: -- between the clients that we already had, Tim already had, and my connections nationally, we started getting a lot of stuff in, and it was almost overwhelming to, to find talent for that. Anne: I wanna just kind of interject here because I think most talent don't think about what is a talent agency, right? And I just wanna kind of bring it home and say, we need to understand that a talent agency or an agent, they are a business. And their business is to match clients up with voice talent. And so they have their own work to do in terms of securing clients that and advertising to clients, that they have a great roster that they can help fulfill that need. So I think sometimes voice talent forget that agents, they aren't magic. They don't have magical clients. They have to do a ton of work to get those clients and to keep those clients. So understanding that an agent is also a business will help you to understand that once you have an agent, when you get an agent, there needs to be a relationship there, where we both can benefit each other. And that agents are also in a business and need to make money. And part of that is by matching clients to talent. And if there is a profit margin there, then obviously the agent is going to work that deal. And the reason I bring that up, Lau, is because I think that a lot of agents work specifically in broadcast media, because there's opportunity for more profit there versus let's say a one0off non-broadcast sort of a deal. So maybe you can expand upon that a little bit. Lau: Yeah. I mean, I think just a baseline for people who are learning about agencies, or maybe wanting to tier up to the next level of a better quality agency, just simply put agencies are the middle people. They're the middle women, middle men. They're in the middle. So they're the contract dealers, the negotiation people, the people who find the talent, connect the talent to the job, help with casting. The -- we're not casting directors per se. We don't take the place of a casting director, but we do help in all sorts of capacities. And we do get clients that say, hey, what are your thoughts? Like, can you help narrow this down? Anne: You do shortlist, right? You do shortlist? Lau: You do shortlist. Anne: I was gonna say, yep. Lau: You do recommendations. You do shortlist. And because sometimes they happen very fast, they will rely on you to make quick recommendations and have very quick answers to questions, questions on availability, questions on rate structure, questions on union status. Anne: Sure. Lau: Questions on what their setup is in their home studio. So there's a lot of stuff that has to happen that goes through the agent that has to happen fast. And the reason they'll go to an agent, many reasons, but one is for speed, so that they know that they're gonna have their stuff when they need it as quickly as possible. They don't have to chase the talent. Anne: That makes sense. And they don't have to cast the net wide and make their own decisions. So, yeah. And I think, so, let me ask you a question. Do, do the majority of agencies, or is this really dependent, do they shortlist themselves or it depends on the client if the client is looking for -- Lau: Yeah, it depends on the client. And once in a while you will have a private client that is with other agencies as well. So like if it's something that's on a national platform or even a regional, if you're going through a casting office, they'll have other agencies. They'll be submitting their top talent from other agencies. They'll whittle that down fairly quickly. And then they'll, you know, reach out to you. As an agency, you're never the only fish in the ocean. Anne: Right. Lau: I think the, what agents try to get is private clients. Like we love private clients. Because we know like when I get a company, that's, let's say they're a regional company, and they're gonna cast and they reach out to us, I know that like eight times out of ten, we're gonna book that job. Anne: Yeah. Yeah. Lau: We're gonna book that job because they're privatized. We have a relationship them. We can provide the same talent over and over and over again. Whereas sometimes it's a hit or miss if you're going through casting -- Anne: And you're reliable. Exactly. Lau: Right. Anne: Just as we need to be as voice talent. Right? Just as we need to be to our clients. Right? Agents need to be that to their clients. Absolutely. Lau: Exactly. So the relational factor's really, really important. And then of course they are assuming and rightly so that we're doing a screening process that they don't have to do. Anne: Right. Lau: They don't have to audition. They don't have to find the talent. Anne: Right. Lau: They don't have to do any of that. We're doing that. Anne: Right. They rely on you because they know that you have a roster of professional talents that their studios have already been vetted. You already are familiar with the roster and their specialties and availability, that's another big thing. Right? Lau: That's right. Anne: Who's available? And so that I think really takes care a lot of the tedious details that they don't wanna have to deal with. And so. Lau: Oh no, they don't wanna deal with any of that. Anne: They reach out and oh gosh. Do I even begin in saying like the naming of files, of audition files? Lau: Oh, it's endless. Anne: Who takes care of that? Lau: It's endless. That's right. I always joke. It's like they don't wanna have Jim in cubicle C handling that because Jim doesn't know how to do that, if you know what I mean? Like they don't get any of that. And so it would be overwhelming to them to go into a big pocket of say, thousands of voices to try to find what they're looking for. That would be way too overwhelming and time consuming to do. So that's another reason why they still go to agencies because they know it's not gonna be thousands and thousands of voices. It's gonna be the top 500 voices for critique. And then out of that, the specific submission for their criteria of their breakdown. And then they've got their top 15, 20, 25 people, which is more than enough for them, 'cause they know again, they're screened in their top to find who they need. And it's funny because at the beginning Tim went from, oh, it's okay. I mean, if they have an iPhone, and they can can record in their iPhone they don't need a home studio, different -- to, okay. You need a studio, a source connect. And I was like, no, we want the best talent nationwide if not international, because we are now competing against very large agencies in the hub. So we don't wanna shorter ourselves by saying, oh, as long as they can jump on a phone and do something. No, no, we wanna have the industry standards in place so that if we book a McDonald's or we book a Dunkin Donuts, so we're really ready for that because they're auditioning your studio as much as they're auditioning you now. Anne: Isn't that the truth? Lau: Everyone knows. Anne: That is the truth. Lau: So the agent depends on that. . Anne: I love that we're learning about agencies from the agency's business side because it really can help us as voice talent to understand like your day-to-day kind of activities. Like let's talk about your day when you are throwing out an audition to people. So tell me, what do you do as an agent when you are casting? Lau: Well, I'm a little bit unorthodox in the sense that I now run two businesses. So I run my studio , which is separate, very separate, then the agency side from MC Inc. So when I run the agency side, we're constantly getting in auditions, which we've been filtered by the different relationships we have, the services we work with, but so they're coming in sometimes daily. They're coming in throughout the day. We're looking at them, making sure that they're legit, they're coming from where they need to come from, and then getting them out as quickly as possible. And that can be a challenge too, because if we're working on other work or we're recording or we're coaching or we're whatever, we have to really multitask or stop what we're doing to do that. Because I know once that audition comes to me, there's a chance it's gone out to X amount of other agencies. Anne: Sure. Right. Lau: So I gotta get my sneakers on and get that out really fast before some of my talent may get that from another agency. Anne: Sure. Now question. Yeah. In terms of like audition deadlines, so this is the bane of my existence, right, with my agents. Right? Because I don't have a lot of time during my day however, so when my auditions come in from my agents, I wanna turn that around quickly, as quickly as I possibly can. So when you understand, let's say, okay, here's your audition. Deadline is this date, are you determining that date for your agency? Or is that the client that's determining that date? Lau: Well, the client gives us the truest date that they have. I don't know how accurate it is to their inside process. Anne: Right, right. Lau: But they'll give us the hard deadline of what they need. Then we'll move the deadline in so that we have time to process it. Anne: Sure, sure. Lau: And we also have time for retake. So let's say there's someone that we have to have in on this audition, but he's on vacation and he is in the mountains and he has no reception, but he can do it tonight or tomorrow, we'll hold that for him so he can do that if possible. So we always time it. So let's say it's due Thursday at 5:00 PM Eastern. We'll time it so that we're getting it in by like Wednesday, if possible, so that we can process it and leave time for problems as they arrive. Anne: And so when you say process it, you are downloading the audition file. You are doing shortlisting if you have to, if your client has asked you to. Correct? Lau: Yeah. Anne: And so is that you personally, or do you have a team that helps you to do that? Lau: We have a team. I have a team that helps me do that. And the industry standard now is Dropbox. So we're all using Dropbox to transfer our files, and even going out now, I'm watching slates go out. So slates are slowly going out where we're sending in a zip or we're sending in a pack and they know where it's coming from. So we don't actually need a slate. So some of the private clients and some of the companies we work with say no slate. We don't wanna hear it. We don't need it. Great. Anne: Okay. Nice. Lau: One less thing to do. That's good. Anne: Sure. Lau: And then we try hard to establish our own protocols if they don't give us direction on labeling and they don't give us direction on this or that. We try to say, listen, we're just not always getting that from the client because they don't care about it. They don't know about it. And it's not relevant. So just do this when you don't hear about it, just do this. Anne: Whoever has to download the files, this is the way I feel, whoever has to download the files needs to be the one that determines how the file is named. Lau: Yeah, exactly. And sometimes agents will send it out and you just won't get that direction, and people are confused. They'll say, wait a second. Am I missing something? I'll say, no, they didn't give us that direction. We're not giving it to you. So just go to your default of, we always label like this, label like this. Anne: I would say name, project, Anne Ganguzza dash and then name of the job. That's my default. That's it. Lau: I do say, Anne, one of the biggest things you can have as a benefit for yourself is speed. Because ours are not that speedy. We're not like a pay-to-play site where you have to get in in 10, 15 minutes. We'll give you a day. We'll give you two, even three days, sometimes like a really long time. But if people are gonna wait until the third day, what'll happen is like, I already know there's a natural bell curve in every roster. I know like the top voices we have, unless they're already on another gig or they're on vacation, they're gonna submit within about an hour or two. And I just know they're gonna be the first ones up for it because A, they're great like you, but B, they may cut that audition off because they may get enough in the first day. And then they don't need to listen to day two or day three. Anne: Right. Right. Right. Exactly. Lau: So I just say to people, you know, don't, don't put yourself under a terrible rush, but don't wait until the last minute either. You know, get it in as soon as you possibly can, move it out the way because those, as I notice our booking ratios, those people tend to be booking more than folks who are waiting longer. Anne: The ones that get it in first, yep. That makes sense. Lau: They are. Anne: That makes sense because at some point too, I think that we have to realize that when you're listening to so many auditions at one time, at some point it starts to become like white noise. . Lau: I would imagine it's overwhelming. Anne: I's overwhelming. Lau: Even it's hard for us to listen to demo submissions sometimes so if we get 10 or 15 at a time, it's time consuming, and we wanna give it what it needs, the attention that it needs. But we have to be careful with the time. Anne: It just brings me back to like, this is what we're always saying is that you need to differentiate yourself from the pack when you're sending in that audition. And it doesn't mean that you're different is like -- a lot of times I'll look at the spec and I'll be like, okay, I get it. But I still wanna add my own unique spin on it because everybody else is gonna look at those specs and try to do it exactly like those specs or what we think they want to hear. And so I think making it more unique in that audition, I mean, for me, it's what have I got to lose in making it unique? I mean, if I can make it unique, they're gonna know that I have the capability of making it sound just like in my head it says it should sound like. Lau: Sure, sure. Anne: So I'm not gonna give them that. I don't wanna give 'em what I think it should sound like. I wanna give 'em that unique take so that it, it makes them wake up. Lau: That's right. Anne: It makes them get me the gig and then they can direct me to whatever they want afterwards. Lau: And, and do it up front because you don't know if they're gonna listen to your entire demo. Anne: Exactly. Lau: And some of the demos we get are not even industry standard. They'll go on for two or three minutes. Very rarely will we listen to a three-minute demo just because we get it, like the first two reads or three reads, like we get it, we get what you can do. So put something up front that's your strong suit, something you get hired for all the time, and then put something that's incredibly diverse and varied from that right next to it. Anne: Are you talking audition or are you talking demo? So like -- Lau: I'm talking demo. Anne: Okay. Lau: I'm talking demo, but also audition. I would say audition as well, because let's say they don't say how many takes they want. I'd say, okay, if you can do three unique takes, do three unique takes, right? What's the worst? They don't listen to them all. But if they do and they really love your voice, make them super diverse, super unique, and very pinpointed as to where you live and where your voice lives. Because there wouldn't be any reason as send in more than one take that sound the same. Anne: Right, right, exactly. Lau: That's a very, a common mistake that people make, you know, otherwise you send one great take, just do your best. Take one great take and call it a day. But if you can do diverse or -- Anne: A completely different. Lau: -- do it. Yeah, do it. Anne: Absolutely. So now let me ask you a question. So when should voice talent search for an agent? Is there a time? Lau: Again, I'm really unorthodox about that. I know a lot of agent friends I have say, don't talk to me until you get like five years under your belt. You've already been with an agency. I got some good credits and I love your demo, and I trust you because that's what I represent. And I get that. I don't feel that way actually. I feel like people should be up for it when they feel ready. And then it's very quick to tell if we think that they're ready. Even if they haven't worked yet, even if they have no resume, we've taken in some people that are amazing, that are new. They're just new. They're coming in. They did a beautiful demo. They're clearly professional in the way in which they write to us. I just instantly like them. I said, why would I hold them back on the basis of like that they haven't worked? They have to get work to work. So if we love their voice and we feel like, oh, we've got a market for their sound, bring them in. Right? But the bread and butter voice is always gonna go first because we have a lot of fans of animation and video game and all of that great stuff. It's just, for us, it's not gonna be the big market for us. And it isn't for a lot of agencies. I think agencies more and more are bringing in slowly animation opportunities, but much of their stuff is just real person stuff. Anne: I'm glad you said that. So I'm gonna say some agencies specialize in just animation or that's their thing. And I would say that those would be located more in the places like LA and those markets where animation is there, but in terms of other agencies, I'm gonna say, yeah, your bread and butter is commercial for the most part, right? Lau: Yeah. Yeah. It is. For the most part. It is. Yeah. Once in a while, we'll see an animation come through, we'll see a narration come through. We'll see a couple different things, but yes. And I have found that with friends that run agencies too. Once in a while, they'll get a great industrial or a really nice nice eLearning piece. But much of the time they're just doing as many nationals as they can get in and as many of their regional market and their local folks, as they can get in to really, really pay the bills. Anne: Good. I'm so glad you said that. And I just wanna kind of make that point to the BOSSes out there. It becomes, where can you make a profit? And I don't mean to make all agents to be all like hungry, profit driven people, but you are a business. And so for the most part, those nationals and those regionals, those are the ones that are bringing in the money in, the consistent money, right, that will be able to make a profit so that you can survive as an agency. So then I wanna also point out that if you are a voice talent, and the majority of your business is e-learning or corporate and that sort of thing, I have a ton of, and I know a lot of voice actors where they have a lot of work in that area -- that happens to be where I do a lot of my work as well. So in terms of, for me, when I was getting agents, I have like 10 agents all scattered around. It doesn't mean that I get auditions from all 10 agents all the time. And I have certain agents that I work closely with because I book with them and we have a relationship. And so that's where my auditions come from, my agents. Lau: That's right, that's right. Anne: So I will take the time to do that. But those jobs that they're offering, they're almost all broadcast commercial genre. And I do get a couple of industrials once in a while from one of my agents. And so if you BOSSes are out there, if you are not necessarily booking in commercial yet, or you're not interested in commercial, then maybe an agent, you don't need one right away. I think everybody should have an agent. I think everyone, at some point should have a commercial demo. But if that is not in your future, that you don't like commercials. You don't think you'd ever wanna do one. And you just wanna spend your career doing eLearning, then that's absolutely fine. Lau: Absolutely. By no means do you have to have an agent in order to work because the world is filled with so many different, wonderful genres of voiceover. You just need to be inventive and clever about doing your homework and doing your research in these different genres. Like for instance, I recently brought into our studio, one of the big romance and erotica voiceover instructors, and she did a wonderful workshop for us. Anne, I knew nothing about that. I did, I just didn't know about--and she talked a long time, a good hour about the business of it, like where to find work. How to list your name, how to do this, how to charge your rates, how to -- and I think, wow, this is great. So do I need an agent for that? No, I really don't. Could I get an agent later in the right market? Probably, but you don't need it. So, so you have to determine, gee okay. If this is my bread and butter market, I probably wanna get an agent to get the upper level auditions, but in these other areas, I can probably make my own inroads and my own connections. Get some great clients into a combination of the two. Anne: Absolutely, absolutely. BOSSes, it's not necessary to have an agent to get work. You can get work in multiple genres without necessarily have an agent, but I'm the type of person that I like to have opportunities, as many opportunities as I can. Thus, I think it's wonderful that I have these amazing agents, like Lau, that are on my team. They're on my side. They wanna see me work. They wanna get me work, and it becomes a relationship just like you have a relationship. And I love that we talked so much about your business of the agency because a lot of times, voice talent don't, they don't think about it and they don't realize it. And I think if they understood the perspective from your side as a business, it helps us to form, I think, a better relationship with you, because we understand where things come from, and why do I get that audition at 8:00 at night? Well, because all day long, they've been fielding emails and dealing with clients and you are getting it out as quick as you can to us. Lau: Yeah. And maybe it's coming from a different time zone. Anne: There you go. Exactly. So there's lots of things that we may not think about when we get an audition in for our agent. And also in terms of like, well, is my agent listening to me and shortlisting me or not? Or is it the client? Or how do I know that this audition wasn't sent out to hundreds of other people? And I think the really good agents understand the opportunity and will send it to the group of people that would be great for the opportunity. Sometimes I have agents that it seems like maybe they didn't do that. Maybe I just got like the generic send out all auditions to all the roster, and therefore I make my own decision. Lau: Yeah. I know, people hate that. They're not filtering . Anne: I know, but I'm thankful for the opportunity. And so, I mean, come on, we can all handle looking at audition and looking at the specs. If you don't fit the specs, don't respond. Lau: I was always the same way too. I was like, okay, it's not for me. Anne: Yeah. I would never complain about that. It actually kind of bothers me that I see some people complaining about that, the cattle call auditions. I'm like my gosh, it's, it's an opportunity. And it takes me a minute to look at those specs and read them and say, do I fit those specs? Am I male? No. So guess what? I, thanks. I'm fine. Just waiting for the next one. So -- Lau: It'd be like clients just from different businesses calling you or emailing you, be like, do you know, we don't do that? That's not what we do. And I'm surprised you would call me. We'd say, oh, how interesting, let me refer you to someone or let me find out more about you, what have you. Anne: I like that. Right. And that goes back like, look, if I got a castings spec, and I've done this before, where it didn't fit me, but I said, oh man, I know a perfect voice for that, I actually would write back to that agent and say, I have a great recommendation. Can I send this audition? Would you be open for me to send this audition? Lau: I love you. I love you. I love people like you and I have a number of people in MCVO that do just that. They say, Lau, you know, it's not me, but I've got friends who are actually this. May I forward them. And I'm like, yes. I love that. Anne: That's why I'm just grateful. I'm grateful to get the opportunity. And, and I just look at it as like, look at another, I get tons of email. It's okay. I can filter. It's not that big of a deal. Takes me a minute. Lau: You think like. I think it's just another job and why don't I wanna see a job? I'm gonna keep the script. I'm gonna have it as a reference. It's interesting to see who the producer is. I love it. Anne: Yeah. You learn a lot. Like, so what if that audition wasn't for me? Oh, that's kind of cool. I like that script. Right? You can just choose to learn. It's like one of the things, just an off topic, but when people say, well, how do I get work in corporate? Right? And I say, well, I go to company websites and I sign up for their mailing list because I wanna see who their audience is and how they're marketing to it. And so if I get the job with that company, I have a background information where I understand who that company is, who their audience is, what their brand stands for. I have all that knowledge that I can then use in a audition for them or in, in correspondence with them. And so the same thing. You can learn a lot. So. Lau: I'm exactly like that. As business people, as BOSSes, you wanna be inquisitive. You wanna be curious. You wanna know like, ooh, what's happening in that world? Oh my goodness. Who are they talking to and what are they concerned about here? And who are they looking for? I always say like, when you get an audition, get used to hopping on your smartphone, just like really fast. Look up an advertising campaign. See the kinds of actors they're bringing in. What does the company visually look like? What does it sound like right now? Just get a flavor of that. Anne: Absolutely. Lau: You may not have time to do massive research, but just to hop on for five minutes. Anne: Yeah. Lau: Like we need to be able to do that as business people. If we're gonna work with a new client. Oh, sorry. So don't you hate, Anne, oh, sorry, I didn't have time to go to your website. Sorry. I don't know exactly what you do. Anne: No, my God. Lau: It's at your fingertips. Just jump on for five minutes to have a little bit of language. Anne: If you're a student of mine, and you didn't check out the website, like that is just no. Lau: Or go on YouTube. Anne: That is not acceptable. Lau: What are they doing, you know? Anne: That is not acceptable, not acceptable that you did not research the company, but like it takes a minute. Takes a minute. Lau: Yeah. What about this one? I don't, I don't know how to pronounce this. How do you pronounce it? Anne: Oh my gosh. Lau: I said, well, go online, go find -- have an actor say it so that you hear what it sounds like. Don't just guess at it or not worry about it. Anne: We need to act like BOSSes, the BOSSes that we are. So what a great conversation. I love -- this was such a unique perspective. Thank you, Lau, for sharing that with us and sharing with the BOSSes. I think that's amazing. I would like to give a great big shout-out to our sponsor, ipDTL. You too can network and learn like BOSSes. Find out more at ipdtl.com. And also if you wanna make a difference with your voice and give back to those communities that give to you, check out 100voiceswhocare.org to find out how you can give back and have a sense of purpose. All right, guys. Amazing talk. Thanks again, Lau. We will see you next week. Bye. Lau: Thank you, BOSSes. >> 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.com 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.

Self-sabotage. We are all guilty of it. You can either fight it or embrace it. If you're not sure what sabotaging behaviors look like, Anne & Lau are here to call you out for everything from minimizing your accomplishments to chronic procrastination. When you're a small business, entrepreneur or creative, your inner voice can often get in the way. The good news is once you recognize the signs of self-sabotage, you can catch yourself & change the outcome. It is easy to feel imposter syndrome. It is easy to push tasks off. But nothing about success comes easy. Having a plan in place to overcome self-sabotage is what will help you beat it, and BOSSES, Anne & Lau have the tips to get every BOSS there. Transcript >> It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere 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. Anne: Hey everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS podcast and the business superpower series, with my guest co-host Lau Lapides. Lau, hey, how are you today? Lau: I'm fabulous. Ready to rock. Anne: Ah, Lau. I love recording our sessions. The thing about it is, BOSSes out there, of course we don't do this live. A lot of times Lau and I are doing this on Saturday. So we are working beyond the five day work week. And for me, I'm kind of a self-professed workaholic. Now there's sometimes where I feel that's a good thing. And sometimes where maybe it's not such a good thing because I really need to get out and refresh and get my creative spirit back. But I thought it would be a good time to talk about growing your business work ethic and how some people -- I know there's a lot of, a lot of my students are like, I don't know what's going on. I'm not getting any work. So what can I do? It's almost like they sabotage themselves before they've even begun. So that whole self-sabotage thing, Lau, what do you think about that? Lau: It's a big deal. I'm telling you, it's a big deal. It's a culprit. And I see it in every other person I work with that's self-sabo -- we'll call it the SS, the self-sabotage. It's so common. And unfortunately, many a time, the person is innocent. They really don't know they're doing it. They're not aware. Anne: I agree. Lau: They need to have an outside source, help them identify like, what is going wrong? What's going off? What are they doing? And what are they not doing that's getting in the way of really achieving their goals. Anne: Sure. And I'll have to say that a majority of let's say students that come to me and say, I hate marketing, or how do I get work now? And so I'll be like, well, you know, you, your marketing has to be an effort, a concentrated, strategized effort by you. And I find that there's an awful lot of people that don't necessarily either know that they have to put as much effort into it as they might in the beginning to get some traction in this industry, or they hate it so much. And they're like, well, I'm gonna take another classroom. I'm gonna get another demo produced. But in the meantime, the other work that needs to get done to really grow their business kind of sits. And it's almost as if they wait and they're like, well, why isn't work coming to me? I've been taking all these classes. I've got my demos. What do I do? And so I think part of it is an education for here's what it takes to really grow your business. And I mentioned earlier that we are here on a Saturday. We're here on a Saturday. And unfortunately, you know, I work six days a week. The one thing that I love about this business is if I need to take time to do something on a Saturday, then we know we'll record at a different time. But the fact is is that I know what has to go into it in order to get results. And unfortunately, sometimes it's a whole lot more than I want to think that goes into this. Yeah. To be successful. There's a lot more work. Lau: And unfortunately, I think the mindset that you just brought up earlier about I'm in school and I'm training and I'm doing demos. Why aren't I getting work? Well ask yourself this question. Am I going to hire a dentist who's in school to pull my teeth? Am I gonna hire a carpenter who's in school to build my $2 million home? Anne: Right. Right. Lau: Not to say, I don't want a mistake for the listeners you shouldn't be taking classes or training. We're always in professional development. Literally. I'm in professional -- you're in professional. Anne: Yep. Always. Lau: But it does not take the place of the exposure energy that you have to put into the world from a marketing standpoint to let people know who you are, what you do, what you provide, and do that on a consistent basis. It's not either, or it's both simultaneously. Anne: People can't hire you if they don't know you exist, you can't just expect to sit in your studio and wait for work to come to you. When I got into it, in the beginning, I mean, I did not judge the fact that I would have to market as much as I did, and sometimes to really get a good traction and get some consistent clients coming back, it doesn't happen overnight. It doesn't happen in a week. It may take years, just being real. And I really truly believe that the people that stick it out -- there's so many people that get their demos, and they're beautiful demos, but then they don't realize everything else that's required. Lau: Yeah, what you have to do with it. Anne: Right. And then if somebody will mention to them, you know, you need be concentrated effort in marketing. They'll make maybe a halfhearted attempt, and they don't go far enough to realize how much it really does take. And in that respect, they are sabotaging themselves. They're sabotaging what they invested all that money into to get the coaching, the demos, and then all of a sudden to not get any work like they're expecting, that is a version of self-sabotage. If you are not willing to put in the effort as much effort as you possibly can to make this a success. And I don't wanna make people think that it's not something that just happens overnight. It's not easy. There is somewhat of a work ethic you have to have to put into it. You get what you put into it, right? You get out of it. What you put into it. Lau: I say that all the time, you just took the words outta my mouth. I mean, it really is your investment of your time, your energy, your mindset, your work, everything has to be in it. Another one, another very popular one is the time management piece of really not understanding what your schedule is. Like I said, let's go to a chart, go to a chart, make a chart, make a block chart. Do something that makes it very tangible what I do Monday through Sunday. Like make it very real, like go to your studio, go to your office space, go and make sure you work X amount of time in your day. Because that habit, that consistency, that commitment that you make is gonna help obstacles move out of the way. Because it's very easy to say, but I gotta be with my kids and I gotta go to the birthday party and I have to get this, and I have to -- there's tons of stuff that we can let get in the way and really justify it and say, well, I have to get this done. I have to do this. This has to be a top priority if this is going to be a career for you. Anne: Absolutely. I think there has to be a commitment, a commitment to all pieces of the business. And again, we talk about this so much. It's not just about the performance. It's not just about doing auditions. It's really about the entire, the entire business. And even if -- I feel like I've become a queen of outsourcing only because I keep wanting to grow my business, and I feel like I cannot grow my business until I can offload some of the tasks that I have to do on a day to day basis to other people. And right now, literally, I mean, I'm not bragging about that, but I have nine people. I have nine people that specialize in what they do, helping me with my business. And I outsource that so that I can do all the things that I wanna do in my business and grow. If I do not hire these people, I will not be able to grow because I physically don't have more of myself to give. So thankfully for this podcast, just as an example, the time that I spend with you in here in our booth recording, the episode is what I put into that. Everything else gets outsourced. I have an editor who edits the episodes afterwards. I have someone who transcribes it. I have two people that do social media. I have a person who works on video clips. So there's literally so many people that are involved in this. I would not be able to put this together or be successful if I did not put the effort into it. And I feel like there's so many people that say, well, I started a podcast, but I don't really have any listeners. So how do I grow the podcast. Again, it's one of those things where you sit down and you say, okay, this is what it's going to take to be successful. And you also have to not sabotage it by understanding that yes, there are these many pieces and components that it will take to be successful. You can't just exist on being a great voice actor. There has to be the other parts of the business that come into play. And so in terms of sabotaging, there's also, I'm gonna say, let's talk about people who are new to the industry and then are afraid to charge a fair amount for their services. Right? And they're like, well, I don't have the experience. So therefore I'll accept this job for $50. Or I'm only gonna charge $50 because I'm new. Let's talk about that. That is a form of self-sabotage. Lau: Yes. And you know what? I just wanna recap what you just said, which was brilliant that the negating of delegating, like the importance of delegating and being unafraid to delegate and being unafraid to pay for that delegation in saying that's an investment -- I'm not spending money. I'm investing in my business and I can't do it all. Like, yeah, we wanna be superheroes. And to some degree we are, but there's only so much time in the day we have to function and then to grow our businesses. So having that realization that if I wanna grow to the next level, I do need to delegate. I do need to have help. And I do -- Anne: I need help. Lau: I do need to pay for it. Anne: I need help! Lau: I need to pay for it. Anne: Oh my God. Such a wonderful point that you brought up, and I'm gonna say myself even in the beginning, I'm a control freak. Is that a surprise? No. Lau: No. And I'm a control freak. Anne: I'm a control freak. Lau: Surprise. Anne: You don't know what it took for me to hire somebody. Lau: Anne, you were in the syndrome that we were all in that's just like, oh, I'll just do it myself. Anne: Yes, Lau: No, I'll just do it myself. I'll do -- Anne: You want it right -- Lau: -- I'll do it myself. Anne: Yeah. If you want it done right, you do it yourself. Well, guess what? That is a form of self-sabotage as well. Right? Not being able to let go of control and outsource those things. Right? Lau: Oo I love that, I love that. Anne: Right? So that was a form of sabotage that I, myself early on in my career, when I was like, no, I can do it. I can make my own webpage. I can do this. It was, I used to work in technology. I can do it. And honestly, it was not serving me to be the control freak. And it took a lot. And I love the fact that you brought up the money. Money is a huge self-sabotage for a lot of people. Number one, not charging enough or not feeling that you're worthy of charging what somebody who's been in the industry for, you know, 15 years -- you are worthy of that. You've made an investment in your coaching and your demos. People want to pay you for your voice. You are worthy of what I charge, 'cause I've been in the business for 15 years. So you're worthy to charge what I charge. And also feeling worthy to make an investment and spend the money, that really is a form of self-sabotage as well, that whole money thing. Right? Oh, I didn't wanna invest. I don't have the money. Right?Well, so many people, I don't have the finances. What can I do to get a professional demo? I don't have the money. Well, okay. Here's what you gotta do. You've gotta strategize. Sit back, take a look at it. Understand that you're gonna have to invest in your coaching, in your demos in your business for you to get something out of your business. You're gonna have to invest. And that is, if you do not admit that or put into action, something that will maybe put savings away. Right? So that you can afford to get a professionally produced demo. Lau: Beautiful. Beautiful. Anne: No, I'm gonna do it myself. And again, that is a form of sabotage. I've just like rambled on. Lau -- Lau: I love it. This is like, listen, honey, this is therapy for both of us because the truth is we practice what we preach and we've experienced everything we talk about. Anne: Yeah. It's true. Lau: I'm not that godlike. I am a human being and I've experienced all of what Anne is talking about here. And that's how we learn. Okay. But if we don't learn, if we don't take the lesson -- as one of my business advisors to me said Lau, if you don't stop your resistance, I can't help you get to that place you wanna go. Anne: Oh yeah. Lau: And that's the humility. I don't know if you call it therapy or just revelation, whatever you call that, of saying, I'm not a god, I'm not a deity. I'm not, not anything other than a person in the world who is learning and working hard and reaching higher levels. But that doesn't mean that I am not resisting getting to the next level of things, whether it's -- oh, let's talk about fear. How about fear? Anne: Oh my God. Fear is so here. Fear of success too. I don't mean to say fear of being rejected. Fear of not being good enough, but fear of success. Lau: Fear, fear of failure. Anne: And fear of failure. All of that is a form of self-sabotage. And gosh, I think you just go on all day, but I know for me, I've always been that person. I'm like, I'm just gonna work, work, work, work. I mean, I've always had that kind of a, a work ethic. You know, if I work hard enough, it will come. And that's just my personality. Lau: Mine too. Anne: But some of that was also self-sabotage. If I didn't, I said, well, I could just do my own website or I can just, then all of a sudden it became like, well, I'm the only one that can do it right. And so again, that was, I want it done this way. And so nobody else will be able to do it, and giving up that control, which was a big self-sabotage for me. Lau: Big. Anne: Huge. Lau: It's a humility factor too because we all have to have a sense of pride and ego in what we do just to pull us through the really tough moments where we feel or perceive we're getting knocked down, or it's not that easy, or we're not making -- we have to have that sense of humility that says that's okay. That's part of your process. You're not gonna be above that. That's something you have to go through and you have to experience. And I get another one for you. How about procrastination? Anne: Oh my gosh. Yes. Yeah. Lau: I promise I'll get to it tomorrow. I will. I absolutely will. Yeah. Then I don't. Anne: And that is a form of self-sabotage. I'll tell you what. I am not immune to procrastination myself. Lau: No one is. Anne: In certain parts of my business, yeah, I'll procrastinate. Let's talk about taxes. If you wanna talk about procrastination, right? Lau: Oh yeah. Anne: I know for a fact that I would procrastinate until the very last minute. And then it became like, this stress-induced hell for my business because I, I hadn't experienced it. You know, when you're first running your own business, you have never done your taxes. You've never -- somebody else did that. You know? And so it was like, oh my God, I have a business now. Now what do I need to learn? And it just became overwhelming. So that also, the fact that it was overwhelming, it was scary, the fear, right, of not knowing what to do or how to do it. So then I procrastinated, which then was also sabotaging, right, my success. And then at the end I just was a, a stress ball of anxiety. And yeah. So I would never say to you BOSSes that, oh, I knew it all coming out of the gate. God no. I learn, I'm scared every single day I learn. I try not to sabotage myself by being scared and we fail a little bit. We learn, we try to just get up, move that, bump it up higher. Right? And just keep growing. Lau: Yep. How about this one, Anne? How about sitting with all the stress, the fear, the anxiety, the whatever, and not knowing how or not allowing yourself to release that? So whether that's going into play mode, whether that's actually just getting things done, whether that's getting your latte, whatever that is, establishing daily and weekly what I need to do to be in my mindset of success. And if I don't do it, then I'm sabotaging myself. Anne: Well, yeah. And that sabotage can take many forms, by the way. I'm just gonna say. Physical illness is one of them. If you're gonna sit there as like a stress ball and not relieve it or not try to do something right to rectify that or whatever that is, self-care, meditation, exercise, eating healthy, taking a few hours off, again, that stress can be sabotaging as well. So many things. Lau: It's like endless, right? Like we could go on forever, unfortunately in this category. It's so vast how much we -- and then of course you had mentioned it earlier that imposter syndrome, that feeling, that deep, deep, deep feeling. A lot of women suffer from this just in general of like, I really don't know if I'm worth everything that I'm doing in my life. And you know, Harvard did a lot of studies on that through the years 'cause Joan Rivers, the comedian, was the first one to uncover that publicly and found that ironically the people through the years who have suffered mostly from imposter syndrome being women who are high achievers. Anne: Oh how interesting. Yeah. That would make a whole lot of sense. Yeah. Imposter syndrome. I still get it. Do you know what I mean? I admit it, it still happens once in a while. I find that I try to just work it off. . Work off the imposter syndrome. Lau: Take a run. Anne: And again, if I'm not scared, right, I don't think I'm growing. It's just one of those things. Right? And yeah. Am I good enough? You know, can I do I think a lot of it, it's not so much, am I good enough at this point? But it's a different question I ask, is it okay? Am I ready to make this next move? Like, am I at the point where I should be making this next move? I think I question like, okay, what am I gonna do? How am I gonna grow even bigger? Right? That's my question every day. How do I grow even bigger? Is there a point where I'll be satisfied ever? And I don't think I ever will be. And maybe that's, maybe that's a form of it or not or -- Lau: Isn't that okay though? Like, isn't that a good driving force? Anne: Well, that's what I like to think. Lau: What are -- Anne: -- really goes through. Lau: Yeah. Like what keeps you going? What keeps you waking up every morning and doing what you do. You have to have a sense of that. You have to have some sense of doing that and saying, oh, I need more. I wanna build more. I wanna envision more. I wanna concoct more ideas. I think that, I think there's a fine line between a visionary, a pioneer, and someone who's like insane. Someone who just drives themselves crazy to the point where they break down and they can't function. I think that there's a very fine line that we have to find, you know, between those two and that fear factor, which can get in our way is also a driving factor too in what you're doing in your level of success as well. And how about this one? I got one more for you. Anne: Okay. Lau: How about ignoring, and sometimes intentionally ignoring, your celebrations, like really saying I'm not gonna celebrate anything. it's not necessary. It's not that good. I'm gonna move on to the next thing, and really ignoring your credits, your credentials, your accolades, as they happen? Your people that are -- Anne: That's a great one. Lau: -- being successful? Yeah. And so I'm really guilty of that. I'm like, oh, that's great. I love that. Okay. So what's next? And I'll have people stop me and go, you need to stop doing that because a lot of what you do, Lau, is for that moment and you're just passing it over. Anne: Right, right, right. Don't want to acknowledge -- Lau: -- pass it over. Anne: Right. Lau: And celebrate it, really actively celebrate it. You can't celebrate every single thing 'cause as a success, you've got a lot of things going on. Anne: Sure. Lau: But take a moment every day where you stop and you breathe, you take 10 or 15 minutes. You go -- Anne: I love it. Lau: Oh my gosh. That person that I directly worked with landed this gig. And I am just loving this moment. Anne: So here's my Panda planner. . And my Panda planner is a place, it's this hard copy, is a place where I can write down. I love that. You said that I can write down accomplishments and I got this beautiful one, the BOSS lady right here in my studio. Right? Lau: That's gorgeous actually on -- that looks beautiful. That's from your east coast sister. Anne: Thank you. Thank you, Lau. This beautiful, beautiful piece is from Lau. And I have a journal where I can write down my accomplishments. Because I remember I did a study like way back when I first got into the voiceover industry, and I, well, I was a scrapbooker. Okay. And as a scrapbooker I said, why don't I document my year of VO? And so I had pictures of like meetups I had been to and all of that stuff. And, and I had documented all of the jobs that I auditioned for and then the ones that I had booked, and I made a little scrapbook out of it. But in that scrapbook also was accomplishments. And I wrote the accomplishments down as they happened throughout the year. I realized that once I started writing them down, I was like, wow, I have come so far. And it was a wonderful benchmark, and it was a wonderful, like motivator for me to say, wow, I have really grown. And I have really improved and I'm proud of myself. And it motivated me to want to grow even more. So -- Lau: What a powerhouse, so smart. Anne: -- huge, huge fan of writing, writing down those accomplishments and reading them, writing them down to cement them and then read them. So. I love it. Lau: And how about speaking them? Anne: Yes. Lau: We're always afraid of like boasting and being too full of ourselves and being rude. But to your people that you have real relationships with, they wanna know what are you celebrating. What did you do? You're working so hard. They wanna know what you've accomplished. And to say, you know, three of my people today, and they got awards, and they got national gigs and they -- isn't that cool? I'm so excited for them. There's no shame in that game. I think we need to do that. We need to take the time to do that, to reward them, but also to reward ourselves -- Anne: Yeah. Lau: -- as well. Anne: And we need to acknowledge, I think acknowledge people celebrating their victories because I really believe that we can celebrate each other and really drive inspiration, motivation for all of us to do better. And again, there is a crowd out there that feels that that's not necessarily like awards. I mean, we could have a whole 'nother podcast on awards. Are awards necessary? And you know what? I tend to really love that they can help to validate us from somebody outside of ourselves. Because again, we can sabotage ourselves like the whole imposter syndrome, which is that fear that you're not good enough. It can really inhibit you from doing more from even continuing in the industry. And I feel that awards can be really good if you can look at them in the fact that we're celebrating other people's victories. We can even celebrate our own victories. And it's a way for validation outside of ourselves and outside of our friends, who I know people who will be like, I know, but you're just saying that because we're friends, and you really need that. You need that external validation to make you feel good. Again, like in the corporate world, we just wanna be loved. That's what I tell everybody, I just wanted to be loved when I worked in the corporate world. I wanted to be acknowledged. I wanted to be thanked for the work that I did and told that I did a good job. Lau: Yeah. I think since we're little kids, we want recognition. We want, you know, an award, a sticker, a rank or recognition, a pat on the back. Like as human beings -- Anne: I worked for those stickers in school. You know? Lau: I did too. Anne: Those like stars and the smileys. Lau: Yes. On the head. Remember they used to put it right on your forehead, the little goals? Remember that? Anne: I used to get -- Lau: They used to put it right on your head. Oh, oh my God. Anne: Award papers. I loved it. I loved it. I don't know. They don't do that. Lau: Oh my God. Anne: Is there paper anymore in schools? I don't. Lau: I don't know. I don't know. That's terrifying. I go to Apple. They go, what's paper? I don't know. Go on your -- did we talk about money at all? I honestly can't remember. Did we bring up the money factor? Anne: Well, I think we talked about the worth factor. Like, are you charging what you're worth? Lau: Okay. I got another angle. There's another angle of that. The other angle is, are you spending and investing what you need? Anne: Yes, the investment. Absolutely. Lau: Because I always find if it's not ignorance or just the fact that you're not educated, and that's fine, that's okay. We all have to educate, but once you're educated, and you wanna be cheap and not spend dime on your career and what you're doing, I just think of that as self-sabotage. Because there is no career that I can think of that you're not investing a lot of money in to get the future out of that, to get the return out of that. So. Anne: And that's not just investment in coaching, it's in, in all aspects of your business. And of course I would say yes, investing in your demos and in your coaching, I'm all for that, 'cause I'm coach. Right? And I produce demos, but also investing in those things like me, the queen of outsourcing, like you can really give up that control and don't be afraid to invest. And I, I will say, I said this multiple times, I put money away specifically into my business savings account. I have a business credit card. I have a business banking account, and I have a business savings account. So I was able to put money a little bit away each week or whatever it was, I put money away. And I finally got to the point where I had a substantial amount in savings. And boy did that help me to really grow. The fact that I didn't have the money in savings or I didn't concentrate on putting money in save -- doesn't matter. It doesn't have to be a ton of money. Just put a little bit of money away each day, each week, whatever it is. When you get to that little nest egg, that makes you feel secure and confident, it's gonna be an amazing thing because it's gonna allow you to invest in your business, to help you to grow so that you can spend the time getting those customers, making more money, growing your business. Lau: And a lot of people, Anne, they really don't realize once they do realize if they start to reach a level where they realize, oh wow, I have to spend money on this. And then I have to spend money on that. And they refuse to. They're resistant to do that. Anne: Yes, yes. Lau: That's the sabotage because the truth is -- Anne: I don't have the money or I can do it myself. And -- Lau: That's an investment that they have to have the belief system that that will come back to them. They have to have that leap of faith. That's where a little bit of your magic, your imagination has to be in there. You know what I mean? Like... Anne: Yes, thank you. Lau: I had someone say to me yesterday, like literally Lau, I need to know, I need you to tell me, when will it come back? When will it happen? I said, I can't tell you. I can't tell you when you'll meet the man of your dreams. I can't tell you if your kid is gonna love you or hate you. And I can't tell you if your car is gonna start this morning. Why would I be able to tell you when that's gonna come back to you? You have to take a leap of faith. Anne: Leap of faith. What a wonderful note to kind of end this podcast. Because I think when it comes down to that, like really what else do you have? Right? If you're based on fear and you're not feeling good enough for all of this self-sabotaging, you're not growing your business, take a leap of faith. My mother said to me once -- you know, I remember when I was, I had moved out of the house and was on my own living in a different state. And I was renting my first apartment and all on my own. And I said to my mom, I don't know, I've been working the budget and what if I don't have enough money? Or what if I, I, I don't know if I can do this. And she said, you know, honey, sometimes it all just works out. Just have a little bit of faith. And I took that to heart. It was, she said it so long ago. It was so simple. It's like something that everybody seems to say, have a little bit of faith, but yeah. Guys, BOSSes have a little bit of faith. I think that honestly, when you've lost all your other avenues of being brave, take a leap of faith and it will work out, but take a smart leap of faith, but definitely have to have that leap of faith. Lau: Yeah, yeah. You definitely do. And you have to just know the only thing that's constant is change, and you have to welcome change and like literally money change, but also change in the universe. And if you can welcome both in, you're gonna move that self sabotaging tactic out. You're you're just gonna be by the laws of attraction. You're gonna be much more successful. Anne: How wonderful. Well, thank you, Lau, as always for you had another amazing discussion. Lau: Yay. Anne: BOSSes, you guys, as individuals, you know, sometimes we don't know if we can make a huge impact, but as a group, we can contribute to the growth of our communities in ways that we never thought possible. Find out more at 100voiceswhocare.org to learn how you can make a difference. Also big shout-out to ipDTL. You too can network and be BOSSes. Find out more at ipdtl.com. You guys, have an amazing week. We love you, and we'll see you next week. Bye. Lau: Bye! >> 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.com 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.

It's the holidays! The time of year when we all get to relax, catch up on our tasks, and spend time with friends and family. But what if you've been so busy working that you didn't even realize it was the holidays? Or what if you're stuck in the booth and can't take a break? If you're going to take time for the holidays, be sure to book out with agents & clients. This way you don't have to worry about missing out on new business opportunities. For all the workaholics out there, the holidays can be a peaceful time to catch up on work. And don't be afraid to take time away! You'll come back from this little vacation refreshed & ready to tackle anything the new year brings. And don't forget that this is a great time for planting seeds for 2023. Send out thank-you cards, small gifts, and mementos to those who have helped make 2022 amazing for you! Still feel like the holidays are a stressful time filled with family obligations, work commitments, and personal commitments that all need to be balanced? Don't worry: we've got some tips for how to BOSS through the season… Transcript >> It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere 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. Anne: Hey everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS podcast. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzza, and I am here with my very, very special guest, cohost Lau Lapides. Hey Lau. Lau: Hey everyone. Hey Anne. Good to see ya. Anne: Here we are for our business superpower series, which is one of my favorite series, The Business Superpowers. And speaking of business superpowers, the holiday season is upon us and there's a lot of things that go on during the holidays. And so I thought it would be a good opportunity to talk about how we can still be the biggest, best BOSSes throughout the holiday season because there are changes that happen. Sometimes things slow down, and we get nervous. Sometimes we have a lot of work and it's tough when you're trying to celebrate the holidays with your family. So let's talk about how we can have BOSSness for the holidays. Lau: I love BOSSness through the holidays, and everyone has their own ebb and flow. Some people, as you said, get super busy. They can't even think straight, and others are dead in the water and they don't know where the work is and everything in between. I do think one of the things you just mentioned, Anne, which is so important, is the celebration factor. So whether it's within the work itself that you're celebrating -- it could be the copy itself is holiday copy. It could be your clients that maybe your handpicking particular clients that you wanna send gifts of gratitude to -- whatever the case may be, you are celebrating. There's a celebratory tone and feel and mood. So you wanna make sure that you balance that to some degree, that you not only have time to celebrate with yourself and your family, but you also celebrate that you have a business, you're running a business. And how do you pay attention to all the many celebrations that are happening around you? Right? Anne: That's an excellent point. I think that it almost comes to like, what's the balance, right? That family, friends, holiday balance with work. If you're crazy busy doing a bunch of work -- now, the one thing that's good about the holidays is I find advertising agencies like to, to get ahead. Right? So, I mean, I'm already like towards the end of the summer starting to record things for the holidays, and so it starts early. Kinda like when they put the Christmas or the holiday, Hanukkah stuff out when it's like August or September in the stores. Lau: Yeah. Retail is like retail two, three seasons ahead. Anne: They are way ahead. So I think that with some planning, right, with strategic planning, BOSSes can really, I think, continue to do wonderful things throughout the holiday season and get the opportunity to spend a good amount of time with their friends and family. I mean, I like to book myself out between, for me, it's Christmas and New Year's. I like, I book myself out and I, I find that to be a relatively safe time for what I end up doing in my genres of work that I typically work in. Usually works well for me. What about you, Lau? Lau: Actually, it's so funny you say that. I don't know if I've ever really formally booked myself out. I feel like I've always, and this is my choice, I have a lot of colleagues that don't do this at all. I'm always kind of available for clients. Partly because, and I'll be honest with you, Anne, I'm like a workaholic. Okay, let me just get that out there right now. So I, I love what I do and I'm sort of addicted to it, and I always do it, you know, so it's like -- Anne: I'm right there with you. Lau: Yeah. I mean arguably so yes, a lot of folks are taking their vacations and booking out and doing all of that, but I always find there's work to do. There's catch-up work, there's my planning for the new year, what I wanna get done in quarter one, quarter two. So always find tons of stuff that I wanna be working on. And I have a different mindset during the holiday season. It actually for me isn't as stressful as when we're outside of holiday season. Because I know everyone's off and running and doing their thing. I get to catch up. So that's really exciting for me. But yeah, to steal some time and make sure that you're relaxing and getting enough rest and taking care of yourself and exercising, you know, all of that is great during the holiday season. Anne: I love that. And I identify, I identify with you, and I don't know if this is something to be proud of, but I mean I am a workaholic and I have been for a long time. And I think one of the reasons why I make it a pact with myself to try and book out as much as possible -- right, it's not that I won't read my email right during those days. However, I try to make sure that I'm not doing any necessary recordings for my clients, but my brain, my brain is never off, right? So there are times though, because I work so hard during the year that when I decide to say I'm off, thankfully I can shut the majority of that off. The good thing about me is that I not only work hard, but I play hard. And so when I decide that I'm going to take that time for reflection and refreshing my energy, I make it work for me because I know that after I take that break, I'm going to be better for it. Lau: Yes, I agree. I think just from the health and wellbeing of your mindset, you do need to have downtime that's scheduled in. Holidays are easy because most people are taking some sort of downtime. So you almost get permission to do it because so many people are doing it as well. I also find too, it's a great time for me to think about how I wanna connect, reconnect, and confirm and thank all the folks that I've worked with throughout the year. So it's a time where I'm sending out maybe gifts or letters or emails or e-cards or whatever it is, saying this has been amazing, love the experience. Let's do this next quarter. So I'm planting seeds. I find I'm planting seeds with people that I've either worked with or haven't worked with of what I'd like to do for next year. And they may not get to it for a month. They may not get to it right away, but it's there. It's like sitting there, it's like a little seed that I know is gonna sprout in a couple months. Anne: Mm-Hmm. For me, yeah, people would always say, well what do you send out gifts? What do you do for your clients over the holidays? And I like to send out e-cards, uh, notes, especially wishing a new year of happiness and prosperity and health and that kind of thing so it doesn't land during the holidays, which I think is a very busy part of the holidays for a lot of my clients. They're probably getting a lot of notes, a lot of gifts. And so I always like to say, well, let me stand out a little bit and I'll send something for the new year. And that way it'll come at a time that maybe they'll be able to spend more time and and see it and not be inundated with other emails, cards, gifts, that sort of thing. So I like the whole celebrate the new year, looking forward to working with you again in the new year, and that sort of a thing. So for me, my attention towards my clients is from a new year perspective and a happy holidays because that would encompass all of the holidays, we hope, that people celebrate 'cause there's just so many of them. Lau: So true. And actually we would think you and I would think 'cause we're from that timeframe where everyone would get gifts, the casting, the agents, whatever -- but you know what I've noticed in the last five or 10 years, Anne, many of them don't get as many as we think. And I know this because they'll write back to me, they'll say, oh my goodness, that was so thoughtful of you. That was incredible. If I send, let's say I send an edible arrangement. And they say, our office is gonna love this, Lau. It's just so thoughtful. You know, we don't see many of these, you know, whatever. Anne: Not like it used to be. Lau: Not like it used to be. No. It's very different now. You know? Anne: And in the corporate world too. I mean it used to be very, very different. And I think the pandemic might have had a lot to do with that as well and the economy. And so I think for me it turned into what can I do that's more meaningful? Right? I think before it used to be like, let's send a gift, let's send this and then what would you send? And is it a personal gift? Does it showcase thought or is it just -- for me, I really try to think about the relationship that I have with my clients and make it something special, something personal. And again, it doesn't have to cost a lot of money. I think that even just a personalized note, or a lot of times I'm a decent baker. Lau: Ooh. Anne: I can bake. I know everybody knows Jerry can cook, but I can bake. And I did when we were first dating, by the way, I did bake him something to impress him, and little did I know at that time he was like a gourmet chef. But I was like, here, I need you a carrot cake muffin for Valentine's Day. I mean carrot cake muffins in a basket. And, and I was like, ooh. I think 'cause it's a really great recipe. And little did I know that he's like a gourmet chef, but I'm like, here have a muffin that I baked. Lau: Oh my God. So you are actually like Kristin Wiig in Bridesmaids, remember that? Where she baked her boyfriend that carrot cake, and it was in the shape of a carrot and then the raccoon ate it? Remember that? Anne: I did, I, I baked a carrot cake. Lau: I was gonna ask you what your favorite gifts are. Like what's your favorite gift that you've either received or that you've sent out? Any come to mind? Anne: So for me it's handmade. It's gotta be handmade because so much of my life with my husband is revolved around his gourmet foodiness. There's lots of things, like every year we give out handmade this or that. And like last year it was handmade salad dressing. And that's really cool. I mean, I buy the bottle, I designed the label. My husband, we make Sicilian lemon olive of oil and that kind of thing, dressing. And we give that out. And that's something that I don't hesitate sending to my clients and that it's handmade, because if they know me at all, which I try to make sure that they do, they know that I come from that background, and that my husband is pretty much a, a gourmet anything. So I find that that makes a really nice gift. And it's something that is not gonna cost a ton for me. And I do, I have to say, I do love Amazon gift certificates. Lau: Oh, totally. Anne: Because yeah, that just takes care of everything for let's say, I have a lot of people that I hire, my assistants, and I feel like I wanna give them something as a gift and not something that's just, of course money is always appreciated, right, a bonus, that kind of thing? So I do that. Or if they do something that's special, and this is at any time, I might give them a gift certificate to Amazon. Lau: That's a good thing. Anne: That really tends to be my favorite thing or anything that's special. So for example, another one of my clients who I share love of animals, you know, my cats or my dogs -- it will be a gift for their cat and it's so funny -- or a gift for their dog because they almost appreciate it more, right, because it shows like a deeper connection. Lau: Yes. Anne: If I get a gift for their dog. Like wouldn't it be cute to get matching sweaters, like, oh, dog sweater and sweater? But again, it has to be specific to the client. What about you? I'm excited to hear your, your favorites. Lau: Yeah. Well, I mean there's standard stuff that whether you know this or not know this -- I mean, most people would know about Edible Arrangements. Anne: Yeah, absolutely. Lau: I really like Sherry's Berries too. So if you don't know about Sherry's Berries, that's really fun. Like hand dipped berries and fruit. That's awesome stuff. Anne: Yep. Lau: But we've done some interesting things in the past. I mean, my daughter is a visual artist, so she could draw like nobody's business. Anne: Oh, that's nice. Lau: Through the years, there were times -- I didn't wanna impose on her because it can take time to create art -- but there were times where we would have a, a special relationship with a casting or an agent, what have you, she would either draw them or she would draw something in the industry and send it to them. And that was like an incredible gift. Anne: Sure. Lau: You can also do promotional items that represent you or your company. And then give it a little personal twist. Like for instance, you know, we have some books that we published and then we'll, you know, add some photos to it or sign them or what have you. So you've got your promotional in there, and then you've got the personalized twist, and you've got a little note in there, a little gift card in there, a little something in there. Those have been some of my favorites. Another regular thing that I used to do with in studio events, when I hold events, I would do gifts, like literal gifts, not as much for the men. If I did anything for the men, it would be a gift card. But for women, I would literally get them jewelry. And I almost never went wrong with jewelry. Almost never. They loved it. And you don't have to spend a lot of money on it either. Like you can get beautiful jewelry, and sometimes they would be thoughtful for what that person is. Like for instance, if I knew their birthdate or if I knew something about what they were celebrating, I would take the color of the stone or I would take their name or something like that and I would put it right into the jewelry. Right into the gift. They love that. They love that stuff. Anne: Personalization. Lau: Yeah, personalization. Anne: Absolutely. And I was actually noticing your earrings earlier, and I was like, I really like those earrings . See, you can't go wrong with jewelry, I don't think for a lot of women, but that's me, of course. But yeah, I think that however you can personalize, it really makes just like any gift that you give to someone, right? However you can personalize it makes it really nice. And I also think in terms of promotional gifts, I try not to do just a promotional gift. You know what I mean? Even if I'm sending a card. Lau: Oh yeah. Anne: It's not gonna be like -- I'll say, I'm grateful, thank you so much. I loved working with you this year. But it's not gonna be all about like a big branded gift. It's really just gonna be thanks so much. And even if I got them a present for their dog, I'm not gonna brand it. Lau: Right. Anne: Because I think that it's similar to like the VO BOSS podcast where I'm always telling people, it doesn't have to be -- like, for me it is about voiceover. But my primary purpose with this podcast was to, I wanted to educate. I wanted to give back, right? And if people get value from it, then it's a gift, right? It's a gift that I wanna give from me to the community. And I feel like that's the way it should be for your gifts, really. And that's why it doesn't have to be like, oh, it's all about my voiceover business, when you're trying to connect with a client and give them a gift for the holidays. It really, I know just the simple fact that you're showing a personalized, something that's deeper than just a, oh, here, I did this job for you and you paid me for it -- I think if you show thoughtfulness behind that, you do not have to brand that thoughtfulness. Lau: Not at all. Anne: In order to be effective at all. Lau: No, because remember, you're a person first. You're a human being first. Anne: Yeah, exactly. Lau: And it doesn't always have to be around the business. Anne: And I think it's more memorable, to be honest with you. Right? It's gonna be more memorable if I get somebody a present for their cat than a branded pen. And I could throw that branded pen with the the cat gift as well. Lau: That would be funny. Anne: It wouldn't be be all about the branded gift, because I know before it used to be like, oh, what should I get? I'm gonna brand it with my logo. I don't think it's about that anymore. I mean, it used to be a thing where people, that's what they did. But I think these days, it's gotta be more meaningful. And I kinda like that trend. I really like that trend. I think the last few years that have been a little tough on us as a society, I'm hoping that things get back to more meaningful, simpler, thoughtful gifts for celebrating. Lau: Yeah. I think the days of extreme swag are kind of gone where you gotta have a t-shirt, you gotta have a pen, you gotta have a -- Anne: Right. Lau: I think that's passé now. But you know, I have to tell you one time -- Anne: I do like a pen. I do like a good pen though. Lau: I like a good pen and I like a good pencil. I actually have a bunch of branded pencils, but I have a talent who's in MCVO and he's a working guy and he's wonderful. One year around Christmas time, he sent me his cup, his travel cup. And it had his business on it. Right? So it was clearly promotional. Right? But the thing when I, I looked at it, and it was so heavy and so well made and so intense, like the metal was so thick. Yes. And it came from one of the nicer stores in New York City. Right? I was like so impressed by that, that he would send that to me. I'm sure he is sending out a bunch of those to other people as well. I was like, my God, he probably spent 25, $30 on this cup. Anne: Yeah. Yeah. Lau: So I'm not telling people to do that. You don't need to do that. I'm just saying, it took me aback that he valued our relationship so much. Anne: Right, to give you one of those. Yes. Lau: And at that time, I hadn't even booked him. I hadn't booked him on anything. It was just he was valuing and faithful about, you know, what was to come and excited about the future and this and that, and I thought gee, that was a lot to invest in a gift for someone, you know, who's new. I never forgot it. . Anne: I'm a big proponent about swag in not making it cheap swag. I think that no swag is better than cheap swag that is not useful. And so for me, like I say, I like a good pen right. Now, recently I had, and I don't have one in here to showcase, but I recently got, you know, the multicolor pens that have the green, the blue, the black -- Lau: Oh yeah, I love those. Anne: -- and the red? Okay. Yeah. So I just got pens, multicolor pens with Anne Ganguzza Voice Productions on it. So I send it to everybody that orders from me, that orders like my vocal spray. And I'll take it to every conference. And more than likely when I send out gifts, they're gonna get a pen just because they're fun. I mean, who doesn't love writing with different colors? Lau: Right, I'm with you. Anne: That kind of thing. But I think if you make a substantial investment, and I'm a big one about cups too, right? This was actually, so this Miir cup, when my husband went to a conference, he got one that was white and it was from one of the companies, and it was made from Miir. And we love that cup so much that I went and bought another one because it was such a good quality cup, like you said. So I feel like if you're going to create swag, make sure it's a good quality swag. And I always like to really think about, is it going to be useful? Lau: Yes. Anne: Not just trendy, but is it going to be useful for the person that you're going to give it to? Otherwise, I don't know if it's worth the investment. Lau: That's exactly it, Anne, and I actually thought I thought of one more that I used to love and give out. I don't know where they are these days, but I'm sure you can find them. I love these. They were the pens, thick pens that light up. And I love them because I was a director for many years. And so I would be in a dark room, a dark theater or a dark studio, and I just love the fact that I could write and light it up. Anne: Yeah. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Lau: Oh my goodness. That was like, I gave that out for years. I gave those pens out for years. So things that are utilitarian and very useful I think are so important if you can find them. Anne: So yeah, I think BOSSes, when it comes to gift giving and the holidays, I think the more thoughtful, right, the more personal, the better. Obviously you don't have to spend a ton of money, but if you're gonna make it swag, I say make an investment into decent swag. And then also let's talk about, are you busy? Are you not busy during the holidays? Should BOSSes worry if they're not busy during the holidays, Lau? Lau: No. No, not at all. I would never worry about that. I always say, you know, if you work in advertising agencies, if you work with talent agencies, if you work in casting, you would know this, that there are really down times. There are dead times, there are down times. You know, it's like a ghost town. And you have to just accept that. That's true in every single business, in every industry. You're just not gonna be making money every day. You're not gonna be making profit every day. You're not gonna be booking in closing every day. You just have to accept that. That was hard on me, you and I as addicted people to our work, it was really hard to be like, is something wrong? I went four days and I haven't booked anything. Oh yeah, because there's an ebb and flow. And each quarter is different and every year is different. So you just have to pay attention to that. Anne: That little piece of valuable, like that was just so valuable, Lau, that you said that as well. I say that a lot to my students and just, there is an ebb and flow. And as freelancers, this is something that is probably one of the hardest things to get used to when you come from, let's say, a corporate background and you're used to getting that paycheck on a consistent basis. Now all of a sudden there could be days that go by when you don't have a job. And it's okay, even for the veterans in this industry, right? Even for those people that are posting on social media where they booked 20 jobs this week, I want you guys to know that it's , it's an ebb and a flow. And so the times that you might see somebody post that they got a ton of jobs that week, well, maybe the following week, they aren't getting as many jobs. I don't know one person, unless you're on a roster or you're on a consistent basis or contract with someone that gets work every single day, it's very tough being that consistent, unless maybe you're doing promos and you know, you're under contract for doing -- you're on a roster, you're doing these specific jobs on a daily basis, but getting new jobs every single day, mm, I don't know anybody. . Lau: No, it's not a realistic. No, no, no. Anne: It's not realistic. Lau: You just have to pay attention to your, your stats. You just have to pay attention to those long ways. I mean, that's not to say you may not be working every day. Anne: Exactly. Lau: You may be working with clients every day catching up, do this, adding on, upselling, whatever you're doing. But when you're talking about closing or booking -- Anne: Yeah, right, booking, that's a different job every single -- Yeah. Yeah. That's just, yeah. And during the holidays is no exception really I would say a lot of times. I think it becomes even more unpredictable during the holidays, unless you're very used to doing particular jobs for the holidays and then in between the holidays. So yeah. BOSSes, it's okay. I think that we should all take the time to enjoy your holidays with your families and friends. On that downtime, if you want to work, well, maybe just take some time to reflect on what are the great new things that are gonna happen in the new year? How -- strategize what you're going to be doing in the new year, and take that time to re-energize. Lau: Mm. Absolutely. If you can, re-energize, rejuvenate, and re-envision everything that you're doing and just enjoy, like enjoy that time of year. Enjoy the weather, enjoy the family, enjoy, and inspire your business in a new way as you go into the new year. Inspire yourself. Anne: Love that. Love that. So yeah, BOSSes, happy holidays, BOSSes. Go and refresh and get inspired, and hope you have the most wonderful holiday season, from the BOSSes to the BOSSes. Great big shout-out to our sponsor, ipDTL. You too can connect and network like BOSSes. Find out more at ipDTL.com. And also 100voiceswhocare.org, you can use your voice to make an immediate difference in the world and give back to the communities that give to you. So find out more at 100voiceswhocare.org. You guys, have a great week and we'll see you next year. Bye! Lau: Bye. >> 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.com 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.

In this extended episode, Anne chats with Landon Beach, the author of Narrator, and Scott Brick, the narrator of the novel, to find out what makes a great narrator-author relationship. If you're a writer, you know your characters, you understand their motivations and their goals. Creating a standout audiobook means trusting an actor to take the story to new heights. That's why we love audiobook narrators! They bring our characters to life with their voices, and they do it so well that we feel like we're coming along for the ride. Landon spent months learning everything he could about Sean Frost, the protagonist in "Narrator" He researched Sean's hobbies, his interests, his personality—even his favorite color! Many details of Sean that didn't make it into the novel became essential for developing his character in Scott's voice. We discuss how Landon's deep research into the character of Sean Frost led him to fully embody the role, and how Scott's experience as a voice actor informed his understanding of the subtleties that make this story great. We also talk about how you might be able to use your skills, interests, and background to add new textures & experience to your work as a voice actor. Transcript >> It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere 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. Anne: Hey everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS Podcast. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzza. And today I am so excited to have two very special guests on the show. Welcome Landon Beach, author of the psychological thriller Narrator, which is available now wherever fine books are sold. Landon previously served as a naval officer and was an educator for 15 years before becoming a full-time writer with six titles, the latest being Narrator. Welcome Landon. Landon: Hey, Anne, thanks for having me on. Anne: We also have the actual narrator of the book Narrator and award-winning narrator who has more than 800 books to his name -- maybe there's more by now -- 600 Earphone Awards, a Voice Arts Legacy Award, a Grammy nomination. Welcome Scott Brick to the show. Scott: Hey, hey. It's so good to see you all. Anne: I know! You guys, thank you so much for joining me. I'm so excited to talk to you today about this book, which is amazing, BOSSes. So if you don't mind, I'd like to start with just a little bit of a preview, if you don't mind. I'm gonna play this and hopefully you guys will be able to hear it. Here we go. >> Why do authors have to kill off characters we love? I, Sean Frost, sit in my darkened recording booth and stare at the final paragraph of the novel I am narrating. Almost there. Finish it. Finish it right, finish it with a flourish. But I can't, not right now for I am crying. The main character, Nehemiah Stone, died two pages ago in a self-sacrifice that I had not seen coming. The book, The Paris Sanction, is author M. Scott Sal's fourth Nehemiah Stone thriller, which I have waited patiently for two years for the chance to narrate. Five years ago, Simon and Schuster thought I was the perfect narrator for the job when they contacted my agent, David Killian, whom I affectionately refer to as Killy. Anne: . I would love to play all of that, but I'm gonna leave the BOSSes in suspense . Wow. So you guys, for me, I mean, having read the book and listened to the audio book as well, it's amazing. And so I'd love to talk to you about the process. So let's start with you, Landon, after being an educator -- thank you very much for your service, thank you -- what was your thought process in becoming a writer? Landon: Well, I've always written ever since I was young, and I had a wonderful English teacher in high school who really encouraged me. And then it kind of went away for a while. As you said, I went off and served, but I don't think I ever lost the passion for reading or the itch. And so fast forward many years later, and Scott and I started working together and developed a friendship. And I had an idea that I had been tossing around in my mind for 20 years because I've always loved the entertainment industry. I love to watch movies and study film. And finally it came to me one day after Scott and I had finished I think three books together. I thought, I think I have a way to tell an entertainment comeback story that has never been done before with an audiobook narrator as the main character set within the framework of a psychological thriller. So that's where the idea came together. It wasn't until I started working with Scott and got to know a little bit about the audiobook world before I saw the opportunity that was in front of me. And then I shoved all other books to the side and just immersed myself in that world. And here we are today, . Anne: So I guess I should ask you then, how did you find Scott? So then Scott kind of contributed to the idea of the book for Narrator after you'd worked with him? Landon: He did not contribute to the idea at all. I shocked the heck out of him when I presented it to him. Anne: Oh, awesome! Landon: Yes. Now after that, yes, he was very helpful and had so much, you know, generous feedback. And the book, whatever success it may have, is in large part, of course, not only to his narration, but just his extreme kindness and professionalism, talking about the industry and seeing what worked and what wouldn't work in the book. And if we were gonna break some rules, to knowingly break them, so that it would be authentic and that the research would be impeccable. So that not only the common fan for 99% of them would not know where we're bending the rules or not. But it was important to us for maybe the 1%, the people that are in the industry that Scott and I both love, would appreciate the nods and winks and the Easter eggs. Anne: Oh, yeah. Landon: And just the fun of it that it hadn't been done before. So in terms of how I found Scott, I had placed in a few writing competitions for my first two novels, and I had written a third novel, and I was discussing with my wife how we might expand the business. And audiobooks were exploding back then and continue to explode now. But this is around 2019. And to make a long story short, I had been a fan of Scott's for years. Didn't know him at all. But I thought, well, if there's one person that I would love to narrate all of my books from now until eternity, it would be Scott. And I saw that he was an entrepreneur, and his ahead of the game, was already working with some indie authors at that point. And so I contacted his amazing production manager, Gina Smith, and reached out and asked if, you know, he'd be interested. And through a process that we went through, we ended up doing a three-book deal. And then it led to later books. So that's sort of how we got together on this. Anne: Well, I love the fact that you've continued to have Scott in your books. And so Scott, I imagine you had some collaboration after the surprise of finding out that he wrote a book about an audio book narrator. Talk about the process of collaboration with Landon. Scott: I will. I'll be happy to. But Landon, I just want you to know, thank you for the kind words, but you've only got 45, 50 minutes. I'll give you 50 more minutes to say good things about me. . It's very kind. Thank you. This was a marvelous surprise. Landon I got to know one another through letters, through emails, cards that we would exchange, and found out that we're both huge fans of Old Hollywood. I probably can't tell that I love old Hollywood, 'cause the books behind me. And at one point, I guess when he had this idea, he asked if he could maybe get some feedback. You know, essentially it was like an interview. He wanted to interview me about how audiobooks are made. And I remember him saying that he had this idea and very broad terms. Now, I wasn't really privy to what was going on in the story. I just told him about the process. And about six months later, he goes, oh, by the way, here you go. And I went, holy shit. Okay. Well, I guess he did. People say they're gonna do things all the time; it doesn't always happen. And then he asked me to read it ahead of time and just give him feedback. I mean, he was talking about like the rules that we break. You know, there's one thing about the audio book industry. It's very gender and ethnicity centric, right? If a black man writes a book, they're gonna hire a black man to narrate it. Same thing. People ask me why I work so much. I'm like, well, there's a lot of old white guys writing books. Right? And in the book at the very beginning is the Audie Awards. And Billy D. Williams has his memoir come out, and there's a woman who is nominated for best narrator of the year for having done that book. And I was like, hey, Landon, I'm sorry to tell you. But you know, they would hire a guy to do that. And , I just love the fact that the way that he addressed it was just talking about the elephant in the room. He said, you know, at one point Billy D. Williams says, you tell me that woman can't read my book? Are you kidding me? You know, and again, it just, address the issue and then move on. The collaboration, for lack of a better word, I was just primarily giving feedback like that as well. It's just that first interview. I remember days before the book was coming out, he emailed real quick and said, is it appropriate to say, I hit the record button? Is there an actual button that you hit in the studio? And I said, Well, no, not really. I mean, I'm not using hardware, I'm using software. So I have a shortcut. I hit the number 3 button on my keyboard. And he goes, But do you use that terminology? "I hit the record button." I said, No, I typically say I hit record. Okay, great. And that's what came about. And you know, they're small things, but Dan Musselman, who's one of my favorite people of all time, he gave me my career, basically. And he always said, you know, most books are a 100,000 words long. You could get 99,999 of them right. But if you pronounce one of them wrong, it will ruin the experience for the listener. And this is a similar thing, if you get the terminology wrong, it would take some of us right out of the experience. Anne: Absolutely. Well, absolutely. And I was just mentioning before when I was speaking in to Landon, how at home I felt with everything, everything was like, it was familiar to me. It was at home. Like, you grabbed a cup of tea for your throat, and you're at the award ceremony, and all of it just was so comfortable and just so wonderful and amazing. And I can't say enough good words about it, but I imagine that this was a little more collaborative than most audio books. Like Scott, talk a little bit about the process when you're hired to narrate an audio book, and how much interaction are you having with the author, or what does that look like? Scott: You know, it all depends on whether you're working directly with the author or through a publisher. Um, publishers really like to curate the relationship, for lack of a better word. They like to limit the amount that you really get to interact with the author. Then again, I have authors I've worked with for 20 years, and it's like, there's no way we're not gonna talk about it. You know, I'm like, okay, he's coming over to my house for a dinner. Am I not supposed to talk to him about his book? And if it's a Dune book, I've done all of those, I think 25 of them now. I call the author , and we go over all the pronunciations for the made up names, phrases, and whatnot. That's typically what will happen. I'll reach out to, you know, Nelson Demille. He puts in real people's names in the books that he writes. Because they've made charitable donations. Well, I wanna make sure that I'm, is it Carns or is it Kerns? They deserve to have their name said right. That's typically the way it works with an author. But when you work directly with an author like I've been blessed to do with Landon, he'll tell me, this thriller was inspired by this movie. He even sent me a copy of it on DVD. I'm blanking on it now. The Gene Hackman film. Why am I blanking? Landon: Night Moves. Scott: That's it. Exactly. So I watched that the night before, and it just helps get you into the mood. If anything else, the relationship that I've had, this working relationship with Landon, which is thankfully for me, become a true friendship, has informed my work on his books. It's nice to know when he sends me an email saying, you know, I got this character. I was inspired by this film, by this actress, by this actor -- it's really nice to know that kind of thing. Nobody listening will realize, oh yeah, that was Gene Hackman who inspired that character. Anne: Sure, sure. Scott: And yet, I know, and it makes it different for me and hopefully more layered and textured for the listener. Anne: So I guess my question would be is when you take on a character, right, you fully envelop that character. How do you prepare for that? And also, I'd like like to ask Landon, was it a surprise when Scott interpreted the character in the way that he did? Landon: So for this one, Anne, you read it ahead of time, Anne, which was wonderful of you to do that, because I wrote this in first person present tense. I felt that I had to know Sean Frost better than any character that I've ever written before. And I am not exaggerating here. I spent months working on Sean. I have 60 or so handwritten, two-sided loose leaf pieces of paper with notes about Sean Frost, his backstory, where he was raised, the toys that he played with when he was young. You know, millions of things that will never get into the book. And a lot of that was inspired by a book that had come out just recently, Character by Robert McKee. And it can be really intimidating to go through his books, but they're so worth it because the journey he takes you through in the -- he asks the hard questions. And so I told Scott this beforehand, I said, my biggest fear when the book was to come out was that someone would get to a place -- like you said, you know, if you get one word wrong, like he's talking about with Dan, is that someone would say, Sean Frost would never say that. Or Sean Frost would never do that. And that's scary and intimidating because you don't want something to take the reader or listener out of the experience. And so I felt comfortable after putting all that work in that I knew who he was, at least to start writing about him. And to add into the research before I say about, you know, Scott's interpretation of Sean, one thing that our relationship has developed far enough along where we're comfortable sending each other things and suggestions. And so this has a lot of pop cultural references, but it also has, I always have a soundtrack for all of my books, and it's, you know, songs that inspired me while I was writing. And if someone listened to all of those that say, how in the heck did you get Narrator out of all of those or the nonfiction books that I read? But there's something about it that I know as Scott, as a performer, as an actor, they're hungry for information. And let me see what I can do with this. And it's always on, you know, I always kinda say a volunteer basis -- he could use nothing that I give him, and we'd be completely fine. But because we're friends and we've had exchange of ideas, and in a lot of points in Narrator that made it better, it was the, let's let the best idea win here, no matter who came up with it. And so I was happy to, to go along with that. But I sent him an email for Narrator that was just massive, but it had every single pop cultural reference in Narrator. And there are points where, as you know, Sean acts them out in his mind and he's thinking about them. And so I thought, well, what if I sent those to Scott ahead of time? And so when he got to that part of the book, he could, he could look at that and work into the scene. And like, like he said, no one else would know that he watched Michael Douglas yelling to Sean Penn in The Game before he actually acted that out. But it keeps things fresh and, you know, energetic. And so that's what I would say about his performance is that, oh my gosh. I mean, just delighted. And I don't know a ton about the industry, but the respect that I gained in the year to year and a half of research before I approached him, I'm surprised I kept it a secret that long, but I was so intimidated before going because I wanted to make sure that I had done my job. But what I did realize is that there are interpretations and decisions -- he's making creative choices of taking that character on sometimes in every line or every word with what you're gonna stress and whatnot that I never noticed before. I always say that Scott and other wonderful performers, they make it seem easy where, oh, I'm just listening to this great audio book. I'm completely in there. But the decisions that you have to make to have that come alive. So yeah, absolutely. To see that hard work pay off, and to see the directions that Scott took it as an artist and creator in his own right, I couldn't be happier. . Anne: That's awesome. So Scott, tell us a little bit about the process, about how you got yourself into character. Scott: So funny, because in acting circles, you're either method or you're not, right? Maybe you're more of a technique actor. God, what's that grape line by Spencer Tracy? He's, you know, his approach to acting was memorize his lines. Don't bump into the furniture. I'm not a method actor, and yet I really like to prepare my mood. We have to prepare the text, make sure everything is pronounced correctly. I have a researcher who handles that for me, but I want to make sure that my head is in the right space. So, yeah. I will watch Night Moves, the Gene Hackman film. Before Narrator, I watched Misery because they're similarities, you know? Somebody who's being held against their will and forced to create basically. What I find really interesting is, I'm going through all the pop culture references that Landon sends me, is sometimes I find some that really work elsewhere. For instance, he was talking about this, and as you heard in the preview, this character, Nehemiah Stone. Well, that's a character who was very much, I think in the same vein as Jack Reacher. And I'm all also blessed to work on that series. I got 'em all right up there, just right behind me. And Landon emailed me and said, you know, while writing this part of the book, I was listening to the theme from The Incredible Hulk in the 1970s, The Lonely Man that marvelous piano music at the end. It's heartbreaking. That actually used to be my ring tone on my phone, but it was so silent that I couldn't hear my phone ring. So I had . But now a month or two after I did Narrator, I did the most recent Jack Reacher novel, which was called No Plan B. And I watched that video. I listened to that music every day before getting started. And nobody who's listening to either Narrator or a Jack Reacher novel is gonna go, wow. Sounds like he was listening to this, to the Incredible Hulk theme. But audiobooks is a type of storytelling where subtlety plays, and if it affects my performance just in a little way, then wonderful. Anne: Yeah. And I felt that absolutely while listening to it, so many subtle, tiny things. I felt close from the beginning, really to the character, which I thought was just phenomenal. So I imagine that because you guys had so much correspondence back and forth, Scott, this is different for you in other books, sometimes. You don't have as much collaboration with the author, right? And so then what other things do you have to do to prepare? As you mentioned, some of your publishers don't necessarily want you to collaborate so much. So what do you do to prepare for those characters and for those books? Scott: I have a real keen sense for genre. Look, I love certain genres that I work in simply because I'm a book fan. That's the reason I got into this industry. I'll give you an example. We just, I was working with Penguin Random House and the estate of Raymond Chandler, and his family wanted the whole Philip Marlow Omnibus rerecorded. And they wanted to add music. And so they were looking for a new voice for Philip Marlow. And they hired me. Now, sadly, Chandler passed away, and I want to say it was the late 50s, early 60s. There was no way I was gonna be able to have any interaction with him other than reading books that he wrote about writing. So what I did is, every single night -- there were eight books, seven novels, and one book of short stories. We recorded them over the course of a year, and every single night, the night before I would record, I would watch, maybe it was The Big Sleep, an actual Philip Marlow story. Maybe it was Double Indemnity. But I was watching film noir constantly, just to put myself in that mood, in that mindset, that hard boiled detective meeting the, you know, the femme fatale. Sometimes that's all you got. I've done that while doing the horror novels. I've watched Shining the night before, or The Ring. Yeah. I've done the same thing when I was recording Somewhere in Time. I watched time travel romances just to put myself in the right mood. Landon: Anne, if I could add something about the character and what Scott was able to bring to the table, I was asked in a recent interview, how did you pick Scott to do this? And, and I said that even if I would've had five different narrators before writing Narrator, I said, of course I would've gone after Scott because I knew it was first person present tense. But also it's so much in the mind of Sean Frost. And when I listened to Scott's work where he does first person -- one, if you identify with that character, at some point you're listening and you think, I'm that character. I'm going through this. Which is a wonder of fiction. But also two, you become immediately immersed in the narrative and the novel. Anne: Oh yeah. Landon: And Scott is great at that. It's kind of what they said about Tom Hanks when they picked him for Robert Langdon, is that they thought that without speaking, he is a fantastic actor of someone who's thinking, and less is more. And I like to think of Scott in those terms of when someone is speaking inside of their head and that internal monologue was a natural choice. And the caveat that we joke about is that, you know, Scott is not Sean Frost , but I thought he was perfectly suited to play that role. Like, and some people have asked me, they're like, they're like, Scott is Sean. I'm like, no, he's not. Anne: I was gonna say, can you identify -- Landon: But he was perfect for it because he's a conglomeration of all the narrators that I researched. All their methods and stuff are kind of melded into this one character. So yes, there is some of Scott that is in there, definitely. But some of the routines that Sean have are completely different than what Scott does. . Anne: Well, that's kind of good in a way. . Scott: All of my colleagues, all the narrators who've gotten back to me and said, I love this book. They don't ask about like abuse issues. They don't -- but anything like that, what they wanna know is, do you really make as much money as Sean Frost does? And I of course say, yes, I do, even though I don't . Anne: Landon, I wanted to say like the first person writing a novel in the first person I thought was really for this novel, I just thought it was really wonderful. Again, like you said, you picked Scott because you thought for him to do it in the character in first person was just, I think a phenomenal choice. Landon: Oh, thank you, Anne. That means a lot. Anne: But is that a choice as an author? Like, okay, when you sit down, you've got an idea to start writing. Like what makes you decide whether it's first person or how you're going to present that? Landon: Well, for this particular case, this is the first time that I've ever written first person. Scott knows from my other books, they've been the third person closed, third person omniscient. But coming up in getting ready to write this book, it really, a lot of it had to do with the fact that I'm trying to dramatize and make a psychological thriller about someone who stays in a really confined space, in a booth. And I empathize with that in terms of an author. I mean, I'm in my office right now, Anne, for 12 hours a day. It's really, really boring and lonely and hard work. And that's why I look forward to these calls, one, to see my buddy here because, you know, we need this as, as creators to touch base with each other every once in a while. And I always leave energized and enthused. But I thought it's gotta be a psychological thriller that's the route to go with making this so that there, I can bring in suspense and reliable narration, unreliable narration. And it opens up a different menu of things to play with the audience's mind and wonder what's real and get as many reversals, authentic reversals, not just cursory ones as we can throughout the entire book to keep people on, on the edge of their seats. So I thought for this one, I had to go all in on this one character. And I say this a bit tongue in cheek, but not, I miss him. I, I, I'm miss writing Sean. I really do. For that one intense period, and I think Scott would agree that when we got to the actual recording, I mean, it was like we were living in the same house next door to each other, and then it breaks away, and you go months without talking to someone. But that was so intense and we had to collaborate and work on a few issues that it was, I don't know, it's, it's like nothing I've never experienced before. Scott: Also, just from my perspective, what it allowed me to do was -- I don't wanna use the word improvisation, because this is a book. It's written, it is scripted. And yet there are those moments where you can improvise in terms of your performance. Not change the words, but like, he asked me about my own particular method of recording it. And for many years I've used a tally clicker. And I can demonstrate to you, you know, it's one of those things that click when you're going in and out of a venue, you see the guy who's counting heads. You know, how many people do we have inside now? Okay. It's technically called it tally clicker. But when I just use the words tally clicker, people always say to me, what? And I'm like, well, so I have to explain. Anne: Got one right here. Scott: Anything that makes the noise. Landon: There it is. There it is. Scott: Anything that will spike the wave form the waveform. Okay, well it's one thing to hear about it and then it's another thing to actually hear it. So I reached out to Landon, and I was like, how about -- 'cause this happens at the very beginning as I'm talking about the tally clicker -- how about I leave one of them in? And I had to call my, my edit my post house to say, I want all of them taken out except that one because it's the one that illustrates. As I'm talking about the tally clicker, I just went up to the microphone and just hit it four or five times. Oh, okay. Great. It'll help the listener. There was four or five things like that that, and I would always email Landon and say, is it okay if I put this in? At one point, I'm literally dabbing my lip balm on. He talks, you know, Sean, he's swishing his mouth with water. I left it in , you -- why not? Anne: I was at home, I'm telling you. Landon: It was so perfect. It was like special effects for a few parts. But it was those kinda layers that I think made this special in my opinion. Especially the time that he goes through Sean's routine, 'cause he goes through it a few times. But Scott picked the perfect moment because it's right at the climax, and here he is, you know, triumphant from let's just say some obstacles that he's had to climb over. And he's like, I dab this and you can hear it. And then I take a swig of water, and you can hear it. And I'm like, that is so perfect. I never even would've thought of that. Anne: I am in the booth. I am in the booth. Landon: I was there. Right there. Scott: The shape of your lips, it changes the sound coming out of it. And I was like, darn right. You know, and people were asking, my buddies were asking me, were you just like dabbing it with your finger? Hell no, I'm using -- Anne: Oh my gosh. Landon: Michelle Cobb was texting Scott back and forth and who is emailing me. And she was talking about it on the podcast, and she's just, you know, having a blast with the whole concept of Sean Frost. She's like, Scott, he's in a tuxedo. But I said, you know, the character that he was narrating in this book listened to me was -- and so I said, well, let's let Sean as a professional get into a little bit of method and do that. And so, yeah, I'm glad that some people like those moments and found them -- Anne: Loved them. Landon: -- entertaining and humorous. Anne: Oh my gosh. Yeah. Landon: It was fun. Anne: Absolutely. So is there a movie in the future? I don't know, I just Landon: I tell you what, I, I would absolutely love to see this made, and I was a screen writer before I was a novelist, and that's where my degree is in, my master's is in screenwriting. And so a lot of this, when I got to the end of it, I said, gosh, I can just, I can see it. So fingers crossed. Hey, anybody listening to this podcast, please reach out to Scott and myself . Anne: Yeah. Fantastic. So I asked that, but what's in the future for you next, Landon? Another book? What's happening? Landon: Yep. So I'm in the final editing stages of a murder mystery, and that's going to come out a month from now, right around Christmas. And I just found this out the other day that the first book in the series, Huron Breeze for thebestthrillerbooks.com won mystery of the year for 2022. Anne: Congrats. Landon: So I'm just excited, humbled, surprised, but it's gonna be neat to release a sequel when all of that gets shared. And so what Scott and I have talked about is that at some point, we'll do our pre-recording conference for Huron Nights, because we're gonna take the main character into a complicated place, because it's part of a trilogy. So usually this is kind of the Empire Strikes Back episode of a trilogy where everything goes to hell, and then they've gotta come back in the third one. So I look forward to that, and I have some, some interesting ideas of some things that might inspire him as he gets ready for his performance. And then I'm collaborating too with Susanne Elise Freeman on a novella, which is gonna take place in between books two and three, and it's going to be an assassination, spy, espionage short. And so we've already talked over Zoom, and I'm thrilled to be working with her. She's gonna of course play the main character in this one. And then we'll wrap up this trilogy with Huron Sunrise. And then finally I'm gonna get to the end of the Great Lake Saga, which is book five in that saga. I have a book on every Great Lake, and so I have four of them, but the last one has taken a backseat just because once Narrator got into my mind, I mean, the seas parted and it was all I had to get that out. And then of course the mystery, that's kind of taken on its own life. It was only planned as a standalone, but so many fans liked it and wanted more, I was like, well, I, I'll have to think about it. I did not plan to write anymore about that. Anne: Yeah. Well count me as one of those. Landon: Busy year coming up. Anne: Yeah. Well, it sounds like so much fun, all your projects coming up. Scott: You know what I, what I love about it is that when we were doing the first book in that series Huron Breeze, and there's this moment where there's a book within a book, right? There's a, a woman writer at the center of it, and she has written this wildly successful book, and they talk about how the audio book was narrated by Susanne Elise Freeman, my girlfriend. And I, and there was like a line or two in it that she actually says, and I said to Landon, you want me to have her come down to the booth and just have her say that? And so we had her do the, the opening credits too, so you -- her voice wouldn't come as a surprise. And then Landon gets this idea that like, oh, maybe I'll write the book within the book. And so he's having Suzanne narrate it; I just love it. It's become a cliche to, to talk about thinking outside the box, but that's where growth comes from. That's where industry norms become, you know, stretched and we expand and grow. And I just love the fact that he is open to, great, let's do something a little different. Anne: Well, I have to tell you, I'm not an audiobook narrator. I've, I've narrated one a long time ago, but I'll tell you what, you guys just make it sound so wonderful and delightful that, BOSSes out there, I'll tell ya, you guys are inspirational. And I really, really appreciate you talking to us today. And I had all these questions, but the whole conversation, I just love the direction it took and I appreciate. Scott: No, I was, and I was gonna have to cut you off from saying nice things. Anyway, that another 15 minutes. That's it. Anne: Well Scott, tell us, outside of working with Landon, is there anything else going on in your future that you'd like to let the BOSSes know about? Any other exciting projects? Scott: Yeah, I've got some wonderful books I've been working on recently. Just finished a historical thriller. It's non-fiction, but it was about the plot to kill Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin at the conference in Tehran, the first of the two times that the three of them met during World War II. The Nazi, it's called The Nazi Conspiracy. And that was really just a brilliant book. I'm also working on a couple of podcasting projects, scripted podcasts about the history of LA, the history of the entertainment industry. You can tell from books behind me, I love the silent film era, and I have an idea that I would love to just share with anybody who's like-minded and fascinated. Anne: Yeah. I'm already intrigued by that. I think that sounds like a fabulous idea. Scott: Awesome. Anne: Absolutely. So tell the BOSSes how they can get Narrator and any other book. Landon, where is it available, at Amazon, on your website? Where can they go to find out more? Landon: So there's links to all of my books on my website, LandonBeachBooks.com. But the Kindle version is exclusively on Amazon, but the paperback, you can get at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Target, anywhere pretty much. And the audio books are wide, so anywhere that audiobooks are sold, you can get a copy of Narrator in 30 seconds. Anne: Fantastic. Yes. So any last, I'm gonna say tips for the BOSSes out there for them to be BOSSes and be successful in their voiceover endeavors or their writing endeavors? Scott: I would say, from my perspective, don't be afraid to reach out to the author because you never know what can happen because of it. Be willing to do something that you might not ordinarily do in the booth. Years ago, there was a book I was doing where one character had an entire package of chewing gum we wanted in his cheek, and it actually spoke about how it changed the sound of his voice. And I knew it wouldn't sound right if I was just doing this. So I reached out and I said, would it be okay if I record all those lines separate and they get edited in later? I checked with the editor, with the publisher and I recorded the whole freaking thing with a, a wad of chewing gum in my mouth. And never in my life before or since have I brought chewing gum into a booth . But that was the time it seemed appropriate. So dare to think differently. Anne: Yeah. That makes the difference. Landon? Landon: Yeah, so I would say an idea that you might want to consider, I know that a lot of audiobook narrators, they will put some of their background and their history of what they did before they became an audiobook narrator. But I would encourage them to list as many things as they were involved in before because you never know if an author is writing about a specific subject -- we can use Narrator as an example. But of course I was looking for someone who had not only audiobook narrating experience, but performing arts experience, which was another reason it worked out perfectly to go with Scott on this. But maybe there is an opportunity of, I don't know, if you were a trucker or something else before you became a narrator, that you might be able to lend a unique experience and voice to that project in a realm that you're already really well versed in with audio books. So I would say, you know, not to run away from your previous background. It might lead to an interesting book that you're a part of. And the other part is just that, yes, there are some authors, and I can say this, they don't really wanna have a relationship. You know, they're like, I did this, you know. The narrator doesn't exist without me because I wrote the book. And you know, obviously those are not gonna be the kind of relationships that would work out like Scott. But with us, there might be an opportunity to really have a unique kind of collaborative environment, not like a total collaboration, which we've said, which is, you know, I have my turf and he has his. But yeah, there could be something that you did not know or expect. I never saw this coming until we became friends, and I, I really can't see Narrator without it now, if that makes sense. So. Yeah. Anne: Absolutely does. Well, gentlemen, it has been such a joy talking to both of you. Thank you so, so much for your words of wisdom and inspiration. And BOSSes, go get Narrator. I'm telling you, go out and get it now. In less than 10 seconds you can click and have this experience for yourselves. Gentlemen, thank you so much. I'm gonna give a great big shout-out to our sponsor, ipDTL. You too can connect and work like BOSSes. Find out more at ipDTL.com. You guys, have an amazing week and I'll see you next week. Bye. >> 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.com 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.

Gratitude is not just a feeling. It's a practice, and it can change your life. This week, Anne & Lau discuss bringing gratitude into your life and biz. They dive into what gratitude can add to your life - a sense of purpose, community, & fulfillment. Take a moment to think about how grateful you are for your life, your family, and the people around you. What if you added just one more thing to that list? What if you took stock of what you're grateful for every day? A grateful mindset makes you easier to work with. It helps people feel good around you + attracts people & opportunities your way. So if you're ready to start crafting gratitude into your life, tune in! Transcript >> It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere 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. Anne: Hey everyone, Welcome to the VO BOSS podcast. I'm your host Anne Ganguzza, and I am excited as always to have with me my special guest co-host Lau Lapides for Business superpowers. Woohoo! Lau: Hey! Anne: Hey Lau. Lau: Hey Anne. So great to be back. Anne: It is wonderful, wonderful to have you. So I was noticing, Lau, lately, it's the holiday season or the holiday season is upcoming. And I have been seeing a lot of talk about gratitude and thanks and people have 30 days of thanks. And I think it's a wonderful thing. I love being able to express gratitude. I think it's healthy for us personally, and I also think it's healthy professionally, but I also think we should be practicing gratitude year round . And I think that gratitude can be a wonderful springboard for growth for not only yourself personally, but for your business. What are your thoughts? Lau: I could not have said that any better. And actually you took the words right out of my head. Anne: I did? Lau: Yes. I was just working with -- Anne: Great minds, Lau. Lau: Yes. I was working with some clients and we were saying, you know, this particular talent, whatever, they should be thankful for having this particular opportunity because it's so interesting, it's so unique and it's so hard to get. And I thought, oh my goodness, it's so true; having gratitude, being thankful every single day, like writing it down, speaking it to someone. Not just thinking it. Right, Anne, 'cause when it's in our head, it's not always as real as when we're doing something actively. Right? Anne: Yeah, yeah. Lau: So if I'm thankful, I'm gonna show an action based on that. If I'm really grateful for something, I might tell someone that I'm grateful, and that action is so important to do every single day of the year. Anne: I consider it a springboard for so many good things that can happen from the start of just thinking of being grateful. It turns your mindset around from, let's say, complaining about something . Like for example, it's been cooler now in Southern California. I for one, love the cooler weather, but sometimes that means, well now I gotta turn the heat on. And so therefore now my heating bill is gonna go up. Whatever it is, I'm just gonna be thankful that I have a change of seasons here in California. And I don't have to turn my air conditioning on. So I think it's a mindset switch from the thinking part of it. And then I think like as you were saying, I think putting things into action, telling people about what you're grateful for or telling people, like I'm grateful, Lau, that you are here today with me doing this podcast. And I'm grateful for all of the episodes that we've done so far. And I'm grateful for all the ones that are going to be coming up because I think it's just done wonders for me personally to get to know you. And I have gratitude for you as a friend, but also as a professional partner. Really. Lau: Well, I am so grateful that you thought to even ask me to be on the program. In fact, I'm gonna go back before that. I'm grateful that we were on a panel together, right? The gods of the panel conferencing universe put us together. I'm grateful that we're assertive business women. And we're unashamed and not frightened to reach out to each other, even though we didn't know each other at all. And say, hey, let me celebrate you. Let me work with you and bada bing, bada boom, as they say, I mean, it's like, wow. All of a sudden project, you thought to invite me to your podcast, which has been an incredible experience. And it's just that journey. I'm thankful for the journey of going on the process. Anne: That is what is so cool about -- you're right. It's not just a one time thought of gratitude. It becomes this journey which can evolve into so much more. So one single thought of gratitude can evolve into much more. And that thought of, wow, we were on that panel together. Wow, this is great. This woman is amazing. Like I really like, let me reach out to her and let's see if we can form a partnership and see if we can work together in some way. We worked together. We now have this wonderful series of podcast episodes, and I have grown personally and professionally. So many opportunities have now opened up for our relationship that we've developed. Right? Opportunities to meet other casting directors, to meet other people, to meet wonderful VO family. And it makes me connect to my East Coast roots. I mean, there's just so many good things that have happened from the one thought of grateful in my brain. So I love the action where you can not only think about what you're grateful for, but put it down on paper. I love the whole people putting what they're grateful for on Facebook or on Instagram, whatever your social media platform of choice. I think if everybody could just put what they're grateful for, like every single day, wouldn't that just be a cool thing? Lau: That's a great action to do. It's what I call making sparks. If you can make sparks, then you can make fire. And making fire is really about -- they used to say in business, you know, I'm setting the world on fire. not in any negative way, but like I'm awakening territory that I want to inspire new relationships, new fertile grounds for business, for not only business, but also for friendships, also for social relationships. Like you have to have that action inside of you so that you can do the spark, so that you can catch fire a little. You can't always rely on other people to do that for you. Right? Anne: Yeah. Lau: And that one little spark, that one little thing you make could do a whole lifetime, could open up a whole lifetime of a trajectory of business and friendship and joy and health for you. And you go, oh my gosh, if I hadn't done that, all of this other stuff would not have happened. Anne: I just saw that happen with a client that I had worked with, and I had the opportunity while I was at a conference to meet in person with them. And I remember -- you wouldn't think that I'm a nervous type , but sometimes, right, especially if this client -- this client was very well known, CEO, president of the company, that kind of thing. So when it comes time for me to just meet face to face for the first time, I'm a little bit like, oh my goodness. You know, I've done some work and I've had some association, but not direct all the time. Lau: Yeah, yeah. Anne: And meeting this person and expressing my gratitude, being able to work with them and how much I enjoyed it, how much I admired and respected their work really led to this relationship where I felt great about it. But not only that, but I just got another invitation to do some more work for this client. So I believe that it truly led to other work. And it doesn't mean -- now look, I think there's so many things that go into creating a good relationship with a client. It's not always about, oh, Anne Ganguzza has the best voice. Right? It really becomes, oh, she's got an amazing voice. But also she is wonderful to work with, she's easy to work with, she's reliable. And so those things all come into play. And when you're paying gratitude or respect to your clients, I truly believe that it will come back to you like threefold. Lau: That's exactly it. And there's a, you know, doing the checkbox is like, it just makes their life so easy then you are a great package. You do know what you're doing, you're well prepped, you're professional. They don't have to worry about the trust factor. But there's so much more in all of that. There's almost like a mystique, like a mysticism of how people come together, how gigs get done, how process takes place. There's -- is something very mystical about that. You can't always explain every single step. Like how were we in particular invited to that panel? How did we notice each other and then reach out to each other? I don't know. There's kind of like an unspoken truth that we may not know what that is and it's okay to not know. But then is that makes it exciting a little bit. It's not completely predictable. All we know is we have the ability to assert ourselves and to put our best foot forward. That's like all we know. And then if it doesn't work out, we're eloquent about saying, okay, it's not gonna work out now. Hopefully in the future it'll work out. But being the fire starter, making that spark is really important and not waiting for someone else to do it. Anne: You know what else is interesting? And this is making me think now in terms of, I said, well, it's not always about your voice. Right? It could be the whole package. I truly believe, especially in these times where we want authenticity, we want believability. I truly believe that you, that you bring to the party, that unique part of you, if gratitude is a part of that, I think it's an attraction, right, for other people. And so, even though you might be reading somebody else's words from a script, that gratitude is part of your personal makeup. And that personal makeup is part of that you that you're bringing to the party. And I believe that the positivity, I think there's a lot of positivity around gratitude, that comes with just you being authentic and then bringing that authentic you to the script -- even if it's like behind, let's say, a character that's an evil villain or whatnot, there's still a part of you that you're bringing to it that cares that you're entertaining or cares that you're connecting. And I think that, like you said, that kind of part that you can't touch or feel it, that part is an important part of your voice and the package that you bring to the table. So I think that gratitude is one of those personality traits or one of those emotions that I think can really come out and affect your physical voice as well. Lau: No question. I think it affects everything, not just your mindset and your voice. It affects your body and how you move in space and how you make people feel. I always feel like, whether you're at home in your home studio, or whether you're at an office or going to someone else's rehearsal place or place of business, how do you make people feel at home? How do you host them in your space? And I, I always feel like if I come from a place of acceptance and gratitude, and thankfulness, and joy, and appreciation, they feel that. There's a pathos in that, there's an emotional pathos that they just pick up immediately that is not a self-centered, narcissistic kind of overly focused on myself kind of thing. But it's like, how are you feeling? Are you warm in this place? Are you comfortable? Do you have what you need? What have you. That I always feel comes out of knowing what to be grateful for. I don't think it's enough just to be grateful. I have to be specific. Just like my vocal delivery. I have to be specific on what am I thankful for? What am I grateful for? Let me write that down. Let me talk that to someone. Let me tell them. I mean, I don't know, it's kind of spiritual, isn't it? If I tell you, like you just told me, I'm so thankful for you, Anne, to have you as my new friend, my colleague, someone who's an inspiration in my life. Oh, I just got goosebumps. My eyes got a little watery on that because -- Anne: Me too. Lau: -- it's emotional. It kicks up those muscles in you as an actor that go right into your muscles that are holding emotion, right? You see my eyes got a little watery when I said that. I'm not upset or sad. Anne: So it can make you a better actor. Look at that. I love that. I love that. Right? Some of the good things that come from feeling that emotion, and so much more moving forward energy than, let's just say, there's a lot of complaining going on in some of these social media circles. Right? And I feel like it's one thing to, if you have something that you're unhappy about, maybe, I don't know, either getting it out, writing it down, whatever it is. But I think a constant rehashing and circling and it's like some ball of negative energy. I don't think that that's necessarily healthy. So I think that the more positive things that you can spin and then encircle yourself with and discuss and tell and talk with and -- I think the more forward we can move. I'm always about moving forward and not like staying in a pool of negativity. . Lau: I agree. I agree. Anne: Right? Lau: And you know, now that I think about it, you know, I'm in the commercial market as an agent, I'm thinking that probably 80'% to 90% of the copy that we see for talent is copy that you would describe as warm, friendly, healing, paternal or maternal, inclusive -- all these terms that you think, okay, I'm an actor. How do I get that out? How do I do it on the spot? How about this, one tactic is to do exactly what we're saying and be grateful. Write down what you're thankful for. Really pay attention to it in detail, emotionalize it and feel it. So you can call upon that when you're doing that next healthcare read. You can call upon that when you're doing that next parental read to say, wow, okay, I remember, I can recall -- actors recall. I can recall what that actually feels like as me a person. Then I can put that into my read. And now it becomes much more authentic and realistic to me as a person. 'Cause that conversational thing throws us all the time. Anne: It does. Lau: What is conversational, you know? Anne: And you know what's so interesting? So I'm gonna see that commercial and I'm gonna -- corporate copy, which honestly, if you think about it, it's the same end goal, right? Commercial, selling a product or selling a brand, same thing with corporate copy. Even though you might be delivering information like, here's our corporate governance, or this is who we are as a company, or this is a product that we're talking about as a company -- it's just a longer format, but still the same end result, right? Companies want you to be on board with their product and with their brand so that ultimately you'll buy from them. But I always like to go all the way back and say, look, when I worked in the corporate world, I remember, and I think I mentioned this to you, I was employee number 246 , um, at the company that I worked with out of school. And I loved the product, I loved the company, I loved what we did. I was passionate about it. I felt like we were helping people. I want everybody that's voicing a piece of commercial copy or corporate copy or whatever it is that has a product to think about that company. Ultimately, I wanna look at the good and say that, well, whoever formed this company, let's say, I'm speaking on behalf of, I don't know, Hope Hospital or whoever that is, there was a good inherent in the formation of that company or that product because they wanted that product to help someone. And that's what I like to think in terms of when I'm going into a piece of copy that there's always a good for this product that's going to help people. And when I think that way, that brings out that positive, that gratefulness, that thankfulness, and that becomes the real and the authentic part of me voicing copy from that. So it goes beyond just, well, let's say I remember that feeling from being grateful here, but here, let's put ourselves in the scene. Let's be an employee of the company, and let's be grateful that we are offering something that can help others to do their jobs better, to be faster, whatever. Lau: And that's that deep dive empathy factor that we're all kind of going for. We may not use it all the time, but we wanna have access to that when we need to have access to that. Anne: Absolutely. Lau: And yes, it's not enough to say, oh, I understand it intellectually. I get it. I'm thankful intellectually that's the beginning. But I think the deeper dive is I can feel that I can live that with you. I can go through the hardship of it. I can understand the problem solving, the need filling, the care taking of that. I can get there and because I can get there, there is that true authenticity to that kind of read, whatever that read is, I would venture to say you could put that into anything, whether it was corporate or audio book -- Anne: Character. Lau: -- eLearning, right, character. There's gotta be a little nugget of something that, you know, what reminds me of Anne? Remember in all the famous sitcoms, like all of our favorite sitcoms from the past, they always yak-yak-yak-yak-yak. They had their studio laugh traps. Funny, funny, funny, funny. And then there was this one moment would land the entire episode where everyone would get quiet in the studio and you'd find yourself crying and you're like, why am I crying? It's like The Brady Bunch. Why we crying? It's like MASH. Why? Why did I feel that? Because they knew that. The writers were so smart, they knew how to take humor. And all of a sudden landed in such a way where we started to feel like, ooh, this is a real person and this is a real problem that we have to solve. And we're using humor to solve it in this case. And in the case of a sitcom, well, we're using all different kinds of tactics to solve our client's problems. Not just humor. We're using a lot of tactics. But the baseline is I have to land it. I have to feel what you feel. I have to move through it with you and I have to solve it. Anne: That's so interesting. And you said a word that I use a lot. And that's empathy. So empathy, when you are connecting with the copy and you are speaking to the person, right? You're speaking to a person who you wanna empathize with. What are their pains? What are their joys? What are their frustrations? And I think that there's so many emotions that play into the grateful, thankful part of it that we tap into. And I think what came first, the chicken or the egg? What came first? Empathy or thankful like . Do you know what I mean? I think they all can lead into a whole series of emotions. I think you can be thankful for just about everything in your life. I mean, I've always been that person that has tried to take what most people would consider a negative event and turn it into something that I'm grateful and thankful for. And one of those, and I've said it multiple times and I'll delve a little bit into it, is my cancer diagnosis. Right? I always, always had a passion for living and being grateful, but actually being diagnosed with cancer and then facing my mortality really made me a billion times more grateful for everything that I had and everything that I have now. And it's funny because I'm continually reminded in a way, because sometimes they say your journey is continual. Right? I still go to the doctor, I still get checked up, and every time I go to get checked up, you don't think I check, what am I grateful for? What am I thankful for? I'm thankful that I got through another test. I'm thankful that so many things. And in a way that's a blessing for me . And I can only see it as that because it helps me to always remind myself of what is wonderful in my life. What am I grateful for? What am I thankful for? And being in the booth, doing what I love, of course I was always thankful for it. But boy, am I thankful for it now because it's something that I was able to do literally two weeks after a major operation, I was be able to get in my booth and do something that I loved, which I was thankful for, thankful that I was able to do that and thankful that I was still there to do it. Lau: And you are not just a survivor now you're a thriver. Anne: Yes, yes. Lau: Right? Because you're really utilizing this journey as one big tool of knowledge to understand how do I unlock, how do I unlock that chest of deep emotion? Like deep feeling, deep empathy. Anne: Yeah. Yeah. Lau: And that to me is like, that's the ultimate truth. And even for the listeners who say, oh, I can't do any of this, I don't get the, any of this. Even from your business standpoint, just from your business standpoint, it allows you to come outside of yourself so you're not just self reflecting all the time. Anne: Right. Lau: And open up the gestalt of your world. Really just see the full map of what's around you when you have that moment of thankfulness. It just makes you remember that, oh my gosh, I have a mother, or I have a a husband, or I have a child, or I have a dog that I love so much. What would I do? What would I do without that dog? Anne: And that all contributes to not only your personal, but even your professional because of what we do, which is so I think part of our person, it's so personal, and it's so gauged on how we can be real and authentic. And that is, that's a privilege to be able to get paid for that. You know, to be able to get paid, you know, as an actor, right? To get paid for being able to bring those emotions to life and feel and express. And I think when it comes to being thankful and grateful that the action, again, I love the action, write it down what it is that we're thankful for. But also let's express it. Let's take it one step further, right? So how can BOSSes benefit from being thankful and grateful? Well, I'm gonna say outside of your own personal growth and your business growth, extend that to your clients, right? Extend your gratefulness to your clients to really secure -- I mean Lau, you and I have talked about securing relationships and nurturing relationships. I'll tell you that's one thing that will nurture your relationship with your clients, express to your gratefulness, to your clients. And don't just do it once a year, you know, at the holidays or twice a year. At any given point, just a simple note. It makes you feel good too, right? It does. But email or you, you pick up that phone and you're just like, Thank you. I am so thankful for the opportunity to work with you. I really appreciate it. And I think that that just extends goodwill. And it can help you grow your business. Lau: Anne, I had a new colleague, a co-producer in New York that I'm working with now, who said to me when we, not when we very first met, but within the first few months, he had come to one of my events, and he wrote back to me, I'll never forget this, he wrote back to me, he said, I'm so grateful to be a part of your life and your studio family. Thank you for including me in that. Just the way he said that, and that was on email, just the way he said that. I kept it. And I never forgot. I just thought that was the sweetest, kindest, most beautiful moment. As someone that I didn't know really a stranger, at all, who felt like he was so included. And I knew in that moment, you know in that moment when someone says that to you, Anne, not only are you doing your job, but you're also being a really progressive and thoughtful human being. Anne: Mm. Yes. Lau: You know what I mean? Anne: I love that. Mm-hmm. Lau: 'Cause it can't just be about business, right? It's gotta be about human, human people and what we're doing and giving to one another. That's really what it is. No matter what holiday you celebrate, if you don't celebrate any holidays at all, every day is kind of a holiday. Remember Madonna, Holiday, celebrate. Anne: Yeah, exactly. Lau: Every day should be a little bit of a holiday for you to celebrate life and what life is offering to you. Anne: Mm-Hmm. I totally agree. And I think extending that gratefulness and that thankfulness to your clients, I think that is the epitome of maybe not every single day, but absolutely that email. And I think also because we are so isolated in our studios -- I keep going back to like when I was in the corporate world and I would go into the office every day, and I would be surrounded by people or you know, when I first started in voiceover and I would go to an audition, I would be in a room full of people who are auditioning. I mean, it's kind of like being at the water cooler. And I feel like the gratefulness and thankfulness needs to be even more so because we are so isolated these days from the pandemic -- well now, we're getting more back into face to face where I think that makes an even more meaningful contribution when you're thankful and grateful and you're there. 'Cause you can see it, you can feel it. But if we are in our studios a lot of the time, I think we need to go an extra mile to showcase thankfulness and gratefulness to our clients. Because it's not so palpable for not like with them physically. Lau: Mm-Hmm. And on top of that, I mean, I think we would be off track if we didn't mention that every day you're gonna get something that gets boomerang; it's going be thrown in your path, a little obstacle, a little problem, a little something that doesn't go well. Be thankful for that. Anne: Yes. Lau: Be thankful because those are opportunities for you to learn and grow and feel hardship and feel fear and feel insecurity because that's what your client is feeling. That's what your colleagues are feeling. That's what people around you are feeling like -- Anne: That brings the empathy. Lau: -- understand that. Yeah. I wanna be able to live that a little, not all day long, but I wanna be able to be in that and understand it so that I don't think, oh, everything's gonna be smooth sail. Everything's gonna be easy going. No, I have to be thankful for the moments that teach me things that I didn't know, that I wasn't willing to look at or learn and now I see it. Anne: Yeah, absolutely. And being grateful for those moments, the moments when they're not all shining and rosy just again turns that into a positive moment. And, and of course positivity is a springboard for so many wonderful things. So, I love this conversation. I talk about gratefulness like every year right around this time because everybody's grateful and I talk about it, but I love the way that we deep dove into gratefulness and thankfulness and how it can positively affect you BOSSes out there by practicing it every single day. So Lau, thank you so much. Really. Yeah. I am grateful for this conversation. I loved it. Loved it. Lau: I'm grateful for you and how we unpacked this today. Anne: Right? Lau: It was really quite amazing. So thank you for that. And I'm grateful that this has recorded so that we can reflect on it over and over again. Anne: Well yes. Absolutely. So I am going to give a great big shout-out to our sponsor, ipDTL. You too can connect and show gratefulness and thankfulness with other BOSSes and clients and colleagues. Find out more at ipDTL.com. And also guys, if you want to give back and have a chance to use your voice to make an immediate difference and give back to the communities that give to you, visit 100voiceswhocare.org to find out more. You guys, have an amazing week. We are grateful for you. We love you and we'll see you next week. Take care. Lau: Take care. >> 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.com 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.

What gets you through the hard days? Purpose. It's what keeps you going when things are tough and when life seems overwhelming. Purpose is your why. Your VO biz is not just a job, it's an expression of who you are and what matters most to you. This week, Anne & Lau talk about what purpose is, why it matters (and why it doesn't have to be all about profits), + how you can identify your business' purpose. They also discuss ways to make sure that your clients, agents, and peers can feel your passion in your presence + hear it in your voice. Finally, they talk about how clear communication of your purpose can help align you with other people who share similar visions and goals. Transcript >> It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere 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. Anne: Hey everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS podcast and the business superpower series. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzza. And today I'm excited to bring back very special guest co-host Lau Lapides. Hey Lau, how are you? Lau: Hey! I'm awesome. I'm loving being back as always. Anne: I love this series, speaking of the business superpower series. So as business owners, we are superpowers, and one of our superpowers, Lau, has to be our purpose, right? Why did we get into this whole voiceover thing in the first place? And I think it's really important for us to understand what our purpose is and bring it to our business. I've been in this business for a long time, and sometimes that gets thrown by the wayside during the busy days. And sometimes we can maybe forget what our purpose is in the business, but I think we need to realign ourselves with who we are and who we are as a business and what is our purpose. Because people and potential clients align with that. And I think it's important these days. Lau: Yes, well said, Anne. We were just saying before that we start out with purpose when we're starting a business, but the purpose may change. It doesn't always stay the same through the years. If you're have luck and fate and love and passion, and you have a lot of longevity in your business, you become more and more purposeful and more and more subdivided in the reenvisioning and repurposing your purpose. And that, you know, that's something that all of our superheroes that we know and love have in common. They all have purpose. It's like to save the world, right, from certain destruction. Anne: Right. Lau: One of my purposes is to offer the world something specific that helps solve their pain point. What's their problem? What's their need? What is it? Anne: Exactly, what's their problem. And I'm going to say that it's important these days to have purpose beyond profit, right? There should be some element of your purpose that not only are you in business to make money, but you are also wanting to bring value to society or value to a cause that you might believe in, and something that I think your potential clients can hear clearly stemming from your business and get on board with, because I think you'll really end up with a lot of customer loyalty if you get people on board with your purpose. So it's not just to, I wanna voice a national commercial. I know that when we first start in the industry, we start with something very close to us. Well, it's a passion, you know, a lot of people getting into it. I love to create character voices, or I read to my children a lot. And so -- I've been told I have a good voice. And so I wanna be able to bring something to my career with my voice. I wanna be able to use it. So I think we need to look further and deeper into ourselves beyond that sole purpose of, yes, I'm passionate about voicing, but what else is it that you wanna bring to, let's say your business, to society that can help to, I think, elevate you and motivate you forward? And especially as you said over the years, like we kind of conquer and divide or divide and conquer and, and create more aspects of our business. And yeah, sometimes we start to really lose where that purpose -- where did that go? What am I doing this for? Lau: Hmm, yes. It's like losing an inner compass for a lot of us that start out extremely strong. I think it would be fair to say as a sweeping generalization, that many entrepreneurs, many solopreneurs start out with a high level of zest, of passion, of what used to be inserts that none of us ever knew; that was the Retzin. Like what's the Retzin in our purpose? So you gotta have that because that passion, that purpose really inspires you through the difficult days, through the tough times. You're right. It can't just be profit driven because there are gonna be many days where you're simply not gonna make a profit. And it's unrealistic to think that it's my business -- yeah, my business should be making profit all the time. I actually thought that at one point. Anne: News flash! News flash. . You may not make a profit every day. Lau: It sounds ridiculous. But it's like one of my actors, literally, literally this morning, I was talking to her and she said, I'm concerned -- she had switched agencies. And she said, I'm very concerned. I said, why are you concerned? She said, I'm not getting that many auditions. I'm getting like, whatever a week. I said, well, wait a second here. First of all, you have to examine -- I use the word intention, but purpose is great, fits right in right here -- like, what do you realistically want here? And what is your purpose in doing this? Surely it can't be that you're gonna get auditions all day long and book gigs all day long. Anne: Right. Lau: And make a profit all day long. Right? A lot of people actually do think that way. They think, well, I'm here. I'm talented. I love what I do. I'm ready. so why aren't I getting the outcomes that I'm expecting? Well, life isn't like that and business isn't like that. Business is really about relational management. How are you paying attention to the details of the client and what is their purpose and identifying it, like determining do they have purpose? And is it specific enough? Anne: Yeah. And I think that purpose probably starts when people get into the voice industry. I have so many people that I do consults with and there are people like, well, you know what, it's the pandemic, I'm at home. And I wanna be able to work from home and make money. I need to make money. And I'm like, well, okay. So that purpose is not as developed as somebody that I would necessarily wanna work with. So because their whole purpose is to simply survive probably or make money. And that's not necessarily the best purpose to come into the voiceover industry just simply because it's freelancer, and, and yeah, news flash we don't make profits every single day or maybe we do. But in order to get to that point of making a profit every single day, I think there's a lot more steps that need to be taken in terms of evolving your business and growing your business. But in the beginning, it's almost like a self-centered, I have a passion for voiceover. I enjoy it. I'm passionate about it, but I think it needs to go further than that. So it's a passion for you that you love to do, but what can it bring to your business? What can it bring to your potential clients? So for me, for example, some of my background, I worked for a short bit of time in orthopedic industry and in medicine. And so my voiceover genres have evolved into medical narration. And so I really take heart in wanting to voice something that will help people. And so my purpose, when I'm reading the back of that pharmaceutical label, it's not so that I can make money. It's my gig. I'm making, you know, $1000 or whatever I'm making. I'm imagining that I am helping someone who is frantically reading that label to make sure that they're taking the right dosage and to make sure that they're not gonna have crazy side effects and what to do in case they are, and where do they contact? What number do I call? And so I'm really thinking about that purpose, going beyond just me getting paid for the job. I wanna make sure that I'm able to bring my voice and my help and my service to people, to society. And that is just one small example. It's another reason also why I do eLearning gigs, because I feel that my purpose in life is to educate and to be -- I feel like that's really where my sole purpose is, is to really educate and bring education to other people, to help them grow their businesses or grow their voice over careers. And so for me, that love of teaching extends to my business, to my client. And so I take pride in the fact that there's purpose in that. There's purpose in this podcast. You know, this podcast stemmed from my wanting to give back to the community and have an educational resource for people that wanted to find out more about the voiceover industry. Lau: Mm that's great. I love that. What a great soliloquy and you know what? I just had a visual, speaking of branding and everything we talk about with business, I had a visual of like cleaner, like Windex cleaner or one of those cleaners. Why? Because on the front label, you almost always see the word multipurpose, on the front label. Okay, so that's the claim that they're making is that I can use it on my stove and my sink and I can use it on the windows. Right? It makes me think we need to have multipurpose as well. I think its a misnomer to think well, I just have one purpose. What's my purpose? Anne: Yeah. Lau: We're multidimensional human beings. And I can have the purpose that I honestly wanna help someone. I wanna guide them. I wanna sherpa them, if you will, but I also want them to create a viable return based business. And then I also want to lift the ethos of the company or what have you. So it's a multidimensional, multi-purpose framework that I think we can create versus this idea of, oh, I just have one thing in mind. Anne: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I was thinking about this this past week and I wanted to tell you, Lau, the one thing that I love about you, I honestly feel and I get the vibe that you are more excited even than I am to get work for me as an, as an agent. I really feel that because you reach out and you're asking me questions and then I can feel and hear the excitement. You're like, oh, I've got an opportunity. And I really believe that you get so excited about bringing opportunities and bringing job fulfillment to your roster. But I think it's more than just job fulfillment. It's about helping us to grow. And I really feel that from you. And so it's like practice what we're talking about, that makes me want to align with you even more. And so it really does my heart good to feel that from someone that I'm working with, because that makes me wanna work with you more. And I really believe that if we have a purpose that is to serve our clients, right, in the very best way, that's gonna be very obvious to them that that is what we are there. We are there to help them, to help them grow, to help them sell that campaign, whatever it is. If you are admitting that through your job, through your voice, through your interactions with them, it's very much a feel and something that makes them want to work with you again. Lau: Oh, thank you for saying that. Anne: Yeah. Lau: I deeply appreciate that. And it's all true. Anne: It's true. It's very true. Lau: And I feel like you can feel that from an email, you can feel that from a text, at least I can and you can. Anne: Yeah. Lau: I can feel the level of connectivity. Anne: In three words. 'Cause you're busy, and you send me three words and I'm like, oh God, she's excited. She's gonna get me an opportunity. I can tell -- Lau: That's right, that's right. Anne: -- from that short sentence and it's so amazing that you can do that. And it's like a magnet. And I think that that is something that we all can learn for our own selves in understanding our purpose and understanding us wanting to be more than just the profit making business. that's out there doing voiceovers. Lau: I would venture to say purpose is addictive. It's addictive. It's catchy. It's something when you're around, it influences you. You know, we talked about influencers all the time, but how do we influence our peeps, your VO Peeps and our audiences to move in a purposeful, mindful, specific and honest way is how we demo what we do, how we role play, what we do. It's hard to tell, but, but you guys should do this and you should do that. And then, then they don't see it in you. They're watching, they're mirroring psychologically. They're saying, Anne, I wanna see that in you. And when I see that in you, all of a sudden, I feel like I wanna do more. I feel like I wanna commit more. In fact, I wanna try, I wanna take more risks. Anne: It's motivational. It's inspirational. And again, if I go back to this podcast, I specifically remember, gosh, the podcast is now I'm gonna say close to six years old. Lau: Woo! Anne: That's a commitment by the way. This podcast is, is a free resource for people, my heart wanting to give something back to the community. And interestingly enough, I feel like for myself, when I got to a point in my career where I was not so frantic, but about, oh my God, am I going to make it? Am I going to be okay? And I started to feel the success, I wanted to share that and give back. And that became the sole mission of the VO BOSS podcast was to give back and to provide an educational resource. And even more so like these series, the superpower series, my AI series, you know, that's something that, again, I wanted to be kind of up front and educate myself and help educate the community on what's coming up in the industry. And what do we need to be on the lookout for? And that all comes from a place of wanting to help and wanting to provide resources so that people can use those resources to intelligently make decisions about their own businesses. And hopefully people that listen to the podcast feel that. And they, they can feel that from me as I continue to bring phenomenal guests like yourself onto the show so that we can help to be a resource. Lau: No doubt. No doubt. I do agree with you. I think even if you're not thinking in a philanthropic mindset, there is this essence, this circular, however you believe, a karmic essence, a circular that what you put out into the world -- and I teach this to my children and I try very hard to live it -- is put out exactly what you would want to get back. If it were a boomerang and I said this to someone, I did this to or for someone, would I want that for myself? Anne: Yeah. Lau: That old do unto others. But it really is true because there is a circular effect in our industry of what I'm putting out. And sometimes it's not profit driven, as we know. And sometimes we don't get paid as we know. There's always this karma effect of wonderful things that come back to you, and it could be in the form of just like a quick one liner. Someone says you change the way I think. You change the trajectory of maybe my life and you think, whoa, I love paychecks, but no paycheck can make me feel that way. Anne: It reminds me exactly why I loved education. And that's why I was in the education industry for 20 years. The fact that I had an opportunity to make a difference. And the funny thing is, is that it wasn't even about like, was I a good teacher? It was the fact that I had the opportunity to help and shape and hopefully motivate, hopefully inspire a mind that can grow and be successful, and I can be happy. And there is nothing, nothing better than that feeling of watching a student of yours go on to be successful. And I I'm gonna say I'm so, I'm so blessed, I really am, to have experienced that for so long and continue to experience. And I, I think that's why I think I was born to be an educator, which is why so much of my business is about education. Now, of course it's about voiceover as well. But like you said, there can be multiple purposes. So is there just one purpose? No, not necessarily. Right? I have that purpose of, I wanna be that voice that helps people when they're reading the back of the pharmaceutical label. I wanna be a voice that can educate others through an e-learning module. I also want to actually have something that can, you know, like my podcast or my VO Peeps group that can help the education. And again, VO Peeps was also stemmed from that same reasoning when I moved from the east coast to the west coast, I wanted to meet people who were in the industry. And I thought, well, what better way than let's create a group of people who are voiceover artists and VO Peeps began. And then I wanted to provide resources because I missed teaching. So it's funny because of course I love voiceover, but it turned into like multiple compartments of my business. And I think that anybody today in the voiceover industry, I don't know if I'd be so bold just to say this, but I think there are times as we grow, we do need to have multiple paths of income, right, in this industry. So I might not just be doing voiceover for all of my money. A lot of people it's just starting out have to have a part-time job or multiple revenue streams until they get to a point where voiceover becomes their full-time income. And that's where your purposes come in. Lau: Absolutely, Anne. I mean, that's, to me, it's a given, to you it's a given, but we do have to educate people that that is the nature of being a contractor. That is the nature of being a trades person, that you are going from job to job. And you kind of have to remember that throughout your life, but also it's okay. Like give yourself permission that whatever you call yourself, you're a creative, you're an artist. You are, whatever you call that thing in you that drives you, that gives you purpose also multitasks in different creative directions that you have to realize. A lot of times you can't be satisfied in just one direction. You have to be multi-directional -- Anne: Ding ding ding! Lau: -- multi-purposeful, right, to feel like -- Anne: Ding ding ding! Lau: -- yeah, excited and revived, a little splash in the face, 'cause you got a new project. I'm taking on a few new things right now that scare me to death, which I love. Because I haven't done them before. You do that throughout your whole life. Anne: I think as creatives, right, that's part of the whole creative mindset, is that I've always said I can't be bored, which is probably why I love to learn. Right? It's probably why I loved technology. I was in technology 'cause things change, things evolve. I liked fixing things. I was in technology. I would fix broken computers, all of those things that required me to do different creative things every single day. And thus, yes, I think as a creative entrepreneur, that's why multiple purposes can be beneficial. And for me it's so much about what can I give, and even in our performances, I'm always telling my students, it's not about your voice. It's about your connection to your listener, and what is it that you're going to do for your listener as you are servicing that piece of copy, right, for a company that's selling a product? What is that product going to do for the person that's listening? How is it going to help them? And that is where the glue is. That's where the connection is. That's where sales become successful. When you are able to help people, right, with a product that will make them feel better, look better, whatever, help them in some way. And that's what becomes the attraction, that force. Right? Lau: So, Anne, would it be fair to say that no matter where you're at in this game, that you've gotta think multi-purposeful and multidimensional that, on one hand, okay. It's a truism, I'd like to work. I'd like to be trained well. I'd like to have great equipment. Okay. We get that. But what is the higher purpose? What is the more multidimensional purpose of how -- let's say you're doing educational reads, eLearning -- how am I affecting a generation of middle schoolers as I do do this? Anne: Sure. Lau: How is my messaging? My voice, but my messaging here really taking effect? And is that an honest purpose that I have? Anne: Sure. And it can go beyond just the purpose of the effect of your voice having on let's say certain campaigns or people, but it can go on to say, well maybe I decide to take a percentage of my earnings. And I donate it or whatever that is. Or as part of my day to day business, I have a certain set amount of time where I mentor people, and it doesn't even have to be in voiceover. It could be in any sort of thing. Right? So a lot of companies have that philanthropic part to their business, because again, it's that what is a higher purpose for your company, for your business? And it's funny because a lot of people will relate it to like the creative aspect of it. What is my purpose? But in reality, defining your purpose in your business, right, it goes beyond just what is my purpose? But how does this purpose affect your business? And how is it that you are communicating that purpose? Is it clear? Do potential clients understand this about you and your brand? How are you communicating that purpose out to the world? Lau: And is it in alignment with the population or the clients that you're working with or out of you? Or are you out of alignment? I think identifying that and being honest about that -- sometimes you're just not in alignment with the people that you're working with or clients that you're working with. And then it's not a good thing that. Anne: Yeah, usually that doesn't end up working out. Lau: Yeah. I mean, you might have an organization that's highly philanthropic, and they want you to have an honest connection to the work you're doing. And you're coming in and saying, well, it's good gig. I'll add it to my resume. I'll get some money on it. It'll be good. People will hear my voice, but their vision is a lot deeper than that. And they need a lot more emotional commitment. Anne: Yeah, absolutely. Lau: You have to kind of be honest about that and say, is this a good fit? Are we spiritually aligned? Sometimes you have to think that way. Because sometimes you're not. Anne: Yeah. Lau: And we can hear that. Like we get that. We can hear that. Anne: Absolutely. Lau: I can hear that in a demo even. I can hear it demo when someone is just not aligned, not present. They're not aligned. They're not present, they're doing it. And it's more of a perfunctory exercise than having joy. Some of my closer friends in the industry talk a lot about having honest, happiness and joy in what you're doing. Anne: Yeah, absolutely. Lau: And I think that's okay to have. It doesn't have to be this heavy, serious thing all the time. Anne: Right, right. Lau: There's okay to have humor. It's okay. To have joy. It's okay. To have that level of cookiness and quirkiness 'cause you're creative. That's what creatives do. Anne: Yeah, yeah. Lau: Right? We get paid to be quirky. Anne: Yes. There you go. Lau: In a way, you know what I mean? Like, oh, I shouldn't do this. I shouldn't sound that I shouldn't. Well, but sometimes you get hired for that stuff. Sometimes you have long term relationships 'cause they know how quirky you are. Right? And we're both quirky. Anne: Yeah, absolutely. Lau: And sometimes that becomes kind of part of the purpose is like one of my purposes is I'm gonna stay true to my persona and my personality while I service the client in the most honest way that I can, but I don't wanna lose myself. In other words, I don't wanna lose my identity. I don't wanna lose who I am. That's a toughie. Anne: Sure. Yeah. A lot of times when we think about, okay, do you align with certain ideals? Right? Do you align with diversity, inclusivity in casting? That's a big one today, right, that all around in corporations, it's all about inclusion, diversity and that sort of thing. So is that something that you align with in casting? Are you willing to pass on opportunities if you feel that it's not the right job for you. Are you gonna pass on an audition or are you gonna recommend somebody that you feel would be better? So that goes beyond, well, I'm gonna do every single job, and it's not just about like the political genre, right? Because the political genre, that's very obvious. Right? So are you on one side or the other? And so this really just goes beyond just a political genre kind of thing in terms of like your purpose and aligning yourself with ideals and making them known to your client. It's about everything that you do. It's about how you communicate it to your client. It's embedded in your performance. That's what I love that you, you brought that back into the performance aspect. We can hear it if you are not aligned in that way. And so I think for the BOSSes out there, if you haven't sat down and just, in a quiet area and just thought about your purpose, maybe jot it down or your purposes, right, what is it that you really are trying to do with your business that can be more than just creating profit? Lau: Yes. I'll leave you on this note. My dad who recently passed away, not too long ago, he was a great businessman, great entrepreneur. And he would give me loads of wisdom, loads of gems of wisdom. And one of the ones I will never forget, way before I even started a business, he would say about starting businesses, he'd say you need to do what your plan is, what your plan of action is, do it for free, and do it for a long time to make sure that you wanna do it because once you start a business on it, don't expect to make money for a good five to seven years. Anne: Yeah. Lau: Right? And the Eastern philosophy is like 10 years. Like don't expect to really make a profit. Okay. So I always kept that in the back of my head. Don't mistake that for devaluing what you do. Oh, I'm only gonna do it for free and work for free. It's to say like, if you take that as an example, don't take it too literally. Take that as an example and say for a period of time, whether it's philanthropic or whether it's just for my own sense of knowing what my purpose is, I'm not gonna collect money on this. And these situations are appropriate for me not to collect money on this, and see how I feel about the work that I'm doing. Am I really willing to put in X amount of hours without billing X amount of hours? I found that very telling, and certainly actors who come from actor backgrounds spend years not getting paid or getting paid very low wages, and still do it, still wanna do it, still wanna continue it. Anne: And that's so interesting because if you've ever read any of Bob Bergen's posts, he's all about, I didn't start doing it for the money, and he had a purpose. Lau: Right, right. Anne: And so he's very adamant about that to the point where I think some people kind of look at him and go, okay, okay. Okay. But I've gotta, you know, pay the mortgage. Lau: Exactly. Anne: That kind of a thing, but it's the thought, right? So this is -- Lau: It's the thought. Anne: -- purpose driven beyond profit, but it doesn't mean that if you're a good business, you cannot create wealth, right? Not just, you cannot make money, wealth in so many ways, right, is that you are contributing to society in a positive manner, as well as making money doing it. And so therein lies the question. So what is my purpose? And have I stayed true to that? Or my purposes, right? And have I stayed true to that? Lau: Yes. To piggyback onto what you just said, one testament to that may be that you are working, you are having a viable business -- take on some charity projects, take on some philanthropic, take on some projects where you're mentoring or maybe you are doing something for visually impaired or what have you so that you can balance it out in your heart and your soul and say, not everything is a paycheck, not everything is an invoice, not everything is how much I can get -- but really get you off that just for a moment to say, oh, this may be another purpose for me that is a slightly higher purpose at times. Anne: Right. Right. Lau: That can feed me in a way that the other jobs may not be able to feed me. Anne: Sure. Sure. Lau: And kind of balance it that way versus all or nothing. I either work for free or I work for as much as I can get. Anne: Or if it is for a profit redistributing that, right, maybe giving back in some other way. Right? Lau: Exactly. Exactly. Anne: So sharing the wealth, so to speak. But yeah, what a great conversation. Lau: What a great conversation. Anne: I really had some time to think about it. I really enjoyed writing that blog article. It just really led me to think about, what am I here today doing, and how did I start off, and how have I evolved over the years? And I can say, I'm grateful that I'm still true to my original purpose and also my evolved purposes. So I feel like I'm staying on track. It's something that I, I don't take for granted either. So I think we should all take some time and to kind of check deep within and see if we have that purpose and if we're following that purpose. Lau: I love it. And now we can all be like the cleaners. Like we can all be like Windex and 409 and say we're multi-purpose. Anne: Multi-purpose. Lau: We're gonna clean up. But we're multi-purpose. Anne: I love it. All right. Wow. Great stuff. Lau: Good stuff. Anne: Great stuff. So I'm going to give a great big shout-out to my sponsor, 100voiceswhocare.org. If you wanna find out how you can make a difference, and this can be part of your purpose, go to 100voiceswhocare.org and find out ways that you can give back. Also big shout-out to sponsor ipDTL. I love, love, love ipDTL and networking with BOSSes like Lau. Find out more at ipdtl.com. You guys, have an amazing week, and we'll see you next week. Bye. >> 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.com 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.

Everyone's got Imposter Syndrome. But it doesn't mean you're a fraud. In this episode, Anne & Lau dive into why we are so attached to the sound of our voice and how fixating on that can be a barrier to success. Voice is an essential part of how we are perceived, which affects our personal and professional lives. When you listen to yourself critically, it's easy to get lost in technical details. Your voice is your greatest tool, so stop doubting it. It is an instrument and the vehicle for your craft. So Bosses, love your voice. Embrace it. And if you still need some extra pointers to overcome your inner critic and use your voice to the fullest, listen up… Transcript >> It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere 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. Anne: Hey everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS podcast and our business superpower series. I'm Anne Ganguzza, your host, and I'm excited to welcome back to the show Lau Lapides. Lau, hello. Lau: Hello. Hello. Glad to be back as always. Anne: How's your week been, Lau? Lau: Amazing. Busy, amazing, wonderful. Went on vacation. We were talking about this earlier. Went on vacation up to the Berkshires 'cause I'm in New England. Anne: Of course. Lovely. Lau: It was a workcation. Anne: Ah. Lau: Right? I never leave. I never really leave work. Anne: Yes. I try to, but you're right. I don't leave either. Although I will say that I do notify my clients ahead of time that I'm going to be on vacation and may not be as responsive, so we have that. But then there are other opportunities that I make sure that I have my travel gear set and ready to go, so. Lau: Well, you're much better than I am. I don't let anyone know. I pretend as if I'm like still -- Anne: As if you're still working? Lau: -- in my studio. And then I'm in some bathroom somewhere in Lennox, Mass during intermission turning my phone on going, yeah. Okay. So you've got a call back and you've gotta get there, and like I have to turn my phone off. I don't know. I'm not getting reception. I'll talk to you in like an hour and a half. Anne: Oh my God. I love it. Lau: . Anne: So funny. Lau: But you know what? It's our lifestyle businesses, right? Anne: It is. Lau: BOSSes know that's the lifestyle that we live. It's not just a nine to five. It's really what we love, what we do, all the time. Anne: Yeah, yeah. As long as there's a balance. Now speaking of superpowers, I wanted to bring up something this week because as you know, I coach my students, and frequently, and I know that you also are dealing with multiple students as well and people on your roster -- I wanna know if you get this as much as I do. I don't like my voice. I just don't like my voice. And I thought to myself, you know, that's so common actually. I hear that a lot from my students, especially my female students actually that they don't like their voice. And I thought it would be a really interesting discussion to talk about the psychology behind that. And why do you think it is that people don't like their voice? Lau: Gosh, I don't think your podcast is even close to long enough to even answer that. I mean, it could take centuries to answer that. I don't know. I think there's a lot of reasons why. I think first that always comes to my mind is that thing of which got really hot, really, really hot, I'd say in the last couple years, the imposter syndrome became hot and known. It was this unknown thing that really women suffered from, primarily women suffered from. And it was, I think the first one that brought it, believe it or not, that brought it out was Joan Rivers, the comedian Joan Rivers put it in her routine. And then Harvard university said, wait a second. Is that a real thing? Let's do studies on it. And then they spent 10 or 15 years doing studies on people who get hit with it. Right? Anne: Well, I think it's absolutely always been a real thing. It just hasn't been talked about, right? Lau: Yes. Oh, very real. Anne: I'm the first person to admit that imposter syndrome hits me still every day. And I always try to turn it around into a good thing where if you have imposter syndrome, it's motivating you to continually grow and excel. But this thing about voices, I'm gonna say, myself, I even went through it myself so that I can identify when a student comes to me and says, ugh, I just don't like my voice. But I always say, remember in the first place, a lot of times, the reason people get into this industry is because someone has said to them that they have a nice voice and that maybe they should consider voiceover as a career. And I've had people that told me that in the beginning, but after I started studying and started really pursuing it as a career and getting work and then falling into the, oh my gosh, am I ever gonna get hired, that kind of a confidence -- oh my God, I must not be good enough, and that imposter syndrome that really kind of hit me, I started to really criticize my voice. And I used to listen to my voice and say, what doesn't sound -- I wanna sound like this person. I want that rasp. My voice does not have a rasp. It just doesn't. And no matter how hard I try to physically create a rasp, it's difficult and it could hurt my vocal cords. So I gave up doing that, but I gave up kind of coveting other people's voices and really started to understand that my voice needed to be embraced, number one, because how would I ever sell my voice if I couldn't embrace it? And the other thing is I think that maybe people spend too much time listening to the sound of their voice, and that I feel might be the biggest barrier to acceptance because, should we really be listening to our voices in terms of technically, how does it sound? I think really as voice actors, right, Lau, you know what I'm gonna say? Right? As actors, we need to be acting and the concentration should not be on how we sound. Lau: That's right. And I know when I record myself, I can't appreciate hearing myself as I'm recording. I oftentimes will not even wear the cans. I won't even wear the headphones because I want to concentrate on the true connection of what I'm doing here. And if I'm hearing myself -- and I was never an air prompter person anyway, so I, I was never in that realm of having to be proficient at hearing myself as I'm delivering language. So I always deliver with headphones off, and I, I suggest to clients, at least for the beginning phase, don't put 'em on because I want you to make an authentic connection in what you're saying and who you're saying it to, who you're speaking to. And that's, you know, acting basics, right? 101. Anne: Sure. Sure. Lau: But I think you hit the nail on the head in terms of, Anne, talking about I'm not good enough. I won't be accepted. I'm not reaching it. Anne: I don't sound good enough. There's always that. Lau: I think that that's so primal. Anne: Does my voice have what it takes to deliver? No, it's not about your voice. It's about you. Lau: It's about, you. Anne: It's about you. You know what I mean? It's about you and your personality and what it brings to that voice. And I'm, I'm just gonna say about the headphones. Now, when I first began, I was in a construction zone, and I had to wear headphones in my booth to make sure that there were no low vibratory sounds that were coming through. So I totally understand what you're saying about taking the headphones off. But I feel that in all honesty, right, if we have the headphones off, we can still sometimes listen to ourselves. You know what I mean? We're still like, these are amplifying everything that we're saying. So for headphones I'm of the nature that yes, whatever works for people to not be distracted by their own sound. I think that if you're a true actor, you can act with headphones on and with headphones off, so. Lau: Of course, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. It's really how you train. Anne: It's helpful. Lau: Yeah. How you train yourself, what technique you build, that's repeatable for you that doesn't distract you away from what you're trying to do. And I always say to a client, I say it's ridiculous in the sense that if you went to Kraft macaroni, or you went to Nike shoes or you went to Toyota, would they honestly be thinking -- they meaning the advertising company, the people who are creating and producing scripts -- would they honestly be thinking right now as I deliver this to you, this sucks? Anne: Yeah, yeah. Lau: They may talk about it at their wine party, up in Aspen over the weekend that they don't like the product, but in the moment of pitching it, in the moment of selling it in the moment of connecting to the end user, it is the best thing in the world. Not only is it the best, you can't live without it. You really can't. Anne: Absolutely. Lau: And there's some sort of disconnect between the product, that physical inanimate object, that and us, our identity, our physical person, our vocal sound. There's a disconnect that we then become part of that product. We become part of that branding. And so for us to say, I don't know if I'm doing this well, I don't know if I'm good enough. I don't know if, what is in essence saying the product isn't good enough. Anne: Isn't good enough. Lau: The product is subpar, and that's a danger zone for us. We have to be very careful of that because we sell value. We don't wanna sell devalue. We don't wanna devalue our value, and whatever you do privately is something else. Anne: Sure. No, I love how you brought it to the product. Because in reality, remember we are the voice of the product. We are the voice of the company. And no matter what you're doing, even if you're doing, I'm just saying, if you're doing corporate narration, if you're doing explainers, again, you're still working with a product. And if you're not doing that, let's say if you're doing anything else, if you're teaching, right, you're teaching more than likely, right, you become a teacher. And you are teaching either about some product or maybe a concept. And so again, you don't wanna devalue the content that you are speaking of. Lau: Exactly. Anne: And that's such a wonderful example that you brought up. I'm so glad you said that. Lau: Thank you. And you it's interesting, Anne, it seems to be unique to us and our profession, us meaning talent. It seems to be unique quality that we see in many, many people that we don't see quite as much in other industries and other professions. It would be like, ask yourself this, if you do this, if you do this, ask yourself this. Would you appreciate going to a doctor's office? And the doctor comes in and says, I don't know if I know how to listen to your heart. I mean, I, I, I don't know if I'm gonna do it well enough. I mean, what do you think? And you'd be freaked out. You'd go running outta that office. You'd go, I don't want this woman or guy touching me. I -- Anne: Yeah, yeah. Lau: Right? If you went to a dentist, and you had to have your tooth drill, like, I don't know if I can, I don't know if you'll like what I do. I'm not sure. I mean, it sounds funny to us, right? Anne: I might make you hurt . Lau: Right? Anne: But you're right. It's so true. Lau: And it doesn't mean either that they're qualified, and it doesn't mean either they're the best at what they do. It just means it is innate within their training, within their experience, within their identity, that this is what they do. This is the product they offer, the value they offer. You're gonna pay for that service and it's as simple as that. Hopefully you won't complain about it. . Right? Anne: Absolutely. Lau: But it's so unique unto us is to take it so personalized and to say, but do you approve of me, but do you like me? So going back to your original question a half an hour ago, like what is the psychology of this whole thing? I think it does really start with us as a human being, as a person. Like where is our self-esteem? Where is our level of confidence? Do we feel good in our own skin? Do we feel ashamed or humiliated in honest connection? I mean, ask yourself these questions as a human being in the world and then try to work with it. If the answer is yes, I have a struggle with this, I have a problem with this, then work with it. Don't work against it. Don't shove it under the rug because it's gonna come out out in your next audition. It's gonna come out in your next reach out. Anne: And I think, honestly, it's again, I love how you just brought it down to that level, but it's also remember you're honoring the copy. The copy has been crafted by someone who has put a lot of thought into it, for the most part we think, right? And that there is a message that needs to be delivered. And you need to communicate that message effectively. Now Lau, when we talk back and forth, I'm certainly not thinking to myself, do I sound okay when I talk to Lau? Lau: It's funny to think that, isn't it? Anne: Right? Does my voice sound -- maybe I should talk to Lau like this. And no, because that just, it's not bringing ourselves. It's not bringing who we are, and you know, we say it over and over again. Bring yourself to the party. Right? Well, your voice and yourself, your voice is not mutually exclusive from yourself. The way you're treating it, if you're listening to it saying it does not sound good enough, then that's what you are essentially doing. You are splitting apart the voice from who you are. And I think ultimately, yeah, you have to be the one that can bring yourself to the party. When we connect as human beings, that's what I care about. I don't care, Lau, when you talk to me, what you sound like, I care about what you're saying to me and what it means to me. And I think by trying to just bring it back onto ourselves where most people might think it's an insecurity thing -- in reality, when you think too much about how you sound, it becomes more of a vanity thing or an egotistical thing, where you're not thinking about the client. You're not thinking about the product or the copy that you should be honoring. You are thinking more about what you sound like on top of that copy. And that's not where your voice needs to be. Your voice needs to be in the act, in the action of delivering that copy to the best of your ability and the most effectively on behalf of that client. Lau: I mean, at the end of the day, it's all about the messaging. We use the fancy schmancy term story and storytelling, but storytelling is about the messenger. What message is being delivered? And what is that stake here? What is the value to the audience of that message? Is it gonna fix their life, fix their health? You know, help them find a pet, and, and help them educate their child, or have a better quality health regimen? It's always something in there for the end user that will potentially better their life. Now I'm not saying that that is, that's not a truism. It doesn't actually do it all the time. I'm saying that that's the claim that is being made in the message. And if you lose the message, you lose the claim. And that is a problem. That can be a real problem. Anne: You say the word value, and that is so important. The value to the client. It's not your value. It's the value that you are bringing to the client. So it goes from a place of how can I help you, the client, not how can I sound beautiful when I say these words? It's how can I help you? And the place has to come from within you and not from just the lips and outward because sometimes when we're listening to what we sound like, that's all we can concentrate on. Lau: Exactly. Anne: And there's no story, there's no message. There's no emotion. There's no point of view. Lau: Exactly. And you brought up a great point there. You know, a number of the roles -- I call it roles, theatrical roles -- but a number of the, the voicing parts that we see in scripts now are not always clean, what we call clean or polished. Sometimes they're dirty sounding. Sometimes they're heavy sounding. Sometimes they're sad. There's a lot of doleful scripts. We see a lot of heavily poetic and weighted scripts about things that are thoughtful or lugubrious, or, you know, you've gotta hit a lot of different kinds of feelings and tones now in scripts that are not always pretty. They're not always perfect. And they're not always lovely sounding. Sometimes they're gritty and gravely and that kind of thing. So that to me reflects life as well. We don't always sound good in life. We don't always -- Anne: Imperfect. Lau: -- say the right thing. Yeah. We're not always PC or whatever. We're just not always right. So the idea of wanting to fix myself all the time, I need to be right. I can't be wrong. Did I get it right, is wrong because there is no right. It's really just according to the vision of the listener, who the listener is and what the messaging is that gives them the value that they're looking for. Anne: Yeah. Imperfect is actually perfect. Lau: It is. Anne: I really believe that. And I think because that connects to people on a very raw and real level, and that's where you get a lot of the casting specs say, make it conversational, make it natural as if you're talking to your friends, make it real. And that is probably the hardest thing for us to do as voice actors. And I think we spend our careers honing that skill of being a better actor and being more real and authentic. And like you said, their scripts are all over the place. Sometimes they're sad and doleful, and we need to be able to be in that moment and create those scenes and react to those scenes. And that is not always a pretty sound. I think one of my favorite corporate narrations that I always play from when I'm presenting corporate narration is a voice actress who, her voice cracks. And it's not a perfect sound. And I think a lot of my students, they feel like they have to be articulate, and I'm like, we're not articulate in the real world. As long as you can understand what I'm saying, contrary to popular belief, you do not need to be articulate because when you're too articulate, then it becomes something that is difficult to listen to. Lau: That's exactly right. And this idea of perfection and this idea of polished is just not where we wanna go oftentimes. It just, in fact, it's the anti that now, it's the opposite of that now. It's like, what's our largest generation now? Our largest generation is millennials in the United States. And so we wanna emulate the demographic to get an empathy factor that, oh, this is me. This sounds like me. This person feels the way I feel. They understand me. Well, I can't sound like that in order to get that feeling, right? It's a more colloquial, more chill, more like laid back, kind of feel to it. And that's hard. I think for the over 40 crowd, like my generation generation Xeer, it's really hard to say, wait a second. What happened to all of our theater acting background? What happened to all of our speech and rhetoric? What happened to, well, it's there, you have to trust it's there, but it's not always applicable to what we're doing in the script. You know what I like to do? Anne, I like to say, change the word conversational and natural, which is throws people oftentimes -- change it to environmental, change it to contextual, because we wanna hear you being somewhere. We wanna hear you involved in something. Anne: Oh I agree with that. Lau: It's not like sound this way. . Anne: Sure. And besides that, I'm always adding in, I wanna hear movement. I wanna hear movement in the scene. It's not you in a monologue. There's so many people that will do the work and say, okay, I'm Anne, I'm talking to my friend Lau, and we're in the kitchen. And they do all that setup work. And then all they do is read the words. And it becomes a monologue to them. Even if they start off talking to Lau, right, they tend to go off, and then they're speaking into the air. And I'm like, if you were on a stage and you were interacting with someone, like you should be with the listener, right, interacting, you would not be necessarily going off on a monologue, 'cause that would be impolite, right? You know, you need to let them in on the conversation. You need to check in on them once in a while. And also when you do that, if you can move in the scene, that makes your audition or your read a whole lot more impactful, I think, than just standing in the same place. Because on a stage you wouldn't stand in the same place typically for too long, right? You'd have some movement. And so that translates to so many things. Right? In the middle of the script, stop and take a look. And where are you? What happened in the scene? Did it change? Did you stand up? Did you walk across the room? Did you look at Lau and see if Lau is shaking her head in agreement or does she have a question? And so I think if you can really set those scenes up, even in something that is written very like dry, and I see this all the time in, in narration scripts, you wanna make sure that that's a more engaging script. You wanna bring that script to life. Well, how are you gonna do that when you're just standing there in the same spot and the energy is only coming out of your lips? Lau: Exactly. It's unnatural. Anne: It's unnatural. We need energy in our hands and our body movement in the scene changes. That I think is just, is so important to bring that to life. Lau: It's, it's so important. And for those folks who are listening in, who have actor training and have trained under the discipline of Sanford Meisner, Meisner's work was based in the concept that all we're asking you to do is act natural under purely unnatural circumstances. So it's, it's really okay. I'm tricking my brain into thinking this is real, even though I know it's not real, whether you're in a theater or a vocal booth or in front of a camera, it couldn't be further from real. Right? But there has to be a piece of you psychologically that stays alive that says I am doing the kind of work that I'm trained to do, that I want to be doing, that I'm enjoying doing. And I give myself permission to fall, to jump, to fail, to make mistakes, to do what real people do in real time. This idea of like, oh, I shouldn't mess up, I shouldn't make a mistake, I should get it right the first or second time -- it's not a natural way to think because natural terms in nature is real time for us. And in real time, we make tons of mistakes and stammer and we stutter and we forget information. Right? Anyone who loves SNL, love that show loved it because of all the mistakes they made. Anne: Those were the funniest. Lau: They were the funniest. Anne: Those were the funniest. Lau: They were hilarious. Right? Anne: Yeah. Yeah. Lau: It's like, you know, we always say, how do you determine the difference between an amateur and a professional? And it's easy. They both make mistakes and quite oftentimes a lot, but the amateur will fall apart. They'll melt down. They won't be able to function. The professional will do a little this and a little of that. Sorry about that. And then move on and use it, use it. Anne: People are so forgiving. They really are. And again, like I said, if all you're thinking about is what you're sounding like and having that perfect voice, and then scrutinizing and, and hating yourself because you don't sound a particular way, think again. Because I was on stage too a long time ago, but also when I used to teach in front of students, right, I would get so excited -- like I was always told that I was a great teacher because I was so excited about the stuff that I was saying. Right? I was passionate. I was enthusiastic. I wanted to share. And that was what made me a good teacher. And I oftentimes would stand up in front of the class. My brain would be going 100 miles an hour, but what came outta my mouth would be gobbledygook sometimes. But they forgave me. I did not speak perfectly. Sometimes I like, oh, wait a minute. I forgot something. So imperfect. I had students who were so much more aligned with me and who really listened to me because I was imperfect. And I was able to admit that and be honest with them. And I never once tried to say, oh, I know more than you. I just wanted to inspire and motivate. Lau: Right. Right. Anne: And that is something I take behind the mic with me. No matter what genre I'm doing specifically though, e-learning, absolutely. I give my heart. Because that is, that is what people connect with. Lau: Yes, absolutely. Anne: But I cannot afford to listen to what I sound like. Or even if I go there a little bit when I'm editing -- so sometimes when I edit, yeah. I get a little tired of my voice. But then again, that's listening to myself and being nitpicking to get rid of breaths and stuff like that. And then it's just becomes tiring because I've been doing it for three hours. So that's different than not liking the way your voice sounds. And so I think you have to just have faith in the fact that you are in this industry, people are hiring you and paying you money for your voice. And that is giving you the validation that, you know what, you're probably doing a pretty good job. Otherwise you may not make any money. You not be able to do that. So. Lau: If you're not being invited back, and you have no bookings, and no one's working with you, then you'll say, oh, I have to evaluate this, what's going on. But you know, you have to psychologically be okay with living in the world of imperfection. You have to live -- certainly in the technical world. It's a tech glitch a minute. You have to be okay with living in the world of mistakes and the mar, the scar. Like the scar makes us interesting. Like, I don't want you to cover it up. I don't want you to laser it off. I don't want you to Photoshop it. I wanna see it. It's interesting to me. It's like your experience, you know? Anne: It's that whole filter thing that's going on now, right? In social media, like are you prettier with the filter or without the filter? Guess what? You're pretty without the filter, you're pretty just as you are. Lau: And you have to measure, you have to see, how am I measuring pretty? Like, what is my measurement for that? How deep do I go with that layer? And I'd like to think as we age and we get a little older and more experienced, we go deeper, deeper, deeper below the surface of the skin. We go like really deep and say, wow. There's a lot of beauty in there that I can bring out that is not aesthetically beautiful. But that, like, I go back to Shakespeare, 'cause I think Shakespeare is everything, and the characters, especially the female characters, but the male characters as well, some of them are really dirty and gritty and ugly and -- but you can't play them until like you're 40 and you understand a little bit about life. You understand a little bit about the grit of experience. Maybe God forbid, you've lost a child. Maybe you've gotten divorced. Maybe you've lost money and then gotten money back. Like these things really can become beautiful lessons and stories in our life that we can share and message versus hide and cover. And I like to think of scripts and copy in that way. It's like, if you're a mom or you took time off, let's say you took 20 years off and you're coming back, don't hide who you are. Don't hide your history. Bring your history to the table 'cause psychologically that's gonna give you a more authentic read in what you're doing potentially. Anne: Yeah. And I'm also gonna say not to give the read that you think people expect of you. Again, what makes us interesting is our imperfections and our flaws. And so I highly, highly encourage and, and recommend BOSSes that you look beyond, like you were saying, beyond the surface, hashtag no filter. Right guys? Like we want those reads. We want those reads that are real and raw and don't have the pretty sound filter put on there. We should have a, a hashtag for that in social media for voiceover, hashtag no pretty voice or -- Lau: That's -- I love that. Anne: You know what I mean? Lau: I love that. And check, we do checks all the time. Check your psychology at the door. Check it. Like not over-analyze. You know, analysis can be paralysis, but, but really check it like, am I okay with not being perfect? And am I also okay with -- oh, here's another one, Anne. Not thinking I'm perfect. Because we don't wanna work with people that are so vain and so arrogant. And so like I did my takes. I'm all done. And if you don't like it, it's too bad. I wanna work with someone who they're 50, 60, 70, 80 years old. And they're like, I'm learning still. I'm exploring. I wanna develop. Can you share something with me? I'm not like done. I'm not finished. I'm not like a final product myself. You know, I'm a work in progress. Anne: Yeah, yeah. I don't think any of us really should think that way anyway. No matter what stage we're at. Right? Always something to learn. Lau: Well, I think it always stops you. It stops your progress and what you could potentially learn and become when you just think that you have it all. You got it all down pat and it's polished and you know it. And that's a big question I get too in coaching, Anne, is like, should I go after this, Lau? Should I go after that? And I said, well, I don't know if you should go after it. Ask yourself the question authentically. How do you feel about it? How are you connecting with it? Where is your voice right now? I mean, I think you're asking the wrong question. I think the questions are really, how do I wanna develop my vocabulary right of knowledge? Anne: How should I go after this? Or let's make a plan to go after this. And I think if the desire is there, hey, it's all part of the journey too. I'm a firm believer that, you know what? I would say to myself, well, I've never gone after animation because I don't know, for me right now, the passion is not necessarily in characters. But I'll tell you what, I'm a character in everything that I do. And I'm a character in medical narration. I am a character in corporate narration. I'm a character in commercial, and it just may not be as animated or cartoon-like, but absolutely we are all actors. We are all characters. Lau: And these days, you know in character work a lot of times, you know, in some of the largest scripts that we see coming through for Pixar and Disney -- Anne: It's real. Lau: They just want real sounds. They want real VO. They don't even want character voices. They make a big note in bold, no character voices. And they said like the leads, these are the leads because we had, you know, A-List Hollywood actors playing these leads. So we wanted to hear who Ray Romano really is, who Tom Cruz really is, who Queen Latifah really is. So that's kind of trickled down, I think in a nice way to the larger population where character now means like, well, who are you? What's the authentic sound you make? That we -- we'll consider that a character. Anne: Absolutely. I love this conversation. Lau: It's inspiring. It really is. Anne: So BOSSes out there, love your voice. Embrace it. Be real. Absolutely. All right. So Lau, I am so excited we had this conversation. I can't wait to have another conversation with you next week. So BOSSes out there, if you would like to make an impact and contribute to the communities that give back to you, find out more at 100voiceswhocare.org. And also a big shout-out to our sponsor, ipDTL. I love ipDTL. It allows me and Lau to connect with you. BOSSes out there, find out more at ipdtl.com. Have an amazing week, guys, and we'll see you next week. Bye. Lau: Bye. >> 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.com 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.

Auditions can be as nerve wracking as a performance, but the best way to come out on top is to be prepared. Anne & Lau are audition experts. When you break it down, an audition is a sample of your performance, and bosses, we know you know how to perform! The best way to start an audition is with copy you feel confident reading and that showcases your acting chops. Making genuine connections with the other actors in the space and casting directors is what keeps you on their mind long after the read ends. Confidence goes a long way in audition settings. Do not shy away from live auditions, and having your 10 favorite scripts on hand will make the impromptu auditions feel more manageable. Want to learn more? Tune in for the full scoop… Transcript >> It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere 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. Anne: Hey everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS podcast and the business superpower series. I'm your host Anne Ganguzza, and I'm excited to bring back the one and only Lau Lapides to the show. Thank you, Lau, for joining me. I'm so excited to talk to you today. Lau: I'm thrilled to be here as always, thrilled to be here, Anne. Anne: Well, Lau, it's been a week. Lau: And I feel like it's been a month with how much our -- how busy our lives are, right, Anne? Anne: I know, right? Lau: I mean, it's like so much. Anne: But this week you were a part of me besides the podcast, besides the podcast. So I'm very excited to be working with you as an agent. And so you did something that I have never experienced before. You called me into a last minute audition. And I said, oh, okay. I didn't have any script. You called me into a Zoom room. And I was like, okay, is that gonna just be me and the casting director? Oh, that's so lovely for Lau to think of me like that. I'm really excited. Okay. Sure. So I joined the Zoom session and there were like, whoa, quite a few people on there. And I didn't have a script. I didn't know what was gonna go on, what was happening. Let's talk about this audition that you called me into and your process for these things. Lau: You were such a good sport. 'Cause you could have said no, I know it's not in your vocabulary to say no, but -- Anne: It's so true. Lau: -- you could have. It would've been totally fine if you said no, but I was really pleasantly surprised to see that not only you, but everyone in that room said yes to coming in the room. Now I'll set it up for you since today we're talking about auditions. This was a little bit, I would call it unorthodox. It was a little bit unorthodox the way we set this up, but that's kind of my middle name and I'm alright with that. I go with that 'cause I like to have a little fire, a little fire in life. So the premise of this audition was that our friend and producer coming in from Switzerland, Lamar Hawkings -- amazing man, amazing, who is very, very close friends with my colleague Joanne Yarrow that I work with at my studio -- invited him in to say, hey, you are doing amazing projects. I mean my friend, Joanne -- who I have to introduce you to, she's fabulous -- she's the voice now the American voice, of La Occitane campaign that he handles. And so I'll send you that. It's awesome. So I'm like, Ooh, we have a wonderful agency, MCVO. We have a wonderful membership base at the studio, talent inner circle. Why don't I invite some of our really great people with great voices to come in and do a private audition for Lamar? And he was completely up for it. He said, I would love that, Lau. I'm looking for new talent. I'm doing a new animation soon. I'm doing commercial campaigns. I'm doing this. And that. He's very, very busy. He's in Switzerland, but he's actually from the states, originally from Texas. And I said, great, let's do it. So we set it up for yesterday. Now here's the thing. A bunch of the people knew that the audition were coming because they were in the studio base, the talent inner circle studio base and had RSVPed that, yes, I want to attend this. I'm able to, I've been screened. I'm accepted in, and I'm coming in. Great. But then I had a number of open slots that I said, I've got to get more MCVO people knowing about this and coming in because this is a legit audition, and it's a live audition. It's something I really love to do and love to host. Anne: That was so different for me. I mean, I felt like I traveled into LA and went to an in-person audition again almost. Lau: Exactly. That's exactly what happened. And fun fact from the background, 'cause no one ever sees what's going on in the background, I was on vacation. I was up in the Berkshires. Like literally I'm at lunch with my husband, and I'm texting like a wild woman. He said, what are you doing? I said, you know, I'm working. It's always a work vacation for me, a workcation. I said, I'm getting more talent to come in and know about this audition, who don't know, from MCVO, and I'm texting you, and I'm texting Jay Michael Collins, and I'm texting Terrell, and I'm texting Carol, and I'm texting this one, and I'm texting Mike Pollock. And all of a sudden, all these people are saying yes and jumping in, and I didn't even have time to tell them what it was. I didn't even have time to say anything. Anne: That was absolutely the thing. And I'm like, whoa, wait a minute. And I'll admit to you, BOSSes out there, I got in the room and I didn't have copy. And I thought, am I missing something? And thank goodness that Lau, you gave me a little bit of information and said grab some commercial copy or we have some. When I got in there, I didn't see it. Maybe it was there and I just didn't know where to look. So I got off and I thought, oh, well that must look horrible. . Lau: No, not at all. Anne: I went to go grab copy. And then I came back in and then it was like, what two people left to go? So I made it just in time. Lau: And then Carol Alfred, who is facilitating, right, one of our coaches, she's texting me, ah, Anne Ganguzza is on. And then she goes, she left. What she left? Where'd she go? And I'm like, Anne, where are you? I thought maybe you were having a technical issue or you had to go and do something. Anne: I went to go find some copy because I didn't wanna be called on and then say, I don't have copy. You know what I mean? So I went to go grab some. Lau: Right. And now, you know, very rarely when we do this kind of audition, we always have copy on hand for cold reads. I know some talent don't prefer to do a cold read. So we say, we'll bring something you wanna bring that shows you off, but. Anne: I was ice cold I was ice cold, but I said to myself, okay -- and BOSSes, listen, when your agent asks you to come in and audition, it's a sign that they believe in you, number one. And that they would not have asked you to come into an audition if they did not feel that you were worthy of doing an audition. And there was no way that I was going to disappoint my agent. Lau: Oh, and I appreciated that so much. And some of the others that came in, it was hilarious. I'm gonna save some of the texts that were like, hey Lau. Uh, that was great. What was that? Where was it? Anne: Yeah, exactly. What just happened? Lau: What happened? It was, you were like, you were in some matrix. There was, there was some vortex that came through like a storm, but I gotta tell you, and this is good for your listeners to hear, every single person who came in that thought they were unprepared or didn't have copy or weren't sure what they were doing did a fantastic job. And it just reminded me what pros we all are when we get in a room. Anne: Yeah. Yeah. Lau: We have passion. We love what we're doing. There's this super connected quality of being in a room with other talent, 'cause that's unexpected as well to be in a room with other talent like that. Anne: I was gonna say absolutely. One of the other things was, oh my God. And everybody else is listening to me. It's not just the agent, the casting director. It is like 50 people in the room. I don't know how many people were in the room, but there were more than one. There was quite a few people listening. And I happened to just come in really quickly with J. Michael Collins who was reading. And then that's when I said, I don't have that copy. And so I skedaddled outta there. And fortunately you had said, just grab any copy. And I said, okay. So I went and I grabbed some copy and it was, my read was ice cold. But again, like I said, BOSSe so important to know that when your agent gives you an audition, it's because they have the faith in you that you're gonna be able to execute. And I think that that is the one thing that really saved me. And I will admit to you, BOSSes, when you're thrown into a situation like that and you're not quite sure what's happening, you're kind of running on adrenaline, and it's a little scary, I'm just gonna say, not knowing what's happening. But I think it was a wonderful lesson for me, even as long as I've been in this industry, just to trust in your agent, trust in yourself, have faith in the process and just go forth and execute. And what's the worst that can happen? I mean, well, I thought of a billion things like, I was like, when I was done, I was like, I'm not quite sure how that went, but he said, nice job. So I'm okay with that. Lau: Yeah. And I gotta tell you, Anne, that enabled me to what I debrief with him -- we're debriefing on Tuesday -- I can now go down the list and say, do you remember this person? You remember this? You had a visual, not only in sound, you had a visual. You had more than one read on a lot of people as well. you had a character read, you had a commercial read, this, that. And to be able to really discuss the performances for particular projects that he's working on -- so it's never just like this one hit wonder and go. It's always like, Ooh, I like the quality of this person, that person. Can I call them back? And I see, hear their demo? Can I, whatever; it's just like an introduction to you. Anne: And that I think is brilliant in reality, because like you have introduced your roster to a potential client and the visual, yes. Now, you know, of course I'm sure there's a bunch of people in their studios going, well, this is an audition over Zoom. And then the engineers in there will be going, I don't know if Zoom is the best quality, but honestly I think that any good casting director is gonna know from your performance, whether it's in your studio or through Zoom or whatever, they're gonna understand. And they're gonna know a good performance when they see one. Lau: Absolutely. And this particular producer, from what I know of his background, well, he has a very rich history of live performance and theater and media. Anne: And that aligns with it. Lau: He gets it. He gets that, because I had people who were in cars and bathrooms, in their workstation. They were, I mean they were coming in from everywhere. So his business brain, I'm sure was saying, oh, they're busy people. They're not just sitting in a spot waiting for me. They're working, they're running, they're traveling, they're on vacation. They're this or that. I'm thankful that they took the time to come in so I could see their work for projects. Anne: And that means a lot too, I'm quite sure. And especially again, like we're always trying to make in auditions -- and I love this episode because this is becoming so much more than just a normal audition type of episode, where we give you the tips and the tricks -- because the experience of this one was so different, and it really, I think can teach us how to make ourselves memorable in a multitude of ways, not just knowing the conditions, right, of the audition. Number one, you called us in cold or you called certain people in cold, and that can resonate well with whoever's listening for that potential client. And also again, there's that visual, and it is like the in person auditions that -- God, I used to go in and it was great. I'd see everybody in the lobby. Now the difference is that I would audition in front of just, you know, it was just me. And it wouldn't be everybody else listening to my auditions. So that added a whole other level to -- it was almost like a workshop. But in reality, if you tend to get nervous in these experiences that could even potentially make you more nervous. So again, having the ability and the privilege to be able to make that kind of impression on a potential client, I think is wonderful. And Lau, you're one of the few people I know that do this. And so I think it's a wonderful thing, even though I had no idea what it was when I was doing it, but , but now I know. Lau: Do we ever, right? Anne: But now I know. Lau: Therein lies the educational value when we talk about professional development is it really one audition or is it as you called it, Anne, an opportunity to build a relationship with a wonderful producer, who's gonna have a lifetime of stuff. That's I think it's the latter, really. It's never just one audition for one thing. It's always like, hey, you're cool. You're a cool, dude. You're a cool dudette. I like you. Right? I like your vibe. And that's where if I were to say to your listeners and also to my audience that came in, many of which were coming in from the studio membership, we're at different stages of the game. I would say one of the things I want you to really consider and remember is that when a producer meets you live, they wanna see a little bit of who you are. They wanna catch your personality and your energy and your persona a little bit. So especially him, especially Lamar. So don't be afraid -- you don't wanna take up a ton of time, but don't be afraid to just chill a little bit and have a little bit of that conversational feel to what you're doing, because you're really meeting a real person in real time. It's a great opportunity for them to know a little piece of your actual personality versus I'm just a voiceover talent and here's my read. No, I'm Anne, I'm Lau. I'm J, and this is what I'm doing and I'm, I'm traveling and I'm whatever, that's cool. People like that. It's the goal of how do I make you feel? Am I gonna make you feel comfortable or am I gonna make you feel uncomfortable? Anne: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I like the fact that you had the ability for everyone to kind of listen to everybody else's auditions. I, at the time though, because I was hunting down copy, and then I literally had another session that was coming up like after five minutes, I couldn't stay for a long time, but what I did stay for, I really enjoyed. And I heard people doing all different types of copy, and I thought, wow, this is really kind of cool. It felt to me like a combination of a showcase and an audition, an in-person audition. Lau: That's what it turned into that's and if you want to, I'm happy to send you the replay because we record those sessions and we hold those for archival purposes. If you want it -- Anne: That's wonderful. Lau: -- you could do the whole thing. It lasted about, I wanna say two hours, like a solid two hours. Anne: Wow. Lau: And we had a rotation of people coming in and out, which was amazing. I think we landed on about 30 people with the folks -- Anne: That's fantastic. Lau: -- who couldn't come, couldn't make it, no showed, new people jumping in, 30, like yourself, some of the country's top talent were there. And I was like, oh my God. We were like representing the country's top talent. I was so proud, so proud of everyone and not just the talent for what they delivered, but the kind of people that came in the room and were kind to him. No one pulled a fit. No one was a diva. No one was making excuses. That's all stuff, when we talk about auditioning, that you wanna steer clear of is like rule number one, I didn't wanna land my problems onto you. Anne: Sure. Absolutely. Lau: Anyone who's had theater training knows that they teach you in conservatory, leave your trash at the door, right? Don't take it into the workspace. Don't worry. It'll be there when you leave; you can take it with you when you go out, you know, but try not to bring your stuff in with you because you wanna come in as an open slate, a pallet of possibilities. You know, we had talked about solving a problem, filling a need, but it's more than that. It's like, does this person have likability factor? Anne: Sure, sure, absolutely. Lau: You know, would I wanna hang out with them? Anne: And you know, what's so interesting is one of the reasons a lot of people get into voiceover is because they wanna almost like hide behind the microphone and not necessarily show who they are or show their face. And so this kind of just threw that on its side. Lau: And that was great. Anne: Yeah. And that again gives such a good impression, I think, just gives it a whole different dimension to the audition so it's not just the voice, but also the, the person and the personality. And I'm the biggest fan of -- look, people wanna connect with people and not just a logo or a voice. And I really feel that that is, is effective in our profession, that if we can connect with our clients as people, that really, really does a lot to, I think, really secure and, and enhance and, and make us memorable to one another. Lau: It's huge, Anne. I'm so glad you brought that up, the visibility factor, because I could have easily said, hey, take your visuals out. All I need to see is your name or your picture, whatever. Just voiceover's fine. Get people off the hook so they don't have to put on the makeup and the lipstick, but I didn't want that. I wanted them to have the ability, and many of them wanted to come on to be seen as people, and also to see the diversity of our crowd, like our people were coming in literally from all over the world, and everyone had a different look, a different age, a different feel, a different background. I think that's important in terms of having cultivating a community that is both educational and professional level. I just think it enriched everyone else to see the level of talent that was there, that the bar was very high. Age range ranged from like teens to probably 70, and every kind of background. And I think that's very inspirational for people to feel like I'm included. This is inclusive. Like I don't have to sound or look or be someone else. I'm me. And that's who I am. Anne: Right. Correct. Lau: And I think everyone did a fairly accurate job as to their brand, their quality because they felt as comfortable as they could feel in a room full of great people. Anne: Yeah. Yeah. Well that was it too. I mean, the fact is, is that I think it was a wonderful experience. Even if let's say I never get cast, the fact that I had the experience for just introducing myself to a potential client in this way has given me more, I'm gonna say confidence and really more confidence in terms of, well, auditions can be anything. Right? Be prepared. It's almost like, oh, I did a quick improv session there. So, you know? Lau: Exactly. And I think, I think COVID changed it to some degree where you don't have to be in an office. You don't have to be in someone else's studio. Your studio is the world now. It's really the world. You could be in your car. You could be in a bathroom. You could be anywhere potentially meeting someone, recording, whatever, the possibilities are endless. It takes me back to even before COVID, Anne, when, when we saw interviews like corporate interviews start to happen in Starbucks. That was one of the big coffee shops that I hear someone behind me, oh, they're having an interview. I'm gonna be quiet. That was a new thing. I don't know when that started. I wanna say maybe 10 years ago or something, that was a new industry standard that you didn't need to be in an office to have an interview. You could have an interview at Starbucks, and it's now kind of the same for us. Like we could do an audition anywhere. We could be in the mountains and do an audition, which is exciting to me. Anne: Yeah. I really love the additional opportunity to connect. So let me ask you a question then. So this is not the first one that you've done or is it the first one that you've done, first audition like this? Lau: Live? Anne: Yeah, live. Lau: In this way? Anne: Yes. Lau: I have done a number of these before. Not recently. This is the first one I've done recently with someone of this caliber in terms of a producer coming in from Europe, someone that I have the inside scoop on who's producing particular campaigns that I'm interested in and animations that I'm interested in for the agency, getting into that genre, that field. And I like it. I mean, I just personally, as Lau, just as a person, I yearn for that improv energy. I yearn for that feeling of like, yeah, let's just meet. All right, a number of people know, they're RSVPing, they're coming in. But then others may not know; they're coming in now. It's like real life. It's like a party, right? You invite your guest list. but then the guests may bring someone, the guests may invite someone else, da, da, da. It's like an authentic experience of what happens in real life when people are coming together, and they're meeting, and they're showcasing their work. So when we talk about showcases, it's not all premeditated ABC. It's like life networking is life. You don't know who you're gonna sit next to on the plane. You don't know who you're gonna be next to in the elevator. You don't -- and I would say, be careful, ladies and gentlemen, when you go in the restrooms, like be careful what you say, be careful what you do because your whole world is your oyster now for meeting producers and producers can also be mom and pop shops, people who are producing their own podcasts, what have you. You wanna always treat everyone respectfully and equally as the stars that they are in their own world, because you may be collaborating and working with them. Anne: Yeah. Good advice. What other tips would you have then in terms of not just this type of audition, but auditions in general that you've seen? Because you certainly are outside the box I think when it comes to the opportunities that you're affording people, which is a wonderful thing. Lau: Thank you so much, thank you. I would say, and, and just thinking back on that experience, some of the things that I would want to change and shift for some of the talent coming through. One is, and this is like an actor's rule, always have material that is great for you, that you love and feel comfortable with ready to go. It's like, whatever you wanna call it, your demo material, your portfolio material, whatever. Have your strong suits ready to go. And it might even be an audition or two that came in last week that you did a great job. It might be a recent booking. You just have to make sure of course you either have permission to use the script or it's in house. It's not gonna be used for commercial purposes. Or just re-craft it enough so that it becomes your own and you know, it's yours. It's good. It's something you feel comfortable doing. It's where your suit lies. I would have that ready to go. And I would have at least a half, a dozen, 30-second pieces ready to go for something live when it happens. It may happen rarely. But when it happens, it happens. Anne: Yeah. That's such good advice because I literally, like I mentioned, I didn't have it. I went and grabbed something that I -- thankfully I have a large pool of copy that, you know, because I work with, with people with copy. So thankfully, and I found something that I was comfortable with. So that's really wonderful advice. Now I'm gonna make sure that I have a few pieces set aside for if that were to happen again, absolutely. Any other tips? Lau: Yeah. And I have another tip too, and this is like the actor in you. So when we talk to VOs, we say, do you consider yourself an actor? Surprisingly many VOs will say, I'm not really an actor. It's not really what I do. I voiced this. That's what I do. I always like to use the word actor because I don't necessarily mean just acting values in the character. I mean, in your life. So like all the world's a stage, right? You're acting like a pro, you're acting like a coach. You're acting like a producer. You're acting in those role like just like an acting chair of a department or, you know, an acting politician, how we would use that term. So you're acting, so don't forget your actor values. What I mean is like some of the folks that came into the room, I noticed they had to let you know that they were in a rush, or they just stole a break, or they barely made it because they couldn't get outta work, whatever. Let that go, like play the role. The role is I'm coming into this session, and I'm totally ready for this session. And I don't know what's going on in the background. There's a bunch of chaos in the background. I don't know what's going on in the background. I'm acting as the professional in this moment, knowing I'm only gonna be here for how however long I'm here. And then I go back to -- remember, I said, leave your stuff at the door? I'm gonna go back to that. That's hard for people to do, Anne. I think that there's this confessional thing in people that they feel the need to tell you the truth about everything. They wanna tell you how difficult their day was or that their tire has gone down. And I barely made it here, and oh my God, my kid and the baby sitter didn't show up. And I always say, leave it at the door because it's not pertinent to the people that are bringing you in. It's just a waste of time, really, for them. You and I talk about energy a lot, karma, like stars aligning. I really do believe in that. I think things happen for a reason. And I don't want you meaning, not you, but the listener, I don't want you guys to ruin your karma by sticking wrenches in it of things that are happening, whether they're your choice or whether they're just happening to you -- don't bring it into the space because it can't do anything positive for your audition or for your exchange in the rapport building. It just can't. It's like an obstacle that you're putting in the way, and you're qualifying something and using it as an excuse. And you don't wanna fall into the victimization compartment. Anne: Sure, absolutely. Lau: You never wanna fall into that. You wanna fall into the place where it's like, hey, I'm gonna bring you what you need. In fact, I could hire you. In fact, I could hire people for you. In fact, I could do this for you. You wanna be that person that they come to to fix the problem. They don't wanna be the person who creates problems that they don't have, If that makes sense. Anne: Oh, that's wonderful advice. Absolutely. Lau: Yeah. So I would leave that. I would leave that outside of the room, and then one more thing. as the tech queens that we are, tech meaning coaching tech, I want that warm up. Some of the folks didn't warm up, and I could tell exactly who they were, who just did not do the vocal warmup because I know the quality of the reads that they could typically do, and they were rushing into it. Whereas others came in, they were already in a session. They were already recording. They were already vocally warmed up. They were ready to go. I could tell the difference. I don't know if you could tell the difference. I could tell the difference. Anne: I could tell the people who were absolutely ready. You know what I mean? And were like, bam, they had their material and they just -- Lau: They were right there. Anne: -- they just executed. Yep. yep. So yep. I could tell. Yeah. Yeah. Lau: So that readiness that's like being on the bench, you know, as a sports player in the game -- Anne: You're ready to go. Lau: -- you're not in the game yet. You're really not there, but you're visible to the crowd. You're on TV. You're getting ready to get selected. And there's that state of readiness that you have to have so when they look at you, it's like, boom, I'm in the game. I'm ready. There is no transition time that you should need to go through. It really should just be there, present, and delivered. And that's hard. It's -- I make it sound easy. It's not it's transitions like executive functioning skill transitions a lot of people find difficult in life, is how do I pivot from this, to this? To this, to this, without any clutter in the middle of it? Anne: Yeah. I do have a question. Something that I thought, just because again, I wasn't there for the entire time, but I did hear people slating, which I think is fine, but people were slating with other talent agencies as well. And I wasn't quite sure about that. I thought why -- you invited me in, so I wasn't gonna necessarily say what other talent agencies were representing me. Oh, okay. So I was really thrown by that one and I thought should I say other talent agencies that represent me when you invited me in so generously and I just said my name? For me, it didn't seem right. But what are your thoughts on that? Lau: Yeah. And, and now, you know, in retrospect, yeah, for this one, there was no right or wrong. It was totally clean, totally open and that would be the protocol, you're right. That would be the actual protocol because there was an educational value to this workshop, I allowed and wanted to people to slate what they have on their plate to have a high ethos, to show a high ethos for themselves. And because we're not exclusive anyway. We're freelance. But I hear you. Anne: Well, because of the invite, it was just, for me, it was like, well, I could say other, and to be honest with you, I just, that threw me. And so I just said my name, 'cause I wanted to be respectful of you who invited me in as an agent. So. Lau: And actually just post, just for listeners to know behind the scenes, 'cause they would never know this or see this, when we have a meeting and we debrief, and we talk about talent behind their backs, in a nice way, I'll make it clear that if he wants to move forward with anyone, he would do it through MCVO. Anne: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Lau: He would. It would be only in the case of like they're not with MCVO. They're exclusive with someone else. I handpick them to come in. Okay. That's fine. Other than that, everyone's with MCVO or in the tick membership. And so I'm like, so we're kind of representing everyone here. So he would use us as the agent and as the liaison to help with the step by step of everything, if he wanted to really call someone back. Anne: Yeah. Then I would say, just my contribution to this episode would be if you are in that position and your live slating and, and auditioning, I would say respectfully with the agent that invited you to that, you should at least have that agency unless it's been otherwise disclosed that you can mention other agencies that you are represented by. Lau: Absolutely. Anne: Just my thoughts on that. Wow. Well, I wanna say thank you, Lau, for that experience. It's always a pleasure learning from you and talking with you every week. So I really appreciate it. It's been a wonderful conversation. Lau: Oh my pleasure. All the time. I can't wait for the next one. Anne: All right. So guys, BOSSes, I want you to take a moment and imagine yourself being a part of making a difference in our world and giving back to the communities that give to you. Find out more at 100voiceswhocare.org. And a big shout-out to our sponsor, ipDTL. You too can network like BOSSes, like Lau and I, and find out more at ipdtl.com. You guys, have an amazing week and we'll see you next week. Bye. >> 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.com 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.

Branding is a form of self-discovery. Your brand is how the world perceives you, but more importantly, how potential voice seekers will perceive you. Anne & Lau want you to put your best foot forward, and that starts with using your name and likeness to let the world know who you really are. Type casting, client feedback, and peer advice can all be tools to build your understanding of how others perceive your brand. But it doesn't stop there! Look inside yourself to learn your core beliefs. What is it that makes you tick? Externalizing this will strengthen your brand and make it authentic, like you. Sounds challenging? Listen up Bosses, Anne & Lau are here to help… Transcript >> It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere 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. Anne: Hey everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS podcast. I'm your host Anne Ganguzza. Welcome to our business superpower series with the one and only Lau Lapides. Hey Lau. Lau: Hey Anne. Anne: How's it going today? Lau: Oh, it's beyond awesome. I'm always thrilled to be on with you. I mean it's, it's -- Anne: Beyond awesome, I love it. Lau: -- can't wait to see what's gonna happen. Anne: I love it. Well, then I've got a question for you. Okay? Lau: Okay. All right. Anne: So this is a question I get asked a lot. So if you had to give three words to describe me, what would those three words be? Either my voice or something that would help to brand me. What would those three words be? Lau: Now, are you talking about let's qualify that, is that within the profession or is that just in general as a person from the short time that we've known each other? Anne: Well, you know what, since it's such a personal brand, like we are personal brands, I think it could be a mix of both if it needs to be. Because I think people wanna connect to the human side of Anne as well as the business side of Anne. Lau: Okay. And by no means is it just these three words, 'cause we could probably come up with you 50 words for you, but we, we only have so much time. So we'll say three for now. Anne: And hopefully they're good words. Lau: Oh. Of course. Okay. So the first one that comes to my mind that I can't dismiss is feisty. Anne: Oh, feisty! Lau: Feisty. Anne: I like feisty. Lau: Feisty always goes with like fun in my mind too, but feisty -- Anne: That's a good word. Thank you. Lau: The second one would be, I wanna say intelligent. I feel it's a little bit bland of a word. I was almost gonna say sophisticated. Anne: Oh, so feisty, intelligent or sophisticated. I'll take those. Lau: Seasoned. Anne: Ooh, seasoned. Lau: Seasoned. Anne: That's awesome. Wow. Lau: And those are three that come to my mind. If you gimme another five minutes, I'll come up with more. But. Anne: I love that. Wow. Lau: And to be perfectly transparent with our listeners, even though I feel like I've known you forever, we really have only been working together like a week. And we only met, when did we meet, a month or two ago? Right? But see, already I got so much perception of your vibe and the way you work and how you're thinking about things. And it's, it's a lot in a very short amount of time. Anne: I love that. So if I have three words for you, and this is funny, cause look, I have not thought about this, BOSSes. I sprung this on Lau like just as you heard it. So she was kind of not anticipating either. So I'm going to say brilliant. That's one for you. And I mean brilliant in not just a sense of like intelligence, but I mean like brilliant, like sparkly. Lau: Oh. Anne: Like in a sparkly way. Lau: Like how you would say about a diamond or something. Anne: Right? Yeah. Yeah. Like brilliant. Lau: Oh thank you. That's really sweet. Anne: And honestly this is something maybe you're not gonna put it on your, your webpage, but we could think of a different word for it. I mean, I think you could, but beautiful really is another, and I don't mean beautiful like visually I do mean visually, but I really mean beautiful spirit. Like a beautiful spirit. Lau: Thank you. Thank you. Anne: Yeah, absolutely. Lau: That means so much more to me. . Anne: So a beautiful spirit and gosh, you know, you said feisty and I love that word. That's a great word, but I -- Lau: Isn't that a great word? Anne: -- also feel like, like a version of feisty, a version of feisty because gosh, I'm thinking of the word, something that would resonate with -- like, no one's gonna pull the wool over your eyes. Lau: Ooh. Anne: Like you're not gonna stand for any kind of nonsense. You are forthright. Lau: Oh, I like that. Thank you. Anne: So those, brilliant, beautiful and forthright. So those would be my three words. And so BOSSes, we get these questions -- Lau and I get these questions all the time, right? What is my brand? How would you describe my voice? And I think it would be a great time to talk about branding, because branding is so difficult to do on your own because -- this is why I asked Lau, what do you think? So I was able to get an assessment from eyes that were not my own or ears that were not my own. And I think it really helps to have someone brand you, but also to have you be a part of that decision in terms of what type of a brand do you wanna be? How do you wanna be perceived out in the business world for your voiceover business? So I know that for my students, there are two different forms of branding. One is a visual branding, which could be your website, right, and how you wanna represent visually. But also vocally. I make it a point to tell students, as we go through our sessions together, I will be vocally branding them. And that really means to assess their tone, their style, and where I feel they fit within the industry in terms of what brands do you think you would represent well, and what styles and what industries your voice would resonate in. Lau: Hmm. I think that's brilliant. I mean, that's so important and that's the very thing that everyone needs, everyone's looking for. Everyone needs it. Sometimes I would imagine it doesn't always like match or it's not always on the level of what someone is self-perceiving, and that's why it's so imperative that you have great coach, great people surrounding you to sort of keep you in line and keep you realizing what is realistic in your perception of whatever your branding is. So I think that that's fantastic that you do that. It's so important, and to do it upfront versus a lot later on, so hearts are not broken you know what I mean? Anne: Well, I think that branding is a process and I think that you can also evolve your brand. You don't have to be one specific brand or three specific adjectives. As a matter of fact, like Lau, you said before, there could be multiple words that describe you. And it's not something that -- you know, it took me a minute to kind of formulate my three words for you, 'cause I was making a decision. There's so many words that came to mind, but as making a decision, how do I best feel that your brand is assessed? And so I think it's important for BOSSes to know out there that branding is not something you can do just over a night or maybe by asking a few questions. I think it's something that happens over time, and it's something that can actually really evolve along with you. I know that my brand, especially my business brand, when I first got out there, I was Anne Speak. And you know, that was like, Anne Speak. What, you know, what is that? What is Anne Speak? And Anne Speak was a very different logo and a very different look on my website. And I've evolved into something that I feel is more authentically me over the years in terms of who I am. And I, I love that you said intelligent because that was one thing that I really wanted for people to perceive about me. It could just be that a female that worked in engineering, that is one of those things that I always wanted people to see me as intelligent and not necessarily, oh, there's a female. I want just here's somebody who knows what they're doing. And some people think that that's why I wear glasses, but honestly I just need them to see . Um, but glasses have always been a big part of my brand. Lau: The truth comes out. Anne: Yeah. Lau: Anne: Well, what about you Lau? 'Cause you've been in the business for some time. And how has your brand evolved over the years? Lau: Well, you know, it's funny. When I started this business, Lau Lapides Company, the studio, I ended up keeping the name throughout. I've never really changed the name itself. I think when I first started though, I always had the mindset of an agent in my head, though it was funny. I wasn't really starting an agency per se. I was starting a studio. Right? So I had this idea of actors work, voice actors work. And so that was one of the running titles in my mind of naming a business, 'cause I wanted talent to work, and I wanted to help them get to work. That was one of -- so that was one of the original working title ideas I had. But then it went to Lau Lapides Company fairly fast and then I stuck with it. Here's the interesting thing I found, Anne, is that despite me or despite what I was thinking, it had a very large appeal. It had a large presence. That's what I'm looking for, a large presence to people on the outside that were saying, wow, you have a big company. And so I would start listening, I think in branding, how do I learn who I am? I have to listen to my audience. And so I spent a lot of time listening to how I was perceived by the audience. And I was astounded at how I was being perceived. And one was this big, large presence. And I think because the name was Lau Lapides Company, it sounded big. It had a largess. So people would come and say, wow, you have an enterprise. Wow you have this, Wow, you have that. And I was very small at the start, as most businesses are. Anne: Sure. Well, one person sometimes. And I love that you talked about your personal name because again, I'm always of the thought that we are our own personal brand. We're selling a product that is very personal to us. It's our voice. Right? It's our essence. And so I always think, well, what better name for your product or your company than your name? And it's funny because people might say, well, I have a long name that's difficult to spell or I have Anne with an E that people always forget. But honestly I'm always like, well look when I need a tissue, I ask for a Kleenex, right? So when I need a voiceover, I should ask for a Lau Lapides or an Anne Ganguzza. Lau: That's right. Anne: And so I've come from the place of abundance as you like to say. And I manifested, right? I am just putting it out there. I'm Anne Ganguzza and lo and behold, at some point people are gonna be asking for an Anne Ganguzza and it, and it will work. And so that was part of my branding, my personal branding for my name was my name. And so my legal company name is Anne Ganguzza Voice Productions. And so it's interesting 'cause you're Lau Lapides Company and I'm Anne Ganguzza Voice Productions. Lau: That's right, that's right. Anne: So I settled on that after many years of trying to figure out what should I name my company? What domain should I buy? Because I thought Anne Speaks was so cute, but we know that nobody really knows what an Anne Speak is. Um, it's not really searchable, but Anne Ganguzza is, right? Lau: Right. Anne: So I love that. And I think you wanted to see what people thought of you, right? Lau: I did. Anne: And that was the basis for the beginning of a brand. So I think any of you BOSSes that are out there and you're starting the branding journey, I think it first has to start with you and the basis of who you are as a person. because it is such a personal brand. Now maybe you're not gonna put those words out beautiful, but maybe beautiful voiceover, who knows. I mean -- Lau: Who knows? Anne: -- whatever comes to you that you wanna be perceived as. Lau: The funny part about it was, Anne, to me it was clunky. It wasn't a smooth transition or polished thing because my name was hard to say it's hard to pronounce. It's hard to spell. I got a lot of people who legitimately thought I was an Asian man. Like literally they had no idea I was a Caucasian white woman, and everyone mispronounced my name, everyone. Anne: Yeah. Yeah. Lau: And so a few of the folks that are close to me said, are you sure you wanna keep the name? Because no one's gonna get it right. and they're gonna mispronounce it. And I said, absolutely. Anne: Yes. Oh my God. Lau: That's what makes it memorable. Anne: I am so in agreement with you, so in agreement with you about that, and that's like, well, don't you think people are gonna spell your name wrong? Well, yeah. I mean, but no. People will learn it and Ganguzza, which to a lot of people think is really a difficult name to spell -- it's not, spelled the way it sounds -- Lau: It's different. Anne: But a lot of people were like, yeah. And so why would you do that? I'm like, hey, no, keep it. It's kind of one of the reasons why I kept my unique New Jersey phone number for my cell phone, because people would know if it was coming from that area code, it was Anne Ganguzza. Lau: So that's right. and as they stumble over the name and still stumble over the name and mispronounce it, it never bothers me. I love it because I know as they learn how to pronounce it or catch something, they're thinking about -- Anne: They're gonna remember it. Lau: Yes. Mm-hmm, they're thinking about, they're gonna remember -- Anne: They're thinking about you. Lau: Yeah. So I think that's a hook for a lot of folks to think about it. It doesn't have to be easy and it doesn't have to be common. It could be something a little bit unique that people remember that they have a tough time with too. Anne: Right. Now, and so let's talk a little bit about visual branding. So for visual branding, I'm assuming like visual branding would be your logo, your website. And so things that represent your store front, that would be the visual branding. It can also be the visual branding of your person. If you're a person that goes to conferences or you're a person that goes out and speaks, go to the chamber of commerce and you're representing your business. So visually branding, so it's a little bit different than vocally branding. So what are some steps that you take, Lau, to visually help brand yourself or others? Like what steps can the BOSSes take to start with the visual branding? Lau: Gosh, that's a great question, Anne, and it's like asking someone to think like a graphic designer. Anne: Yeah. Lau: Or a web designer, right, or do something that I personally am not. I am not a visual designer. I'm not a graphic designer. And yet when I was starting out with a website, I had to kind of become that in the sense of the designer would need to know, what was I going for? What was the visual I was seeing. So I had to -- Anne: Colors. I think starting with them -- Lau: -- work with them. Colors. Anne: Colors. Lau: Colors, colors. Anne: I think colors are a good start. Right? Lau: Huge. So what I did was, and I remember doing this years ago before I actually started the studio, I started asking some of my students at that time, I would say, what color do you think of when you think of me? Anne: Yeah. Absolutely. Lau: And I remember, I remember some of their responses that it was so memorable to me. One of the women that I worked with was amazing. And she said, oh, red. Anne: Yeah. Lau: It just like came right out. Just like that. I said, you don't have to think about that for a second. She said, no, no, you're blunt. You're vibrant, you're specific you're out there and unapologetic, and you're red. . Anne: Yep. I agree with that. I totally -- Lau: 'Cause I love all colors, Anne. I don't have a favorite color. Like any color you give me, I would like. Anne: Oh really? Lau: Yeah. Anne: So my favorite color is blue, right? Yes. Believe it or not, blue -- and blue is actually my brand. If you go to annganguzza.com, blue is -- but I also love red. Okay? Lau: I can see that. Yes. Anne: And so red -- yes -- red is part of my VO BOSS brand. So I got to have the best of both worlds and my favorite colors. And it's not necessarily a vibrant, bright red, but it is more of a deeper red. That is one of my very favorite colors. And so I got to have both for both of my brands. And so I think it starts, colorwise also, I think it can really describe you in a lot of ways, colors. You know, Blue's very professional calming, but for me, blue is also the color of my eyes. And it was always been my favorite color. I mean, when I was a kid blue everything, and I had blue stripes painted in my room on my walls because I love the color blue. And so that's really an integral part of who I am. And I think starting with those colors and it was something within that color palette can be a great visual representation. And I'll tell you what I do with a lot of my students, if I were helping them brand themselves is we, we actually create a, a private Pinterest board, and I have them just like a vision board, right, I have them pin everything that they love on one of a board that they call Sarah's branding board. Right? And they pin their favorite colors. And then maybe they'll go to like Behr paints and get a color palette, right? Pick their favorite colors, pick their favorite fonts, pick their favorite things, and flowers and whatever that might be and put that on a board. And what's really cool is that -- I'm not saying you have to design the website, but you give that to the person who's doing your website design. And that is a great representation of who you visually are as a brand. Lau: Oh, I love that. That's fab. Anne: Yeah. Yeah. Lau: That's fab. And you know, the other thing that comes to my mind is shape. So when I think about shape, right? I think about the first thing that comes to my mind was the documentary on coffee, the great coffee kings entrepreneurs around the world. And Starbucks had done years and years of studies about their furniture. Like what shape should their furniture be in their stores? And they went from square to rectangle to oval, to round, whatever. Bottom line they landed on more -- at that time, it may have changed -- more round than square and the reasoning being, they want the community to be connected in the circular sense than in a square sense with sharp corners and sharp edges. That's, I mean, they were really going to town with the details. Anne: That's, that's really interesting. Lau: And I learned a lot from that and I thought, gee, what shape am I? What shape am I? And my logo was very square. It was actually very rectangular. And I analyzed why I did that. At the time I was coming out of an executive speech firm that was pretty square. I mean, they were pretty corporate in the sense. Anne: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Lau: I thought it was, was the right thing, the right thing to have a logo that had subliminally, I thought that had sharp, sharp, structured edges to it. Anne: That makes sense. Lau: I since created a new logo, and it's always in a, a work in progress, like everything we're always work in progress, and I didn't even think about this. I just did it, Anne. It became circular. It became circular. I like the image, but I also love the sense of just roundness and the world and the -- Anne: Softening. Lau: -- connections. Softening. Anne: Yeah. Yeah. Lau: Yeah. So I think shape plays a big part in your branding. Anne: That is so interesting. And I, I interesting that 'cause shape can define your website. You can have a curved logo or even curved edges on your website or represented in circles for me. I'm very clean. I'm gonna say clean lines, clean circles. And I'm gonna say -- that's so funny because your furniture decor can say a lot about your taste as well, right? I used it for many, many years. It was more of like a, a Tuscan Italian dark wood. And then literally just moved to this new house, which became the interpretive farmhouse. Right? And now I became all clean lines, and my backyard landscaping, believe it or not is not circular. And it's funny because I would go to my neighbors' yards as they were getting them landscaped. And I'd be like, I love the circular curved paths, but in retrospect, my backyard is very square and asymmetrical, rectangular and asymmetrical. And there's something to that as well. So I think that BOSSes think about those things in terms of visual branding, put them on a Pinterest board that you can either give to your website designer or use it yourself in terms of colors and shapes really say a lot. And fonts, I love clean fonts. I don't like fonts with curly anything. I don't like fonts that are Times New Roman like that kind of like that. I like fonts that are plain like Arial, you know, that kind of a Sans Serif, those types of things. So clean and readable and clear. And I feel that that also describes my voice, believe it or not clear and professional. And so those are my font choices. Then comes the part of the visual branding is also how you write about yourself, how you describe yourself. Do you write in the first person, do you write in the third person? You know, how is it that you're describing yourself on your webpage for your bio or for your business? But that really is a visual branding thing. And I think it can absolutely help if you start doing that and work with someone to help you to develop your visual brand. It's sometimes really difficult and know that it can evolve. I mean, absolutely. My colors when I first started were dark green. So who knew, right? I evolved my brand into blue and deep red. And now maybe it'll turn into something else. But brands do evolve. They do refresh. And I literally just had a refresh of the VO BOSS website. And so, so the colors that I had before were more brighter red and more of a royal blue. Now I've got maybe just a deep red and black. So the look is different. The website design, the logo is clearer and so things can evolve. And I think it's good for you to refresh your brand once in a while. Lau: Absolutely. Anne: Now let's talk about vocal branding. So it's something that I say that I do. And I, there's not a lot of people who they're like, oh, I love that you vocally brand me. What do you do? But I think a lot of people are vocally branded, right? When we try to describe what are the traits of my voice that you hear? I think that's definitely one, but also I think not just what are the traits of my voice, whether it's friendly, warm, whatever could be -- Lau: The qualities. Anne: The qualities of voice. But I think it's also more of a style as well. What do you think, Lau? Lau: Oh, oh my goodness. Absolutely. I feel like your personality, your persona, your inners, so to speak, do come out in the sound of your voice. Like when we're working with a client to find their voice, it's not just for voiceover delivery. It's for authentication of your identity, of your strength, of your inner soul, if you will. It goes that deep. So I think a branding is an offshoot of that. It doesn't have to expose everything about you personally, but there is that element there of how do you come across? How are you perceived on a daily basis outside of copy, outside of a booth, outside of work? And melting that into your professional life so it's not a totally separate thing. It's really a hybrid of your persona, your personality, the personification of personalization with your professional chosen life and choices that you've made. It's kind of a combination of those two. I don't believe it's one or the other. So I think your vocal branding is really every possible range of motion movement that your voice is capable of doing and really landing on what do I do most? What do I do best? What do I like doing? Anne: Right, and a lot of that has to do with like, you know, when I talk about vocal branding, you're right, it doesn't stop at the actual technicality of a vocal. It really, it becomes what styles, what do you love? What are you passionate about? Because again, that personality, that authenticity, that you, that unique you is a part of your vocal. So it's so interesting when people try to just categorize it as just being friendly, warm, compassionate, gravelly. It's so much more than that, your vocal branding. And again -- Lau: It is. Anne: -- that's something that I think with a lot of times, if a demo producer they're creating a demo for you, they'll ask you what brands do you align with? What things are you passionate about? Because it really makes sense that if you're talking about things that you're passionate about, it comes through in your voice and that becomes a style. I know that there are people, let's say if there's a male that comes to me, that has a very deep gravelly voice, what sorts of things do you think of when you think of a deep gravelly voice? I don't know, Ford trucks or , you know, maybe at Cracker Barrel, I don't know. Or, or it could be John Deere construction equipment, that sort of thing. So what sort of things with a higher pitched, young youthful voice? Well, believe it or not, a lot of times I think of finance. There's a lot of finance lately that is using young millennial youthful voices, because that's the audience they're trying to attract, not just the young voice for that, but just, it could be college spots or anything that that style or that age would be passionate about or thinking about. And a lot of the style and the content that we are shooting for is where they want to advertise to. Are they advertising to a younger audience? Are they advertising to a more mature audience? And so wherever your voice follows suit the best, I think helps to vocally brand your voice as well. You know, even though I have a younger sounding voice, I certainly cannot sound millennial. It's just not necessarily in my authenticity, right, to sound millennial. Even if I try to mimic a millennial, I think ingrained in my voice is too many years of, I don't know, just too many years. Right? So I could try to sound millennial, but will I feel authentic doing it? So for vocal branding, I'm always very much about the authentic part of you. Now, if you get into character, that's something different, right? That's a different voice. And again, that's also a different passion. I know so many people vocally that can bring out so much more personality behind a character than they can with their own voice. It's hard for them to assess their own voice and to be authentic with their own voice or realistic, I should say, because I truly believe there's a lot of people that are exceptional character actors, that they're really good at -- and I don't maybe hiding behind the voice is not a good word for it, but I wanna say they're very good at putting on another character. And sometimes when you say, well, let me just hear you because you are good enough. Your voice is good enough. That's a little more difficult for them. Lau: Oh, no question about it. And I think a lot of folks get really disappointed and let down when they are prototyped quickly or when they are thought of as, oh, you're the grandmother. Oh, you're the -- Anne: You're the mother type. Lau: -- middle-aged mother. Oh, you are the, this you're the that. Well, that's what our industry does. I mean, our industry has to do that for time sake, for expediency, for ease, you know. I can do Shakespeare. I can do a lot of things, but what do I do most of, what do I do best? What do I do easiest? What's the easiest thing for me to deliver? That's important for you to really identify that and recognize that and understand that you get -- it's not the only thing you'll get. You may get something outside of that, for sure. But if you can make the job of the producer, casting a lot easier, then you wanna do that. And you wanna listen to your audience, how they're seeing you or in this case, how they're hearing you. How do they hear you? I remember too, I got a number of times through the years, even when I was much younger, Anne, even when I was in my 20's, I was starting to get audiences say to me, oh yeah, you're like the nanny. You're like the Jewish, you know, mom, you're the Jewish mom, aren't you? And I was offended. Here I was a conservatory actress. I wasn't married. I had no children. I, I was like, all right, I guess so. I thought it was almost like a slight to me. It was almost like a backwards insult of saying, is that all you hear me as? Is that really what is all has come down to? Well, since then, I've learned that that level of familiarity, that level of maternal, maternalistic quality, that level of ethnic appeal is very gratifying for a lot of people, very gratifying, and very gratifying for me too, as an actor. And so I adopted that. I love that. I, I embrace that. But then I know I could do something totally different at another time. It doesn't really limit me, not really. It just expands the level of work that I can get, because that's what I get known for. See? Anne: Yeah. Yeah. I'm so glad that you said that. And I think that there are people who hear your vocal brand as a type. I mean, I just had a student who had a really deep gravelly voice and I said, oh, we're gonna do a Kubota spot, 'cause I had -- construction equipment. He goes that's so funny because I work in it and I have no idea about construction equipment. I said, yeah. But it's something that it's associated with that type of work, and you sound great at it. And as long as you're okay with it, you know, and you can be authentic about it, and it doesn't mean you have to go out and run a piece of equipment to be authentic about it. You just have to be authentic about the message and what you're saying. And so, yeah. I'm so glad that you said that because there are perceived, you know, you sound like this type. And for me I've like, okay, you've got the professional educator because you've got that clear articulate voice. Well, I can't help -- I -- it's a clear articulate voice. And I would love to have that raspy kind of a demure kind of other voice, but it doesn't physically happen for me. So I said, okay, I'm going to accept that. And you know, if I get hired for that, of course, that's fantastic, right? But it doesn't stop me from learning other genres. It doesn't stop me from trying to vocally place my voice and do different things to increase my acting ability and my vocal ability. So it's just something, if you embrace it and then just move forward, continuing to broaden and expand your styles. I think that's, that's a wonderful thing. Lau: Yeah, it reminds me of when someone says, oh my God, you, you look like my best friend. You look like my aunt, you look like this one I know. That used to annoy me. That used to say, oh, it's like, I'm not my own identity. I'm not my own person. I look like someone everyone knows. And then I realized that's a really great thing because they already feel close to me. They feel familiar to me. They feel like they know me. Anne: What a great way to analyze that because that's the same thing with your voice. Right? So somebody is kind of saying, oh you are that voice. Well then that's great. Because they're familiar with it. They feel comfortable with it. That's a wonderful way to look at it. Lau: That's exactly it, exactly it. So don't look at is anything is limiting you. Look at it as expansion, your brand, your vocal, your visual, your inner, your outer. I think the sky is the limit, but do understand how in audience, there's like a truism, a community truism that you get in a film when you're watching a great film or when you're listening to great music. There's a community understanding of familiarity or greatness or fitting in a particular role. And it's important to just pay attention to that. So you're red, you're red. Anne: Yeah, there you go. And I can also be blue. So there you go. Lau: And you can be blue. Anne: So branding, guys, it's not something you can do overnight. Remember, it definitely helps when you have someone else, a trusted coach, a trusted circle of friends and community that can help you to understand how you are perceived. And also I think it takes a lot on your part to project what it is that you want to be perceived in an authentic manner, of course. That's gonna be your start to branding. Just know that it doesn't typically happen overnight and that you can evolve and change with it. And I think that's a wonderful thing. Lau: And it can be a load of fun. And you can learn an awful lot through the years of shifting your brand, and changing your brand, and what your perceived brand is, and really kind of just opening up and accepting the flow of what the audience and the universe is giving to you. Anne: Yeah. I would never disagree to being able to discover more about myself and learn more about myself in order to help put out a brand. So it's all good. It's all good, BOSSes. Well, thank you, Lau. What a great conversation. Lau: My pleasure, as always. Anne: Always a pleasure to have you. I'm going to give a big shout out to ipDTL, our sponsor. You too can connect and network like BOSSes. Find out more at ipdtl.com. Also for your voices out there, 100voiceswhocare.org. You can use your voice to make a difference. Find out more at 100voiceswhocare.org. BOSSes, it's been amazing, and Lau, it's been amazing having you again. And we will all see you next week. Lau: See you next week. Anne: Bye. >> 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.com 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.

Build a circle that will support, motivate, and promote your inner joy, strength & courage. Anne & Lau are breaking down fear to build up your confidence. Your confidence level can make or break your biz, but it all starts from within. Do you really want success? Are you ready to put in the work to achieve your dreams? Instead of asking coaches, peers, and friends, you have to ask yourself and answer with honesty. Creating goals that feel insurmountable is what will end your business before you begin. But with the right tools & wisdom from your favorite business superheroes, we know you can tackle any task! Transcript >> It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere 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. Anne: Hey everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS podcast in the business superpower series. I'm your host Anne Ganguzza, and I'm excited to welcome back to the show special guest co-host Lau Lapides. Lau, how are you today? Lau: Fabulous. Fabulous. Thank you, Anne. It's great to be back. Anne: Yeah, I am excited about our series, so excited. Lau: Me too. Anne: And the last couple of series we've were learning more and more about you. And I wanted to kind of bring into the mold a little bit about when I first started back in, oh God, this is so long ago, but not quite as long -- I think you've been in the business longer than me but -- Lau: I have. Anne: I remember distinctly, I remember distinctly when I started, I didn't come from a creative background. You know, I didn't have a job and a creative background. Well, everything can be a creative field I think if you make it a creative field, but it wasn't distinctly a creative field of voiceover. So I remember when I gave up my cushy job, my cushy corporate job or cushy corporate job in education, I was scared. I was really scared about starting a full time job in voiceover. And I was really a little bit timid and lacked a little bit of confidence because I had never embarked on something. I had never been an entrepreneur and started my own business. So, and I know that a lot of people, this is somewhat intimidating to them. So I thought we could talk about the topic of confidence, because I truly believe that the evolution of my confidence and how I manifested it helped me to really get through the first stumbling blocks and hard times. And not that there aren't hard times now, but I feel like confidence really plays a big part in how well we get through events that may or may not be everyday roses. Lau: Yeah, I'm right there with you. I think it's the bedrock of what we do as performers. I mean, if you put aside right now, the idea that you're an entrepreneur, you're a BOSS, you, you head up your own company, whether you're a DBA, an LLC, or whatever those letters are after your name, it's your own deal. It's your own shindig. But put that aside for a second, just as a person, as a human being -- we're performers and our job is to, to some degree become vulnerable, to open up to a world, something inside of us and reveal something. And how do we do that? Right? How do we get to that? How do we have that confidence to be able to expose ourself in that way and then be able to reel it in? So I think, think, yes, I think confidence is really, really just a foundation of where we start from and where we're working from and what helps define us as the, the superheroes that we are asked to become every day. Anne: And I was even talking just business-wise, like, how do I even do this thing? And you brought in the whole other aspect of performance that, yeah, we do have to show ourselves to be vulnerable. We have to really be able to bring ourselves to the copy. And a lot of times that means exposing ourselves and that is sometimes very uncomfortable for people, especially if they're not used to doing it. And so I just remember so many self-doubts flooding my brain. And I didn't have anybody to talk to 'cause I didn't know anybody that had really done what I was doing in my immediate circle. As a matter of fact, most people, sometimes my parents too, would be like -- well, my mother would be like, honey, when are you gonna get a real job? And bless her, I love her. But she would say, well, you know, when are you gonna get? And, and I'm like, but Mom, I. Lau: . Right. Right. Anne: I'm an entrepreneur, Mom. And it was funny because it took her a while before she finally, you know, understood what it was that I was doing. And so I think first of all, we have to assess the current situation that we're in, and we have to actually acknowledge that I think fear could be something that is contributing to our lack of confidence. I think that's step number one. What are your thoughts? Lau: I'm with you all the way. I think that fear is, is a huge factor. And I often talk to my clients about this, is that there's two really big obstacles that can get in our way. One is fear and one is focus, and the two of them together can be powerhouse if used wisely because the truth is we're never gonna not feel fear. That's like a double negative. But that's just, you know, we're human beings. We're, we're animalistic in a survivalist kind of way. We're built to have instinct about things, which is important. We have to listen to our inner voice as well as our outer voice. We have to pay attention when we feel there's danger or something that's not going to work for us. Right? So don't put that inner fear factor voice away, but it's really like feeling the fear, but then doing it anyway, if that's a calculated risk, if that's a risk worth taking for you, how do I manage that? I always feel like I can never really control anything as much as I would love to. I can't. I have to be able to manage the difficulties and the conflicts and the obstructions and all that stuff that gets thrown in our path. But if we think about it as oh, but I have to control my fear, I shouldn't be feeling fear -- that's wrong. I think then we're already off on the wrong path. We have to accept the fact that we're built to feel fear. You know, even our breathing as speakers, we understand what fight or flight breathing is. You know, if we go into our upper thoracic chest cavity, if we go into the clavicular area of our throat, we know we're in more of a stress fight or flight mode. Right? And it's not great for speaking, but it's meant for other occasions that will kind of save us and save our lives. Anne: Right. Right. Lau: So you are right, Anne. I think fear is important. It's necessary, but a lot of people have a negative connotation of fear and how to manage the fear. Anne: I think if you don't feel fear, then you are not growing. Lau: Yeah, and, and like, do we even care about it? Anne: Right. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. I think if you're not feeling fear, then you're not maybe pushing yourself to where I think you could be. And I think that that is something that if you can take that fear and not fear the fear but yet figure out a way to push through the fear and roll with the fear and know that it's normal and know that it's normal even for veterans like us I think that have been in the business for a long time. I still feel fear as a matter of fact, quite a bit. And I've grown to the point where I know that if I don't feel fear, that I'm not pushing myself. And I just, for me, I think to be the best entrepreneur and the best that I can be, I need to be able to feel that and push through it. But it doesn't mean that it makes it any easier sometimes. Lau: No, it doesn't, but fear can be fun. Remember the show that used to be on, Fear Factor. Anne: Yeah. Right, right. Lau: That a huge, massive audience. Like why are we so fascinated with seeing people in fear? Why is the horror genre in film or in audiobooks so massive, a billion dollar industry? Because there's a catharsis that we need as human beings that we live through that we learn, at least have the potential to learn about morality about what to do, what not to do, about how to protect ourselves, about how to build a better situation for ourselves. It's fun. And it's exciting. And there's a little, you know, frisson that comes in the back of the neck. But at the end of the day, we wanna walk out and we wanna say, hey, I kind of discovered something here. I learned something about myself or about my surroundings. And the fear was like a little bit of a, a sign saying, pay, pay attention. You know, just, just look at the details of what's happening here. And fear in a way is care. Anne: Yeah, absolutely. That's a really good point. Lau: Like I care when I feel fear. Right? Anne: Yeah. Absolutely. Lau: So we have to be kind of fearless about fear. Anne: And so, you know, let's talk about what are the things that are, I think common fears when we become entrepreneurs. I'll, I'll start with, I fear that I'm not going to be able to make it or make any money and I will be, I will fail. So therefore it becomes that thought that I won't be good enough. I won't be able to make money and I'll have to go back to the corporate world and I'll fail. And that was my biggest fear in the beginning. And it was a very like blanket, like thought. And it was a very big thought that like, oh no, it will never work. I will fail. And then I'll have to go back. And that was looking at it at a, on a very large scale. I think one of the things that helped me to kind of get through that is to start to look at things in a smaller light and have little steps that maybe I could feel that I wouldn't fail, but that was number one, the fear that the whole thing wouldn't work, and it wasn't just, oh, I won't be good enough. It'll just be like the whole thing won't work. I don't know anything about starting a business. I haven't researched it really. I've never done it before. And I don't have anybody in my immediate circle that has started a business. So where do I go for help? So there was all these unknown questions. That was my -- what about you when you first started? Lau: That's a good one. Actually. That's a hard one to top; that fear of failure in is like big. I think your engineer needs to do a, some, some like good trivia music right now. Just like some Jeopardy music right now. Anne: Yeah. Right? Lau: See if I could top that one. Okay. Here's one. The fear of spending money, IE the fear of losing money. Anne: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Lau: Right. Without an ROI that's secure, if there is such a thing without knowing what my return really will be, without knowing if I'll ever get work, I'm scared to spend money. I'm scared to go broke. I'm scared to waste money. That's a big one, right? Anne: That's a very common fear I think for a lot of people just getting into the industry, it's their, they like, I don't have money to invest, but I need to get work. And it's that which came first. Right? Lau: Right. Anne: And so thankfully I think anybody that goes into this full or, or even part-time needs to, first of all, make sure they have a little bit of a financial cushion so that they can invest the money. Just knowing I didn't quit my corporate job completely blind. I did understand that I would need to invest money. And so I think that securing that knowledge that you have money to invest in your career is one thing. And that's a big thing. And that even now, as I have been in the industry for more than 15 years to continually invest in my company, because now that I have seven to eight people right now that work for me, that was a big thing, right? To be able to like, oh my God, I'm gonna pay someone, and do I have the extra money to pay someone? And so BOSSes, what's really cool about that comparison is that going from an independent, I work for myself, I'm going out to make money, and to grow to a point where you're now gonna hire an assistant that can help you because you're grown to the point so that you can continue to do what it is that you love and have other people that can do the things that maybe you don't love so much, or that you're not as good at. And so that whole first decision like, oh my gosh, do I have the money to hire someone and to spend and to invest? That's a big fear as well. And I think what gave me confidence was I did it small steps at a time. And I think that's one thing for you, BOSSes, is to think about it. What are the small steps they're gonna take you to get you to your goal and what are the achievable steps that will then give you confidence, right, to continue moving forward? Lau; Right. And, Anne, I wanna piggyback on that point , which is so necessary. It's like bottom line again, bedrock principle what you're talking about here is mindset, mindset, mindset over your matter. You really have to power up that mindset when it comes to investment and say, am I coming from a mindset of poverty or am I coming from a mindset of wealth? And I'm not only talking about physical money. I'm also talking about abundance, surplus, glass half full. Am I a hopeful positive, I'm gonna take that lemon and make it into lemonade? That to me is wealth, wealth of knowledge, wealth of spirit, wealth of fun and risk taking. So you have to be honest with yourself I think, Anne, and say, am I really in a position to do this? Because my mindset needs to be able to open up to the possibilities of success. Like I, I always say to my clients be careful what you wish for. You may get it. Anne: Yeah, absolutely. Lau: Right? Because success is difficult. It's hard. It holds you to a very high level of responsibility and industry standard and timeline and everything. Success isn't easy. Success is a challenge. Right? Anne: And there's a fear of success as well. That is absolutely a thing. Lau: Ooh, that's your number three, I think, right? Anne: Yeah. Fear of success. That's number -- and then wanting to continue and continue to grow. And I think it's a cycle. Every step, as you move up really becomes, I'm afraid. like acknowledging the fear, and then breaking it up maybe into smaller chunks. How can I get from this level to this level? And then breaking that up into small steps and then being able to manifest come from that place of abundance, and just push through until that small step is achieved. That will give you the conference to move up to the next step. Lau: Absolutely. Anne: And help you to manifest the next step. And I think that that might be a, a great process for people to work through the fear and build their confidence in order to grow their business. Lau: Yeah. And yeah, I do think you have to be as honest with yourself as possible and your crew around you, your coaches, your directors, whoever you're working with, even your professional accountability buddies in saying, do I really want success? Or do I like the idea of success? Because the reality is a job, it's work, it's time. It's wonderful, but it's work. So do I really want to put in what I need to put in to work or do I have self sabotaging patterns where every time I start getting close to something that's progressive and good, I put something in the way of it to wall it off? Which I see an awful lot of people doing, whether it's, I can't make that timeframe. Anne: I see that on social media. Lau: I'm busy with something else. Yeah. yeah. And you think, well, wait a second, isn't this your goal? Isn't this what you wanna be doing? Yes. As long as it's within my timeframe, within my structure, my context and not really realizing that you're really have to be more client centered, more audience centered, more producer centered. It's not about you in your world. It's really about what you're doing for the client. And so the self sabotage can start to take over. That's common. Anne: Yeah. That's I think a, a big thing. And I do see that on social media where there'll be forums and people will be talking about, well, how do I get work? Or how do you find success in this? And you know, well, I just can't because of this. I can't because of that. I can't because of, and so, you know, again, it's that sort of thing where you're, you're kind of putting all the things that you can't do in front of things that you can do to grow and to move up. And I think, again, it's got to start with you being honest and taking a real honest look at yourself and finding out if you're willing to do the work. You know, there's so many people, and I know you've run into this as well, Lau, that say, do I have what it takes? Do I have what it takes to make it? Lau: Right. Anne: So there's a good question, Lau. What is your answer to the people who will ask you that? Do I have what it takes? Lau: I always say, you know, when that type of question comes up, I always feel immediately, my knee jerk reaction is I think you're asking the wrong question, to be honest with you. I think a more effective question to ask would be, am I willing to set up a realistic work structure for myself, then I can adhere to on a time management basis and really hold myself accountable to that. Am I willing to do that? Because I always feel like when I went to grad school, I was in a accepted to a three year conservatory full program. And I was nervous about it, nervous, fearful, a little scared. I asked one of my dear friends who had come out of a program. I said, what do I expect? What should I be looking for? He said, listen, simple as this, what you put into it is what you're gonna get out of it. Anne: Yeah. Lau: And I said, what a brilliant answer. I've used that for years and years, because it's an individual journey. It's an individual's path. I can't predict your level of success. I can't predict who's going to perceive you as a incredible talent. I can't even predict what kind of genre you're gonna go into, honestly. I can give you my, my advice and that's what I can do. but you have to be honest with yourself and say, do I want this? Am I willing to set up a work schedule for myself? Can I invest in this? Am I willing to not be an ego and set up professionals who know a lot more than I do surrounding me to teach me? I mean, am I willing to do this? And then I can get closer to the answer to that question. Anne: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's so many people that think it takes like, well, do I have the voice for it? And honestly, I always try to tell people it's about so much more than just your voice. It's really about your connection and the ability to bring yourself to the words and be able to connect. And I believe that if you have the ability to connect with people on a day to day basis, you have the basis for what it takes to do voiceover, because everybody's looking for authenticity. And I think if you're not at the point in your journey where you can bring authenticity to your craft, then that might be the question to ask. It's not, do I have the voice, but do I have the courage to expose myself and be authentic through the art? And once I am, then does that bring me the joy that will bring the passion, the emotion to the craft, which I think is what is truly the connection with people and what people respond to. I'm gonna say the physical aspects of the voice in this whole career, like, will you be successful, I think there's a very small percentage of us -- and again, it's very subjective, right? That have a voice that has the physical characteristics that are like, oh my goodness, like the majority of people will find that beautiful. Very few. There's a lot of us out here though that have a great ability to connect with people. And that almost means more because if you have a beautiful voice and you're not able to connect with authenticity, that is only gonna buy you a certain level of success, I believe. Lau: Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And, you know, I think we just came up with your next episode, and that is like all the wrong questions to ask. Anne: Yeah. Right? Lau: When you start voiceover, there's really a lot -- I don't even like to use the word wrong. It's not that it's wrong. It's that it's not appropriate at the time to ask that kind of question. Anne: Yeah. Lau: Until you've really been in it for a while. Like a question like coming into it, how much money can I make doing this? It's not an appropriate or effective question to answer at the beginning stages of a career. It just, it just isn't. So that's your next episode, I think, that's the next one. Anne: Well, I, what I was hoping with that explanation was to also give people a boost of confidence so that it does help. I mean, this whole episode is about how to build your confidence up and how to overcome the fear. And I, I really believe that if you understand that about this industry and understand that about this career, again, it's so much more than just that voice, then it becomes, do you have the courage to build a business? Do you have the courage to do the work? And again, that I think if you break it down into the small steps and that's about my only solution for it is to really maybe write your goals down, which I think is a phenomenal way to really help you break down this fear, right, and give yourself confidence. And I also think, and, and I believe that we talked about this before, or I must have talked about it 100 times before writing down those small accomplishments can really mean the world to giving yourself more confidence to continue forward. And as well as the fact that you wrote it down, right, gives you a benchmark. So again, you have to grow step by step moving forward and moving more forward. How do you know if you don't compare it to where you've been? Right? You don't have a benchmark. Lau: So exactly. There's just no context for it in time, in your timeline of your life and also of your career that you're in the middle of. I, I'm also gonna add to that and say, build your circle. I won't even say network. I'll just say circle because it could be family. It could be friends. It could be whoever it could be pets. It could be anyone or anything that helps promote your inner strength, your inner joy and your courage, the word you used earlier. I think is a really smart and frightening word to a lot of people. Like, how do I get courageous? How do I get brave? How, how do I become the superhero? Well, it's just like little moments, little detailed steps you take every day. It isn't these big, massive moves of saving the world. It's like, if you're helping the environment, how do I save the world? I can't save the world. Well, just pick up the can. Anne: Well, exactly. Lau: You know, just pick up a bottle. Put it in here. Anne: Exactly. Take the small step. . Lau: That's all you have to do. Anne: That's such a wonderful example because honestly, if it becomes this all encompassing, overwhelming thing, you've quit before you've even started. Lau: Right, I can't do that. Anne: If you make it so large and so big, and it's like, oh my God, I can't possibly like, if you're beginning, you're beginning to say, well, I didn't make any money this week. And that is what deters you from, you know, the entire career, then -- Lau: Then you quit. Anne: Yeah, exactly. Lau: You've already quit. Anne: You've already quit. Lau: I got one more to throw in the mix, 'cause I hear this a lot. Especially from my crowd that's over 40, fear of technology. Very scary to a lot of people who are not digital natives. They didn't grow up on computers. They didn't grow up using a microphone. They didn't grow up on a video screen. They just didn't, right? I'm in that generation. I'm generation X. We didn't grow up that way. We learned, I mean, I didn't learn it. It was till I was in my 30's, like how to even be on a computer, you know, we didn't have cell phones. So that fear of technology I think can stop a lot of people's progress, and it's important that if you recognize you have the fear, again, it's okay to have the fear it's, it's natural. It's normal. Just how do I manage the fear? Well, one way I could manage the fear, I could delegate some tasks to some of my circle that's around me that I find overwhelming or I find scary. It could be something like, help me choose a microphone or help me, help me learn some new apps on my computer or help me whatever. And also delegating actual tasks to someone else. Like you have an engineer you hire, I have an engineer I hire, I mean that's okay once you have enough money in the pot to hire people and have them do a job that you're not proficient at, you don't have the time for, you don't want to be doing whatever. It's like give yourself permission to delegate. Anne: One of the biggest confidence builders I've found myself as I've grown through the years. Is that money in the pot thing right? So if you can put together a savings account and as you make money, right? Put some in. I mean, that sounds like my mom and dad, like from just, we save a penny. Right? But having money in the pot will help you have confidence so that when there is a low period or maybe you don't get a job for a week or two or a month, that will give you the confidence to still continue on and move forward, and also give you the confidence to help reinvest that money someplace else. The bigger that savings account is, I'll tell you once I got my savings account to a certain level, I was bold as yeah. Anything good. Lau: Yes, yes, yes. Anne: Because I was like, okay, this is okay. I was bold in everything bold in how I was gonna grow my business, bold in, you know, oh, maybe I'll try this now. Right? I was bold to make different steps. And it really changed the way that I ran my business, and it was exhilarating to me. And that gave me confidence like nothing else. I'm not gonna say money is the only thing that gives you confidence, but in this kind of an industry where you have a lot of highs and a lot of lows and a lot of fears, and a lot of the fear I think is fear of failure. And for me, because I went full time, I wanted to contribute to the household expenses, right? This was not just something that I could just enjoy for the rest of my life. I wasn't retiring. I needed to make money to pay the mortgage. And so money for me there gave me a lot of confidence. So I think BOSSes, take tiny steps to understand that there is fear. Take those tiny steps, write down those goals, celebrate those milestones, generate that confidence, and continue to grow and be BOSSes. Right? Lau: I love it. We'll call that VO bucks. Put away your VO bucks, right? Anne: Your VO bucks. I love it. Lau: VO bucks. And when someone says to you, Anne, but honestly I'm telling you honestly, Anne, I don't have the money. I can't buy a new microphone. You say, well, wait a second, wait a second. This is where the financial advisor and you start popping out and you say, wait a second. Didn't you go to the movies last weekend? Did you eat out a couple times this week? Anne: Did you buy that Starbucks? Lau: yes. Just, just be willing to sacrifice that. Do the math on, on that. Put it towards the microphone or whatever you need. And then tell me later, wow. I was able to reprioritize, redirect my VO bucks, and I somehow magically found the money. I found it. Anne: Yeah, hey, I got a part-time job as a office assistant and my mother was like, here, I came out of my six figure, you know, corporate job. And then I'm like, well I'm an office assistant, and I would never downplay any of that. But it was one of those things I did part-time while I was building up the business so that I could have the money and not feel horribly guilty. Right? That I wasn't contributing. And I was building up the business. So giving me confidence, giving me the money to reinvest. BOSSes, you can do it. We've got the faith in you. so. Lau: Everyone is the superhero at the end of the day, Anne, everyone has those powers. Anne: Business superpowers. So awesome episode. Thank you so much, Lau. It's been so much fun. Lau: So much fun. Anne: And, and I am going to give a great big shout out to our sponsor, ipDTL. You too can connect and network like BOSSes. Find out more at ipdtl.com. And also I want to let you know about 100voiceswhocare.org. You can use your voice to make an immediate difference in the world and give back to the communities that give to you. So find out more at 100voiceswhocare.org. You guys, have an amazing week and we'll see you next week. Bye. Lau: Bye. >> 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.com 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.

Casting is global, digital, and massive. This week, Anne & Lau lead Bosses through the complicated world of casting. Resiliency & timing are key for booking that dream gig. Lau teaches us that not all rejections mean no. They often mean not right now. Anne shows us that we are every aspect of our business and that marketing well enough to get in front of voice seekers is part of your job, whether you like it or not! If you're feeling overwhelmed and defeated during the casting process, tune in for some (super) powerful advice… Transcript >> It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere 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. Anne: Hey everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS podcast. I'm your host Anne Ganguzza, and I'm excited to bring back to the show special guest co-host Lau Lapides and Business Superpowers. Yay. Hey Lau. How's it going today? Lau: Awesome, Anne. So good to be with you. Love being with you. Anne: I'm so excited for this new series and actually, because you do a lot of casting, and I also do casting as well. I thought it would be a great episode to talk about casting because casting over the years, I'm sure, has evolved and changed. And a lot of times my students wanna know, well, what does it take to get in front of a casting director and impress them so that they get hired? Lau: Sure, it's a biggie. Anne: Who better to ask, Lau than someone that's been doing it for many, many years. Right? So let's talk about like, how has casting changed over the years? Lau: Mm that's a loaded question. I love the theme. I have to tell you, I love the superpower theme because innately, I think for actors, voice actors, there's this feeling of helplessness, of powerlessness, of waiting for a job or waiting for someone to like me. Right? You know, what did I do wrong? Why didn't they cast me? Why didn't they like me? And I love the theme of this show that you chose, because it's all about finding your inner power. Like what ignites us, what empowers us when we get to the casting, when we get to the agency, when we get to the hiring power, hiring people, how do we ignite our own power inside of us? So I love that. I love that. Okay. So it's a hard question to answer in the sense that it's so unique to each person. Every individual is a very, very unique experience throughout their performance life. But you know, I can give you a few tips along the way, in terms of, let's say you're starting out and you're early to market, and you're coming in, you're saying, huh, how do I get people knowing my name and hearing my voice? Well, for casting, I'll tell you one of the things that we're always looking for are people that are submitting a lot. They're really marketing themselves well, and they're submitting a lot, and they're unafraid to submit and resubmit because I think it's a truism in the industry that you're not gonna book the first job. You may not even book the second or third job or the 50th job. So what do we do? We have to have that tenacity, that inner power within us to say, it's okay. I can submit until the cows come home. And maybe, maybe they just don't need my value right now. So I'm not looking at this as a rejection. I'm looking at this as not a no, but a not now. Anne: Right? I love that. You know what, you're the first person that I've ever heard say that, the tenacity, submit, submit, submit, because I think for a lot of talent, they get discouraged, right? They're either like, oh my gosh, I've submitted. I haven't booked anything. And then they get down on themselves. And you're the first casting director that I've heard actually say be tenacious, submit, submit, submit. And actually, you know, I totally agree, because I feel like your name will become known as well to the casting directors. And at some point, I would imagine if you're continually submitting, either at some point, somebody's going to stop and give you feedback, if they feel it's necessary. And also it's just kind of a way to keep yourself top of mind, which is like any good marketing, is to keep yourself top of mind with a casting director. So I wanted to stop and say, thank you for saying that, because I'm sure that you just gave these BOSSes a whole lot more reason to just continue on, and be positive, and just submit, submit. So thank you for that. Love it. Yeah. Lau: Of course. That was my pleasure. And BOSSes listening in, I'm telling you, there are not enough places in the world and your lifetime isn't long enough to submit to every place you could be submitting to. So it's not about waiting for 5, 10, 15, 20 sources. It's about pasting. Like it's global, we're in a global industry now. You wanna cover the globe. So you don't wanna go from local. You don't wanna do regional. You don't even wanna keep it national. You wanna go international. So you wanna think about as you work with your coaches, as you work with your trainers, as you work with Anne, you wanna think about, boy, here's where I am in this market, but how am I viewed in that market? And then how am I viewed in this market? And it becomes an endless journey of how can I get in front of casting and representation that can represent me for that particular genre and that particular brand, which may change, which very well may change. Anne: Now, let me play devil's advocate here from the voice talent perspective and say, how do I find different casting directors that cast in different genres or different places? Is that something that's easily researched? Lau: Well, yes and no. In the sense that nothing is easy But everything's at our fingertips now. Anne: Right, right. Lau: We know this, everything is at our fingertips. So what you need, and I'm like preaching to the choir on this one, but what the BOSSes need is they need a great time management schedule. They need to be honest about what are they committing? I always say what you put in is what you're going to get out of it for your career. Am I putting in an hour, a day, am I putting in 15 hours a day? I'm most likely gonna get more out of it if I'm putting in more time. And the time needs to be very focused time, very incisive time. I need to know exactly, like how does an actor think I need to have purpose. I need to have an objective. I can't just generically go in and hope for work. I have to really, really target in. So let's say, say, I'm looking for casting directors. I know, based on my studio, I know one of the ways you can be seen live and virtually, virtually and live is to do showcases. And showcases are a fascinating event. We produce them and a lot of others produce them as well. And you get to go live in person, whether you're walking into a room or whether you're walking into a Zoom room, you get to meet people. There's nothing better than being in front of a casting director or an agent or a producer and saying, hi, I'm live. This is who I am. This is what I do. I'm gonna do it for you right now. This is a great option to get in front of as many casting people and reps, if you're looking for reps, as possible. A lot of people are afraid of it and they shouldn't be. Anne: Well, and I'm gonna just kind of plug my VO Peeps group. I mean, we do have workouts with casting directors and talent agents. And if you are afraid thinking that you're not ready to be seen or to be showcased, do the work to get yourself performance-wise where you feel confident. Because it's never a guarantee if you're performing in front of a casting director. And I always have to say that. Like, there is no guarantee you'll get work if you come to my workshop that is hosted by me and I have a talent agent or a casting director, but what a great opportunity to kind of showcase your talents. And so again, there's never any guarantee that you'll get work, but it's an opportunity for you to get in front of these people live in a Zoom room for the VO Peeps cases anyways, and then live also with -- Lau has showcases. And I know there's other casting directors as well that do those showcases, and that's a great opportunity to get seen and heard. Lau: It is. And it also will satisfy you. Like if you're doing the Peeps, you're doing the workout, it satisfies that live actor forum in you, where you wanna get some feedback. You wanna meet someone, you wanna talk about what you do. You wanna have the interaction of the room. I mean, that's something we just can't get alone in our studio or alone in our booth. We just can't capture it the way we can live. So I, I do think that's one, really important way where you're in a, either a workout or a casting workshop or a showcase, whatever that is. I would put that right into your time management. I also would work with either Anne, your coach, your trainer to really get together the marketing list you wanna get together of casting directors and of agencies that you can be target marketing. I think that's very important and a lot of talent miss that. I think gone are the days of opening up the phone book. We don't really use the phone book that often anymore. Anne: Well, wait, but wait, the Voiceover Resource Guide is coming back. I have to just do a plug for that because if you -- do you remember -- you've been casting direct for a while. You remember the Voiceover Resource Guide, the printed book? Lau: Yes. Anne: That used to be the only thing that basically gave you information for area coaches, area studios and casting directors, and that is making a comeback. And so it, it is in print and also online. So that's a great resource, and BOSSes, I'll be put in that link in our show notes and also any resources, Lau, that are online that you can share with BOSSes, I'll put that as well in the show notes. So you guys can check that out, but continue on Lau about how talent can get in front of first of all, find them, get in front of, and then how can we make a good impression? Like I think that's really what everybody wants to know. Lau: It is. It is, it is. And, and one more I wanna throw in the mix, Anne, and that is, I want you -- not you I want everyone listening in to think about every person that you meet or get in front of or have email contact with is a prospect. So they are a potential casting director. Anne: Yeah. Lau: They don't call themselves that that's not their title and they wouldn't even know what it is if you ask them, but they're the hiring person. They're the decision maker. They're the person who maybe owns their own business and needs vocal talent, doesn't know that they need them. So as you have your business, you have to think, wow, I am gonna look at my suspects and I'm gonna prospect them. And how do I prospect them? I'm gonna go after every organization, every group that I possibly can, that fits my interest of where my voice is. So for instance, I may go after the women's groups. There's a lot of professional women's groups out there that are wonderful, that would love to know, women and men, that would love to know your voices there, to promote their companies, to promote their products and services, to promote their organizations. A lot of them don't even have voiceovers to do that, right? Why not hit them up? They could be your casting director. What about your local chamber of commerce? What about your BNIs? Right? All of those, those are international professional clubs that you can go into and be in front of 10, 20, 50, 100 people at a time that are great prospects for you to then create what I call the rapport before the relationship. The two R's you have to remember when you're trying to get in front of anyone who's doing casting or hiring is, hey, I have to connect with you. I have to have some sort of authentic connection that you're interested in me and I'm interested in you. And then we have to build a relationship together over time. So it's really working in that sphere of understanding that casting is now global. It's now massive. And yes, you have casting directors proper in each city, in each state, but then you have all these businesses that may very well hire you once they know that you're there. Anne: Sure, sure, sure. And you know, I love that you've brought the term casting agent global now. It's really anybody that has a need for your services and that can hire you. And yes, there are traditional casting agents title only that belong to in studios typically. Right? And their job is to cast voice talent all day. And I like that you created a global job for anybody that hires you for your voice. And that's very true. The one thing I think that, BOSSes, you need to take into consideration is the amount of education necessary to connect and find the need for the job. Right? Because a lot of times we're auditioning, we're auditioning, we're auditioning. We're not getting any feedback. We're not getting any gigs. And we turn it all on our own performance. And I speak on this all the time, because I know that mentality. I have many students that talk about it all the time, and they're like, I don't think I belong in this industry anymore because I'm not getting any work. A lot of time, that work depends on the market. It depends on if there is a need at the time for your voice. And that is something that I think we forget as voice talent. We forget that a lot of it is timing based, right? A company may absolutely love your voice for their product, but if they don't have a campaign or they don't have something ready yet to release, they can't hire somebody. And so you just may be like, I'm submitting, submitting, submitting. And maybe just at that point, right, you might be marketing to them, they just don't need your voice yet. And that's when you're doing that kind of marketing and people are like, well, nobody's responding to me. I'm not getting any feedback to my marketing. Well, that may just be a timing issue. That's all it is. So don't always go to the place where, oh no, they didn't like my voice. Lau: Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, it's a business where we have to personalize everything but we can't take anything personal. Anne: Yes, absolutely. Lau: We just have to understand the difference between personalizing your work and me, Lau, feeling like you hit me, you hit me. Well, I have to be careful of that because then I'll be hit all day long, and it won't be about my value. It'll be about me personally, as you gotta keep it to your value. And I do think, Anne, that there's two factors as I look at the years and years of working with talent and connecting them and auditioning them and all that, two very big areas that are common that are the obstacles, the walls that people have a tough time getting through; identified them as focus and fear. Those are typically the two game stoppers for you that I'm scared. I'm terrified. I don't wanna be rejected. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm not good enough. That's the fear factor. And then the focus of like, okay, do I understand my schedule? Do I know what I can authentically commit? Am I really putting in the time and energy I need to, to get the ROI that I'm looking for? And oftentimes folks are not doing it. If they're gonna be really honest and transparent, they're not putting in the time and effort that an entrepreneur that owns their own business really needs to put in, right? Anne: So are you talking now? Are they not doing enough auditions or are they not doing enough work to prepare their performance so that they can get hired or both? Lau: It could be all of the above. When we started the conversation, we were talking about casting. And so for looking at finding and prospecting my own casting opportunities, well, how do I do that? I have to put X amount of time into my work week in order to do that. And there was one more I wanted to hit too, Anne, and that was getting my lists together. And if you're connected to great people like Anne, who may be able to help you with, who are the casting directors, and the casting departments, and the agencies proper in the nation that you can then be going, okay, I gotta send, send, send, send, send, I'm gonna Google. I'm gonna get online. I'm gonna look at doing all of that. And it is a lot of work. It's a lot of work. Anne: It is, it is. Lau: But it's work we have to do in marketing efforts to understand who is hiring, who is submitting, and who is gone now because after COVID, a lot of businesses unfortunately went down or merged and changed. Anne: Yeah. And one thing I wanna point out BOSSes is that we have had a couple of different episodes on email marketing and just make sure if you are submitting or sending information out that you're abiding by rules and regulations so that you're not considered as spamming. And so be careful with that. It's one of the reasons -- and shameless plug, one of the reasons that I created the VO BOSS Blast is that we can market to a list that has already given us permission of casting directors and production companies that have said, yes, it's okay for us to market to. So that is something you guys can take a look at as well as doing your own research. And then it becomes a marketing challenge, right? How are you going to get in front of these people? And again, then it becomes that timing issue. But as Lau stated, you really do have to put in the effort. And I know how many people, they got into this industry thinking it's gonna be all fun and performance in the studio. Well, believe it or not, a lot of the time really isn't until you get that job, right? You've got to get the job. And then once you've got the job, you can't anticipate that that job will be there forever. You have to continually mine for new prospects and getting in front of new people that can cast you and hire you. So Lau, are there differences over the years in terms of what people are looking for today versus maybe 20 years ago? Let's talk about the difference in the types of voices they're looking for. Lau: Yeah. Well, there's been, I know, you know, this Anna huge swing in diversity casting and rightly so. Anne: Absolutely. Lau: That's been a long time coming. And so we've seen that both on camera and voiceover. Anne: Yeah. And I'm so thankful for that honestly. It's just really brought, I mean, these past years, and it's not to where we need it yet, but I'll tell you what. I've really been enjoying hearing and watching and seeing all the diversity. It's just been amazing. And I just wanted to keep continuing, so. Lau: Absolutely. I'm right there with you and it's been happening now -- Anne: It's been wonderful. Lau: -- solidly -- yeah -- for about three years or so, maybe a little bit longer, which is exciting. And now we have to look at, okay, vocal actors, if you're not in that diversity casting pool, that's okay. You have your value and now you have to do the work to say, how do I prospect the right clients, the right customers, the right casting who's going to be interested in what I'm doing and what my sound is? And, you know, be honest, like, are you a proactive person or are you more of a reactive person? And both are just fine. But one of the common denominators of successful entrepreneurs is that they're proactive, in that we're willing to go out and take action and take a lot of action and do it consistently for a long time, whether we get a return on it or not. I mean, that's just kind of the reality. We can't always depend on someone else doing it for us, and we can't always allow someone else to do it for us. There are certain things we just have to take agency of. Anne: Yeah, absolutely. Lau: Right? And our career, our career, our business, VO BOSS, the name of what we do, the branding is ours. And we have to take 100% commitment in that. Anne: Yeah. And you are the marketing department, , you know, you are the accounting department. You are the performance department. You are everything. And just to remind people, and again, I think we forget, we say, I am going to be a voice actor. And so you envision this life where you're gonna be in the studio, auditioning, doing gigs, and the other parts of that business, you kind of say, oh shoot, I have to do those too? And so yeah, you do. And as a matter of fact, that's kind of why there's entire marketing departments in companies that encompass people, like more than one people. And they're full time, as well as accounting people, people full time. So if you wanna run your business successfully, you've got to really remember that this marketing, you may hate it. You can decide to maybe outsource it, but you do have to have control over it being done and/or delegating it to someone. And it is a necessary evil, accounting is a necessary evil. But getting in front of casting directors, people who can hire you, that is a marketing effort and sales really. But if you're doing great marketing, the sales hopefully come automatically. Right? And you don't have to call people up and say, yeah, you know, sell your voice. But if you're doing marketing properly, hopefully it comes your way. And this stems back to a lot of conversations, and I'm sure we can talk about it as well in terms of, is your storefront ready? Do you have your website? Do you have your demos? Are you prepared to market in that respect? It's all encompassing. Lau: And you took the words literally right outta my mouth. That's how I know we're sister sisters. I know this because I was just about to say, I just coached a young man this morning and, and the concern was, ugh, I wanna get to the right agency. I need to be at a big agency. I need to get these kinds of roles. I need to do this. And then when we were actually coaching, there were a lot of issues in his delivery. So always be in coaching, always be training, always have that on your side because casting and agents and producers, you know, really isn't their job to give you feedback. I mean, you're lucky if you get some good feedback from them. A lot of casting were actors before and will just give you feedback, but many won't. And so to have that level of expectation is unrealistic. It's really not their job. Their job is to deal with placement, like recruiters. You're dealing with placement. It's the job of your coach, your trainer, or being in your class. That is really the feedback source that you need to have that piece before you're overly concerned about the business end of it. You don't wanna be marketing something that's not quite ready yet. That's not there or not competitive. Anne: Yeah. I think lifelong learners, I think as performers, whether you are acting on camera, whatever it is, theater and voiceover, I think we continually have to be lifelong learners. I mean, that's, as an educator, that's what I love so much. That's why I was in education I think because I love to learn and I am a lifelong learner. And so that includes your performance and everything that you do and your business to be continually learning. And you have to consider investment. Not everything is free. Sometimes you can train for free. There's a lot of great resources out there, but sometimes you do have to make an investment in it and you can't be surprised by that. And you can't complain. They complain about the cost of coaching, the cost of demos, the cost of marketing. But guys, that's just a reality. That is an investment in your business. And yes, maybe there are some things that cost more than you anticipated, but it is something that I think as a good business BOSS, right, you have to anticipate and you have to put that money away for that coaching. That always helps. So to get yourself in front of that casting director, now you're in front of them. You wanna be able to impress them with your performance and you wanna have something that's relevant and current. And so studying also I think trends, right? Go to iSpot, listen to current commercials, go to YouTube and listen to current voiceover. Now I'm the first person to say that not everything you hear is gonna be the right or great voiceover, but I think you can develop an ear for great voiceover. Lau: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think, you know, having that training piece on your side like having it in, in your back pocket, the professional development, the education you're right, Anne, it's just a lifelong thing. And I often tell my clients, we're not off the hook. They somehow look at us and think, you guys are the BOSS. You own the world, you know, everything you're done. Anne: You're getting, you're getting that work for me. . Lau: And I'm telling you, they don't understand that we're always growing businesses. We're always leveling up. We're always investing and reinvesting, and fixing problems, and doing things better. It's never done. There isn't the sense of, oh, I did it. I got my demos. I'm done. No, you're just starting. You're really just beginning. You're not done. You're only at the beginning. And that's what business is like, a general sense. It's like, you always feel like you're starting and restarting based off what your new objectives and your purpose is. Quarter one, I have a new purpose. Now, quarter two comes, I repurpose that. And now I got a new objective. So I have to be able to understand that and know that the truth is our profession is a drop in the bucket, not to minimize the way people feel. 'Cause I totally empathize. Especially in the middle of inflation, believe me, I get you. I get you. But I'm telling you it's a drop in the bucket compared to going to medical school. It is a drop in the bucket compared to my friends who went for an MBA to be a financial advisor. And even actors that are friends of mine that went through three year conservatory degrees come out owing $200,000, $300,000 that they may never be able to pay off. What we are investing, Anne, is incremental. It's not overnight. It's really significantly lower than a lot of other industries out there and what they call upon just to get to the point of an interview for a job. Anne: Right. Now you did mention, and I just was asking like how things have evolved and changed over the years in terms of what casting directors are looking for. And diversity was absolutely number one out of your mouth there. And I agree with that. What else is there? I'm gonna say that natural, believable, authentic style of delivery for sure, which is 90% of casting specs when they come through. Let's talk about that for a little bit. Lau: Mm-hmm. I know that's true. That's the thing everyone gets annoyed with is like, ugh, the natural, the conversational, the connected. Anne: That's the hardest, Lau: it's the hardest. Whether you're a voiceover or an on camera, they just don't wanna hear you act. Anne: Yep, yep. Lau: They just don't want you exaggerated. They don't want you to call attention to your style. They just want to connect to you as a very, very authentic real person. So yeah. It's super important. It's the thing. It represents a whole, actually the largest generation in the United States, which is millennials right now represents them. Right? So that's something we'd absolutely have to pay attention to. Anne: Even promo by the way, even promo is going more conversational by the way. I thought that was so interesting because I hosted Rick Wasserman the other night for VO Peeps. And he said, yeah, they're looking for conversational promo. No more of the announcer style. So. Lau: That amazes me. That really does. That's so true. That amazes me. I wanted to say in casting, now we look for people who have their own built-in audience. Anne: Yes. Lau: That was not a thing. like, I'm not a digital native. I didn't grow up with a computer. Right? Like I literally learned how to turn a computer on at 32 years old. All right. So I'm off the hook a little bit, but the younger generation is not off the hook. They have to come in with their own built-in audience. What I mean by that is a lot of casting will ask you, okay, for your social media, what's your fan base like? What are your numbers like? Who's on your Insta channel? Who's this? Who's that and you're taken aback going, what, why are they asking me this? Because oftentimes they wanna ride. They wanna ride on their coattails of your current audience. Right? So they wanna take people in that already have this built in fan club. So the persona, yeah, the personality really weighs heavily even for voiceover. Anne: And I think that's gonna be that's gonna be another episode, all about social media and social media etiquette, which has become just chaotic. And I think that it's important that as companies and BOSSes, we understand how to represent those companies and our products online. And that's very important, I think, to casting directors these days. So. Lau: Yeah. It's the wild west for sure. And, and dealing with protocol and etiquette but, and again, for listeners who are going, oh no, I'm 55, and I don't know anything about that. It doesn't make you or break you. This is not like, if you don't have it, you're not gonna work. It's just, what are the waves? What are the trends? What are things that we're paying attention to that we find people are really looking for? And that's one of those. Anne: Yeah. Oh good stuff, Lau. Good stuff. Lau: Good stuff. Anne: Thank you so much again for being here and dropping those nuggets of wisdom to the BOSS listeners. I'm very excited for our future episodes. BOSSes, by the way, if you are looking to have your voice make an impact, you absolutely can. And you can give back to the communities that give to you. Visit 100voiceswhocare.org to find out more. And also as always, we love our sponsor ipDTL. You too can connect and network like BOSSes and find out more at ipdtl.com. You guys, have an amazing week. Lau, thank you so much. And we'll see you next week, BOSSes. Bye! Lau: My pleasure. Bye! >> 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.com 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 hardest boss you'll ever work for is yourself. In this episode, Anne & Lau jump into Business Superpowers by recounting Lau's many interesting jobs and career shifts. She has been an actor, a voice talent, a manager, a professor, but most importantly, she is fierce in the face of fear. If you feel nervous, excited, or scared about a new opportunity, run towards it. What's the worst that could happen? Failures and mistakes teach you more than success ever will, and with every overnight success comes years of unnoticed hard work. If that's not enough motivation for you, tune in for the full career deep dive with your favorite self-employed Bosses! Transcript >> It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere 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. Anne: Hey everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS podcast. I'm your host Anne Ganguzza, and today I am excited to start another brand new series, Business Superpowers with special guest Lau Lapides. Lau is founder and president of Lau Lapides Company, a boutique coaching, training, and production company for voice talent and actors headquartered in Boston with satellites in New York City, Miami, and LA. Her programs include hybrid online and in-person workshops, seminars, and one-on-one personalized coaching as well as showcases in New York City, LA, and online. Lau's media and broadcasting career coaches all currently work in television, film, radio, and theater, and their voices can be heard around the world. Lau, it is so much fun to have you here today. Thank you so much for joining me. Lau: I'm so excited to be here. Like I can't believe it. We finally met each other, got together, east meets west. Anne: Here we go. Lau: Here we go. . Anne: I'm just so excited that you agreed to do this. And I'm so excited about our series, the Business Superpowers, because we've got a lot to talk about. So let's start with you so that our BOSSes can get to know you a little bit better. Let's talk a little bit about your history, how you got started, and how you became such a BOSS in this industry. Lau: Wow. Thank you for that introduction. I appreciate it. I always feel like BOSS term in regards to me and personally has been like the overnight success. You know, when someone comes to you, Anne, and says, I wanna have it overnight, I wanna get that dream. Let's go. And I say, yeah, you can be an overnight success. Absolutely. A 40-year overnight success. Anne: Yeah, I always say my overnight success happened 12 years later. Sorry. Or at least you've gotta start with that. Lau: That's right. Anne: It's true. Lau: I always feel that way that it, it really has been such a lifelong process, such an amazing journey. The path splits off in so many directions. It's hard to even think about what the origins really were, but I'll tell you I was a dancer. Believe it or not. I was a dancer. Anne: And I was an engineer, so, wow. That's pretty cool. There you go. Lau: There you go. Same thing in a lot of ways, right? Walking, choreography. Anne: Right. But you don't always think, well, you'd end up with your own company in voice acting and, and acting, so. Lau: No, no. If someone were to tell me that I would do this 30, 40 years later, I would've laughed. I would've fell off my chair. I would not have believed it. So I started off as a dancer who really didn't speak at all. And then I went into an acting career. I had a whole acting career for a good 20 years, went through top level graduate program at UC Irvine in California. And that really changed my life, your neck of the woods. Anne: East and west. Here we go. So . Lau: East and west, east and west. And so after having this extensive theater background, I did a lot of repertory, a lot of regional, a lot of stock, became Equity, became an Equity actor, yada yada, so on and so forth. I ended up at grad school in California. That was really a turn for me. I started getting into a lot of media driven entertainment, started doing more TV/film, started my voiceover as a voiceover talent as a performer, really mid to late 20s. It was kind of later for me and then just kind of launched in that direction. And once I got my master's degree, I became a professor. I became a college and university professor and one of my specialties was to create curriculum . So I made my way back to New York. I lived in New York and I started creating curriculum all while I was acting and directing, 'cause I had also become a director and producer. Anne: I was gonna say, acting curriculum? Lau: Acting curriculum but it was interesting, Anne. The twist is, and this is where the whole BOSS in business situation starts to enter my world, is I was approached by top business colleges, and this was really out of my realm. Honestly, I'll be quite transparent with you. I knew nothing about that. I think I had business savvy, but I had the mind of a creative. Anne: Sure, absolutely. Lau: I was actor, voice talent, director. You know, I was on the other side of it, and all of a sudden I got approached by Harvard. I got approached by Babson. I got approached by Bentley. These were all the top business colleges at that time, now universities, Boston University saying all kind of like the similar theme. What is the problem and how can I fix it? So I knew right away, they all had a problem or a need. And it was, we want programming for our business students that is creative and teaches them how to speak. Anne: Mm yes. Right? Important. Lau: It's very important. Anne: To be, to speak and present. I know that for sure. We have so many parallels, you and I, because I was 20 years in education and started up as an engineer, and I was on the east coast and then started my voiceover career a little bit later. So I had what I consider the creative in the engineering aspect, in the technology aspect and then in education, because I got so geeky and excited about it, I wanted to share it. So then I taught and, and then it just, it became all these passions and loves of mine. And then ultimately I started a full time voiceover career after that and moved west. So we have so many parallels. Lau: Yeah. Anne: And you're absolutely right. The business aspect of things is so important in the creative. I think a lot of students that come to me, and I'm sure you're familiar with this, they feel stuck in their jobs. And they need the creativity, and that's exactly like, what's that problem? Like where's the creativity in your job and where is that outlet? And a lot of times people turn to the creative arts, which is fantastic that you had that left brain, right brain 50-50, which is something that I was always told I was very good at, that you could relate on both sides of the thing. And so fantastic. So now bring us up to date now. You're currently still on the east coast? Lau: Yes I am. And skip 10 years, got an offer to open a studio. It was the right time. I got a brick and mortar. I was very excited about it. Always wanted to have a studio, had been now teaching for a good decade, had been now directing. While I was still performing, I was acting and doing voiceover all the way through. There was something in me, Anne, that wanted to be a leader. And here's the interesting thing I wanted to bring out about being in business programs. I got an education by default. So I started to learn that I could be educated by the students I was teaching. Anne: Oh gosh, yes mm-hmm. Lau: Right? So these were students from all over the world. They were undergrad, graduate, MBA, fast track people, every country in the world. And I started to learn what I needed to know as a business woman to then open a studio. So when I was 40, I opened a studio and I opened first an actor division. First I opened an actor division, and then about two years later came my voiceover division. And this was in the first recession. One of the worst recessions we had in the country was the first five years of my business. And so I knew I was either gonna sink or swim this was it. And somehow we made it through. It started to explode. What I thought was a luxury based business or a dream based business really turned into a reality and something very pragmatic that people were looking for to solve that problem, to fill that need in them. You know, what do I do next in my life? Or how do I restart a career? Or how do I live my dream? And we were learning, we meaning myself and then I hired a staff of like six to eight really amazing coaches from all over the place, to help me realize this team leadership, client centered kind of philosophy that I had in my head after teaching for 10 years all these amazing up and coming entrepreneurs. And so that was an amalgamation of all those years. I had no business model. I should have. I didn't. My business model was hardcore. It was like, my dad always taught me. He was a great entrepreneur. And he said, put the key in the door, show up early and just go to work. Anne: Well, I was just gonna say to you, you talk about, well, I just opened up a studio. Like, oh, it was like literally a split second of our conversation. But in reality, like, I need to know like that is a BOSS move. Like there's a lot of things that go into saying, oh, I'm going to open up a studio. And I'm sure that you probably went through, oh my gosh, like, how am I gonna get the money and will I make money? And you didn't have a business plan, but I love how you just said put the key in the ignition and just go. I think that says a lot for just foraging ahead and manifesting success for yourself because I can only imagine how difficult that is. And BOSSes out there, I mean, as entrepreneurs, this is something that you really need to do when it comes time to taking that leap of faith and going for it and making this a business that you can support yourself with, I mean, and make money. I mean, it's the reason why we create businesses is so that we can make money. And that's just such an important factor. So this is the same studio right now that you're working out of, the one that you've opened? Lau: This is another one. We've moved since, and of course COVID had changed everything for everyone. So, you know, everyone has home studios now. Everyone has condensed down. Everyone has compressed. We are just getting back to live in studio again and traveling. We just came back from a showcase that we produce, our company produces in New York City and then a week-long competitive convention that we are a part of. So we're just literally now getting back to physically getting on a train, going to New York, going back into studios. And that's also part of our mainstay is to connect voice talent to people live if possible in an industry. Anne: So let's talk about the pandemic because as a studio, how did you survive during the pandemic? I mean, you've gotta pivot. So not only are you just opening brick and mortar studios, which have become with the progression of home studios, being something that everybody's got, that's a tough biz anyway, right? So, and then the pandemic, which pretty much just cut off all in person, in studio gigs. How did you survive and how did you pivot during that time? Lau: Yeah, I mean, so I'll take it to a moment 'cause you know how it is about life, Anne. There's so much you can talk about, but you gotta get down to the nugget of what you really wanna say. There was a moment for me in COVID, and to get back to your comments about the putting the key in the door, how does it feel, the terror that you have inside of you, the fear of failure, the how do I make the rental? This is all internal life that I had inside of me, as many BOSSes have inside of the, of saying I have to feel the fear and then I have to do it anyway. So if I feel the fear, I acknowledge it. I affirm it. It's natural. Now I'm gonna do it anyway. I'm gonna take that calculated risk. So to answer your question, there was a moment in COVID where I thought, okay, all production has gone down for actors. Voiceover is still great, viable and running. What do I film now? Like I'm a good, good problem solver. What's the need that we need right now? And at the time I was sitting in Boston thinking, what does New England need? And I came to me, we needed a voiceover division. We have no voiceover divisions that run out of agencies in New England. Like I know out of the major hubs. And I said, huh, how do I create that? So I immediately started reaching out to agency friends and colleagues, 'cause we work with everyone everywhere, and certainly in new England, we know the handful that are out there. And the bite that I got was a, a friend and colleague of mine, Tim Ayers, who's amazing and has Run Model Club Inc out of Boston for many years. He's owned it for about 10, 12 years. And it's been existence for a good 30 years. A lot of us are repped by them in the New England market. And I reached out to him, and he just had that progressive moment of saying, listening to his meshugene crazy friend Lau, just spout on, in the middle of COVID and all he said was yeah, yeah. Do it. I don't know anything about voiceover, so you're gonna have to do that. And I said, great! Not knowing anything, anything about being an agent or becoming an agent. So I had done casting. I had done producing, I was an actor, certainly a voiceover talent, but I had never been an agent. Anne: But you had all the knowledge and all of the industries surrounding it and the things that you would need to know to be a good agent actually. So I think all of you -- this had prepared you for the moment to become an agent. Lau: Right. But going back to your question earlier, which was brilliant is you are in that moment, you feel excited. And then when you realize the reality you go, ooh, that's a little scary. That's a little terrifying. Now I have to know stuff. Now I have to like now I have to lead. Anne: Not just a little terrifying. It's pretty much terrifying. Just saying. Lau: It's terrifying. And then when I felt it, I knew I was on the right track because that was the challenge that -- Anne: When you're scared. Lau: When you're scared, yeah, you need to jump out of the plane. You need to jump off the cliff. You really do. And I always think to myself, and I pass this on to clients and talent. I say, what's the worst that's gonna happen, really? I wasn't sinking a lot of capital or a lot of money into that, you know? No one really knew I was doing it. I said the worst is it doesn't work. It just doesn't work. And that's okay. I will learn a lot from the not working if it doesn't work. Anne: Yeah. Yeah. I love that. It's a learning opportunity. Lau: it is. It really is. I think everything is to be honest with you. And I think once we make mistakes and once we do the wrong thing, we learn even more oftentimes than when we do the right thing. Anne: Absolutely. So then you developed your voiceover division. And that is now running strong and now you're starting to come back in studio as well? Lau: Yes. Yes. Anne: Fantastic. Lau: Yes. So, you know, the agency of course is mostly online nowadays, you know. Tim works online. I work online. Very rarely are we seeing actors or voice talent in person. It's just not necessary. It's expensive to do that. It's time consuming. And so we had to learn how to be a hybrid business model. We had to learn that. Anne: Sure, sure. Now what sorts of things are you doing in studio these days? Lau: Well, we have a handful of folks that come to us. And the interesting part about it, Anne, is we have a really unique model. Our model now runs as the studio, which is Lau Lapides Company. That's our training production base. That's totally separate than the agency. The agency is under Tim. He's the owner-operator. I'm his lead agent that launched the voiceover division, MCVO. Anne: Got it. Lau: And they run parallel to each other. And it's fascinating. It's really interesting to see where are the crossovers and where's the distinctive separation, because in essence I'm a, for lack of a better term, a hired consultant to launch a division, but yet we're the ones who know how to run it. We're the ones who know the world. We're the ones who are bringing in all of the talent in the roster. So it's a very interesting kind of parallel that we walk. The people that we see in person, mainly coaching, mainly studio clients that will come in. Maybe they'll need to do a recording or they'll need a coaching session, or they just wanna come in and talk about their career. And there's always a group of people that are geographically local enough to do that and wanna have that in person experience. Then everyone else is online. Anne: Yeah. Technology is a beautiful thing, but also in person is something I think through that pandemic, I mean, people are just desperate to get out for face to face, an in person meetings, sessions. And I think that hybrid is really a wonderful thing. I remember myself when I moved from the east coast to the west coast -- it's funny because you said you wanted to be a leader, and I missed teaching. I missed leading a group, and that's what created my desire to start the VO Peeps. And that was a group that I wanted to lead and bring educational initiatives to. And it's just something that was wonderful at the time. And because I started in Southern California, there was only a certain amount of people that I could reach out to locally. And because I had such a background in technology, I was one of the first meetup groups to both stream meetings personally, as well as onto the Internet. So I had a very hybrid group. And so I could actually at that point become a global networking group. And that became something that I did long time ago, back in 2000 and, I think 2010 I started to do that at the time. Not many people were doing it. And so it became a really wonderful way to just reach out to a much broader audience. So you have such a, a wonderfully wide audience. So even though you're located on the east coast, you have a widespread reach that is global, which is something that, as voice talent today, it's something that we need to address and understand the market in that way. Because gosh, when I started doing voiceover, a home studio wasn't even a thought. It was a luxury. Some people, oh, they dabbled in it. And other than that, you just have to go to the studio and, and audition and do the jobs and getting the work was -- that was before pay to plays. And really the agent was the person who served you. Let's get a little bit more in depth with, let's say the casting processes. I feel like if you had to sum up like, what one thing do you do the most of right now? Or is it all things? Is it casting? Is it performance? Is it managing? What is it that you do that consumes your day? Or what's a day like for Lau? Lau: I would say managing. You brought it up. That's the word managing and management as you know, Anne, is hard. It's challenging. It's about how you deal with temperament, balance, time, energy, you know, it's all those things. How do you have longevity to keep going? How do you maintain stamina? How do you hold grace and not lose your patience? There's so much that goes into an education about how do you run a business? How do you manage people? How do you manage yourself? How do you keep yourself in line? I always joke with my people. I say really, honestly, I work for the hardest boss I've ever worked for. Anne: Yourself. Lau: She's tough. And that's me. Anne: I love that. That's I get. Yeah, I get that. Lau: Like I can stand outside and be honest about that and say, wow, she's a bitch. Sometimes I have to be really tough. And sometimes I have to be really strong, and sometimes I have to be really vulnerable and empathize with situations that I myself may or may not, or I myself may or may not think is a big deal. So I think the management factor of making an eclectic, diverse program run along with the agency division is a lot of the circus plates in the air. It's really a lot of that. And I realize I'm gonna drop plates at times. I realize I'm gonna set myself on fire at times. And I always have some sort of extinguisher waiting, you know what I mean? Like you're gonna get burned. That's just the reality of it. But yeah, so we're coaching all the time. We are working on jobs and gigs all the time. This was a great week for us. We hooked a lot of our agency MCVOs up with some great gigs this week, three big jobs we landed this week. So it's a lot of balancing act, and it's a lot about getting to people quickly, right? People want responses, being responsive quickly. Anne: I have to completely agree with that. And as a manager, right, as a boss, we expect those things of ourselves, of people we're dealing with. And I wanna kind of just bring what you've said in perspective for, let's say, people just coming into the industry. You may not have people to manage yet, but you absolutely have to manage yourself. And also part of the growing and part of growth, even as a small business entrepreneur -- you don't have to open up a studio to be managing things and managing people. Because I've talked about this on previous episodes and I'm sure Lau and I will talk about this as outsourcing. You will have to manage people, manage your business, and to do so successfully requires some skills that you can learn as you go. I mean, I think it's a wonderful thing. Once you become an entrepreneur and you're not necessarily -- you know, I worked in corporate for many years and I worked in education, which is another form of working for someone else. When it comes time to working for yourself, you're probably the hardest boss. And that includes not just the aspects of the business, but you're also hard on yourself personally, because what you're selling is part of a brand of yourself. You are a personal brand. And so not only is it doubly hard, I think, because you don't have a physical product necessarily to offset. Right now, if you're hard on someone, you're also hard on yourself because now you're gonna be hard on your product, which is your voice and your performance. And it's a very personal thing, which makes I think being an entrepreneur in our industry very difficult. You have to try to separate yourself so that you're not affecting your product by being hard on your performance or hard on your growth or lack of growth. Lau: That is beautiful, Anne, just perfect. And you have to play paradoxes every single day of your life. You have to play these opposites, which feel really weird and uncomfortable. Like on one hand, you have to be super hard on yourself so that you can perform, you can produce, and you can do it in a timely manner. And then on the other hand, you have to go easy on yourself. You have to forgive yourself. You have to not hold yourself to standards that are insanely ridiculous. You know what I mean? And you have to treat yourself as a human being because if you beat yourself up too much, you're just not gonna last long. You're not gonna have the esteem and the confidence to really last long in the industry. So you have to play these kind of opposites, this antithetical effect all the time, and go back and forth from it, and kind of say, hey, I need to do this. I need to get this done. It's important, but hey, wait a second. Where's the flexibility in it? How can I do it again better? What did I learn from it? And really kind of fluidly go back and forth from that mindset. Anne: Right. And it's not something, as we both mentioned in the beginning of this podcast, it's not something that happens a few times like a day or week. I mean, we're talking to really be successful in this industry in a marathon, not a sprint, right? Our overnight success took 12 years or 40 years, whatever that is, that is continue -- and I don't know if the fear factor for me got easier or I just dealt with it better because if I'm not doing something every day that scares me, then I'm not growing. And if I'm stagnating, that is the death of me. That is where I felt I was when I worked in the corporate world. I felt like it just wasn't growing. And that is something to me and my psyche and my development is really important. Lau: It's super important. I love that quote too. That's I think a famous Eleanor Roosevelt quote is do something every day that scares you. You know, and never, never, never give up. So there's that element of, yeah. I need to be afraid, but not so terrified that I'm paralyzed. You know, I like to say now analysis can be paralysis. Like don't overthink it too much. Don't overanalyze it too much because you can find a reason why not to do things all the time. Anne: Oh, gosh. Lau: Right? Anne: Oh yeah. Yeah. There's ways -- I'm a good procrastinator on certain things. Lau: I think most people are. Anne: Those are the things I wanna outsource. I wanna outsource those things, but. Lau: But you know what you said earlier, which was so true is like the delegation effect, learning how to delegate, learning how to -- Anne: Let go control. Lau: Yes. Anne: That's me. I'm a control freak. Did you notice that about me yet? Lau: Listen, you and me are gonna start that club because I am a self-professed control freak too. And part of that is a beautiful gift because you wanna have that sense of like, I can fully 100% manage what's going on, but we have to know that, you know, at the end of the day, we don't really have control over anything. It's like an illusion, you know? Anne: You're right. And I'm learning as I grow that it's impossible for me to grow without delegating and letting go control because I'm only one person with only so many hours in a day. And so I cannot grow my business without letting go of some of that control and trusting. And then it becomes a whole 'nother lesson I think in growing your business is trusting your team and getting people on board with you that believe in you, believe in your process, believe in the company and that you have a mutual respect for each other. And I always say that, you know, I treat my employees like gold because they really are gold to me, and I make sure they're paid well. I make sure all those things that scare me and say, oh my God, can I afford to do this? Do I have a budget? I make the budget. Right? And so again, you have to throw out a lot of faith, a lot of faith that things will come to you if you put it out there and that you are putting your faith in your employees and they have a sense of loyalty and pride and want to work with you for success of the company. And that's a really hard thing if you're not used to doing that, if you've worked for someone else for all your life and that's scary thing. Lau: And it's a skill. You're right, it's a soft skill. But ironically, it's a hard skill. It really is. And you need to cultivate it to some degree because you want to have your team, your village, your tribe, whatever you call them, no person is an island. I'm telling you, I could not build the studio myself. I had my family, my husband, my own children who now work in the business with me. I mean, it's immense, the help that and assistance that you need as you grow. And just like identifying, you have to be able to identify who are my people that are really great, and they're supportive, and they're helpful? And then who are the people who are the growth people? Those are the people who can really help you grow and level up in your business to the next tier and really not mixing up. Yeah, not mixing up the two, 'cause they're very different people, equally valuable and equally loved. I'll use that word love. I think you need to love people. Anne: And -- I agree -- and of course, even harder I think is if the people are not necessarily a fit for you and in letting go and in making that decision. There's that whole boss-employee kind of relationship. Are they friends as well? And there's a lot of delicate things in there, which, oh gosh, we could spend a whole 'nother podcast probably talking about that. Lau: We could, we could spend forever talking about that. . Anne: And actually I think we will, but I'm gonna say for today, Lau, thank you so much. It's been a wonderful privilege to have you coming on the show. I'm excited for our future episodes of BOSS Superpowers, of Business Superpowers. And so thank you so much for your wisdom today and telling us a little bit about yourself. And BOSSes out there, I want you to know that as individuals, sometimes it can seem difficult to make a huge impact, but as a group, you can help contribute to the growth of our communities in ways that you never thought possible. And you can visit 100voiceswhocare.org to learn how. Also a great, big shout-out to my sponsor, ipDTL. You too can connect and network like BOSSes. Find out more at ipdtl.com. You guys, have an amazing week and we'll see you next week. Thanks so much, Lau. Bye. Lau: Thank you, Anne. Loved it. Anne: Bye! >> 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.com 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.

Iterate or evaporate. In this episode, Anne & Erikka are here to get you out of a funk. Whether it's a slow season in your genre or you are feeling like work isn't coming as easily as it did a few months ago, your hosts are here to cheer you on. Connecting with a community can help motivate you, but really the only person you have to impress is yourself! This industry requires you to be consistent, tenacious, and ready to keep going even when it feels impossible. Reflecting on recent accomplishments or setting new goals can reignite that fire. Maybe you need to journal about why you got into voice over in the first place. Whatever it is, we are here for you and if you need a little boost, put this episode on repeat! Transcript >> It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere 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. Anne: Hey everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS podcast. I'm your host Anne Ganguzza, and I'm happy to be back this morning, having a balanced breakfast with my good friend, Erikka J. Erikka! Yay! How are you? Erikka: Hey Ann. I am good. I did not have a balanced breakfast, but. Anne: Erikka: I'm coming back balanced and refreshed from vacation. Anne: Well, there you go. Erikka: That's great. Anne: And since we wanna remain with our theme of balance, I wanted to ask you, it seems like you had a wonderful, luxurious vacation. Did it restore the balance to your creative and professional life as well as your personal life? Erikka: I think so. I think so, but it was crazy because kind of looping back to what we said in earlier episode, I had like a chaotic day, right before I left. I know we've talked about like having backups and all those things, and man, did it save my behind because -- Anne: Ah, very important. Talk about it. Let's talk about it. Erikka: Oh my goodness. I had a SAG video game session that I've worked with once or twice before, but still, you know, those are like super exciting, but also wanna make sure everything's right. So had everything set up. They had me on Zoom first and they get on SourceConnect. And for whatever reason, Zoom and SourceConnect hated each other that day. And like my interface wouldn't work, and my DAW wouldn't work and it was just like, ohhhh, like. Anne: That's tense. That's a tense situation. So what happened? So what happened? Erikka: Luckily I had backups, Anne. Anne: Ooh! Erikka: So so I switched from my Apollo right over to my Audient, and I switched from Adobe audition right over to Pro Tools, which they use too, so they were super cool with. And I actually heard them comment, "isn't it great when an actor like knows what they're doing with the technical stuff?" Anne: Ooh. Score. Erikka: And I was, like -- Anne: That was awesome. Erikka: Yes! Anne: And you know what? I absolutely am quite sure that's gonna have a big bearing on them wanting to work with you again. Erikka: Well, I'll tell you what, it was also a very nice way to kick off vacation by not leaving a session, like, oh my God, I screwed up. It was like, it all worked out in the end. So then I could go on vacation happily and you know, relax. So it was great. Anne: Wow. Well, congratulations on that for sure. Erikka: Thank you. Anne: I know that for me, like when I go on vacation, I'm very much all on or I'm very much all off. And when I go on vacation, I can completely, thankfully I can completely disconnect. And then I find that when I get back, it's tough to motivate myself again. Erikka: Yeah. Anne: So I figured it would be kind of a good thing to talk about. How do you motivate yourself? And then also, how do you motivate yourself when, during the course of your voiceover career, let's say, things aren't working out the way you expect? I know a lot of people come to me, you know, I'm not booking and it's just really frustrating. And how do you self motivate when you're just coming off a vacation or when the chips are down? Erikka: Oh boy, that's something that I think is like a muscle that we have to keep toned in this business, you know? Because there's so many things that can not help to keep us motivate -- Anne: Demotivate. Yeah. Erikka: Exactly. Exactly. So, you know, you're not booking or whatever, but coming back off a vacation, it's like, yes, you've had this refresh, but it's always like hard to get back in the saddle, right? So usually what I'll do is I'll have at least one day of rest to make sure that like, I don't have -- Anne: Once you come back. Erikka: I'm typically still booked out. Anne: Yeah. I love that. Yes, I do that too. I book out one extra day when I come back for that jet leg or whatever it is. So you can just relax and kind of get yourself geared back up. Erikka: Yep. And if I see like an audition I really wanna do, I might try to do like one or two just to kind of like warm up getting back in the booth. Anne: Sure. Erikka: But you know, that way it's kind of my choice, 'cause I've already said like, hey, I'm booked out this day. Anne: Important question though. Did you completely book out during that vacation? Did you bring any equipment with you? Erikka: I did. So I have that Shure MV 88, which is plus, which is super tiny and it's so small that I don't mind carrying that. I stopped carrying around my 416 and my interface, 'cause that just felt like -- it was hard to be on vacation yeah. And I always get stopped by TSA. Like it's a microphone. Anne: Yeah. Yeah. Me too. Erikka: So I did bring it with me, but yeah, I didn't record a single thing on vacation. It was great. Anne: Good. Congratulations on that. Yeah. Erikka: Thank you. Thank you. Anne: Absolutely. Erikka: Yeah. So self-motivating, man, you gotta -- there's a lot of different things, whether that's warming up to get back in the booth and then thinking about why are you doing this? You know, what are your personal goals? What are your professional goals? What about you, Anne? Anne: Well, I think a lot of times, if you're getting frustrated, when let's say work, isn't coming your way or you didn't book that audition or you're not sure what's happening, obviously number one, it happens to all of us. So just know that. There are times when things can be slow, and things may not be happening the way that you expect them to. So number one, know that you're not alone. Number two, reach out. I think reach out to somebody that can be an accountability buddy or, or just a friend in the industry that can help you motivate, get yourself back on track. And just to kind of reinforce the fact that you're not alone, and maybe they're having some slow moments too, or maybe they're not, and then that may or may not make you feel better. But but for sure, I think know that it happens to all of us and reach out and communicate. Don't just let it sit inside you and fester. Erikka: Fester, yes. Anne: Because I think that just is like a self-fulfilling prophecy, you know what I mean? It just, it's hard to get out of until somebody can help snap you out of it. And so, Hey, just put this VO BOSS episode on repeat. So whenever you're down, and you need motivation to say it's okay and it happens, there are slow times in the industry. Erikka: Yeah. Anne: Keep plugging away at it. It is a marathon, not a sprint. What other things do we say? Interestingly enough, Erikka, I've been in this industry over 15 years, and honestly it does take tenacity, and it takes consistency and staying with it. Erikka: Yeah. Anne: Now obviously if you haven't booked in a year, that might be an indication that maybe you need some other outside help or maybe performance technique or something else. Maybe you're not marketing enough. But I think for the most part, when you go through these lulls, for sure, just understand that it does happen and reach out so that you're not in this self-sabotaging moments of saying, that's it; I can't do this or this isn't for me and quit, because it is a marathon. It is a marathon. Erikka: Yeah. Yeah. And I think what you said is important about like, not just reaching out, like remembering that that also includes like coaches or, you know, finding workshops that maybe you need just need a refresh. Everybody still needs to train. I just had a class on Thursday when I got back. But you know, also sort of honing in on what exactly. like what's the problem? You can't really solve it until you know exactly what's missing. Is it that you're not reaching out enough and you're not drumming up enough leads? Or are you getting the leads and not quite landing the auditions? Maybe it's audition technique, 'cause maybe once you're in the job, it's great and they love you, but you're not getting the attention and standing out from the pack. Just sort of honing in on what is it that I need to work on to drum things up and knowing what the lulls are in the industry is key. Because it may not be you; it may just be the time of year, you know? Anne: Yeah, and also, not just the time of year, but the genre that you're working in as well. Erikka: Yes. Yeah. Anne: Like there are certain genres that probably don't let up, like if you're in promo, right? And you're the voice of a show, you will have a schedule that will be somewhat predictable when the show is running or before the show -- whatever it is, you'll be on a schedule for those particular jobs. Versus let's say commercial: if you're the voice of a particular campaign, there may be a lot of work at once and then the campaign might be over. And so then you're onto the next campaign. If it's e-learning or corporate, it could be kind of hit or miss, you know, sometimes it's feast or famine, that sort of thing. Erikka: Yeah, yeah. Anne: And just understand that when there is a famine, I think that's the time when you have to step back and increase the marketing levels, increase your, you know, reaching out to your contacts, making sure that you're continually on the lookout for that next client. I think you really should never be complacent if you're busy and when you're busy. Always be on the lookout for finding that next client, because you just never know when that job may end. And I think for me, I don't expect anything -- Erikka: Yeah. Anne: -- from my clients and the more predictable the work is, obviously the more comfortable and the more confident you're gonna be. So for me, I've got some regular clients that I know in advance like what jobs are coming up. And that gives me a source of confidence so that I can go and audition for more jobs and maybe a different genre and take some chances there. Because I always like to mix that up. Erikka: Absolutely. Yeah. You don't wanna be taking all your risk at one point and then you don't have anything going on. You wanna kind of have your foundation, you know, know your, what your business plan is, know what your strategy is to keep yourself balanced, right, and to keep your balance sheet in balance. Anne: Absolutely. Absolutely. Erikka: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So those are all, all great things. Anne: And I think we talk about like goal setting in a recent episode. You know, I think goal setting is important because we can lose sight of -- within that goal setting, we write things down. We also not just write our goals down, but our accomplishments. And if you're doing that on a timely basis, on a weekly basis, a monthly basis, whatever that is, going back and taking a look at your progress and your accomplishments is going to be something I think that you can always keep track of. And that can also help to motivate you to say -- you know, I was thinking I haven't been busy, but in reality, I got that job. Or, you know, I got that wonderful testimonial from that client. Or I made contact with a bunch of new production houses that I'm on the roster. Whatever that is, you can take a look at what has happened so far. That's why I think keeping track in goal setting and writing down your accomplishments and goals that have come to fruition, I think that's so, so important. Erikka: Absolutely. Like my metrics are super self-motivating for me. And it actually has kind of pulled me out of a, oh, I don't think I'm doing as much work. You know, I haven't been feeling well, all of this. And then I go back, and I look and I'm like, well, it's not that bad. You know, and maybe it's not as bad as I kind of -- we, we inflate these things in our head, but when you go back and look at the numbers, especially like, what I do is I'll definitely look at my year over year. So I'll see I did this last March and you know, this this March and kind of get an idea of where I'm at, looking at incomes, you know, a number of auditions that I did, bookings, and even like callbacks. Like if I got a callback in a genre that I haven't gotten a call back in before, that is progress, and that's showing that, you know, I've gotten better. So all that stuff is incredibly self-motivating. Anne: Well, you know, you mentioned income, and I'd like to touch upon that just a little bit. I will say that for me, of course it's about voiceover. But for me, it's also about being the entrepreneur, and the entrepreneur is someone who can design their business so that it can be profitable and fruitful both in self-fulfillment as well as let's say financial, and I am not ashamed to say that that is part of a game for me. I like to make money. It helps me to support the household and the family, and I'm not ashamed to say that. And I think there's a lot of us that, especially when starting out in the industry are very timid. "I'm not experienced enough. I'm not good enough yet. I need more training." And they're very timid about charging a particular amount, charging what they're worth. We've touched on charging what you're worth, you know, multiple times in this podcast. But I will say that if you charge what you're worth, and even just once in a while, throw out a number that you think is ridiculous. When you get that number, that is a motivator, like no other . Erikka: Yes, totally agree. Totally agree. And being able to kind of, tying that in with goals and the income thing, is making sure that your goals are -- and I wanna be cautious with the word realistic. And what I think I really mean is incremental and iterative. Anne: Yes. Erikka: So it is okay to set astronomical goals for yourself, but make that a long term thing. Anne: Yes. Erikka: What are the steps to get there? If you wanna make $100,000 in voiceover, what is it gonna take for you to make per month, per week, per day? How many reachouts or, you know, whatever your lead generation strategy is, what do you need to do to to generate that number? And then taking a look at where you landed and kind of setting for the next iteration, what's a more realistic goal for me if I didn't hit it or, oh, I did go over. So maybe I need to reach a little harder because you put that into the universe, I really believe that you can limit yourself by kind of having lower goals. But if you have somewhere in the sweet spot, it can help you be very motivated. Anne: Yeah. And I do wanna continue a little bit more on that financial aspect of it, but if you have a cushion, if you have been able to, if you have a great repeat client, if you have -- or anything, not even, even if it's voiceover, if you have another job, right, that you're making income and you have some money that you have put aside, and this is my voiceover business investment money -- once you have the confidence of having money in there, I believe it is a true motivator to allow you to take more risks in your business. Erikka: Yes, totally agree. Anne: And that to me has been honestly, something that has helped me grow exponentially, just that confidence that I don't have to worry about the money because I've got money set aside for investment. I have a little bit of time to kind of strategize and calculate what can I do now to make money? And again, without people thinking I'm greedy, 'cause I don't like to classify that as greed at all. It's a simple acknowledgement and understanding that money makes the world go around right now, and I need to pay a mortgage. And so with that hardcore realization, to me, it becomes a challenge. "Okay. How can I have enough money set aside and reinvest that money so that I can make more money?" Erikka: Yep, absolutely. Anne: So that I can maybe invest in a good vacation that will help me reset myself creatively, which is something that I need and is coming up in the next year. You know, I've made plans to go on a nice vacation. That is something that I think is not only helpful for me personally, but also professionally because it's going to help me to reset. And so many of us have certain blocks for money. And once we realize what those blocks are, we can work to kind of clear those blocks and just, without getting too woo-woo, right allow the abundance, allow the money and not be ashamed or feel bad about it or simply accept it and allow it to come into our lives. 14:30 Erikka: Yeah, absolutely. So keeping that balanced mindset, not one of scarcity, but one of abundance and welcoming that not just money itself because yes, I love making money too. And recognizing that you have value when you are voicing these projects. You are helping these companies make money in some type of way. Anne: Exactly. Erikka: So you should be compensated for it. There's nothing wrong with that. But this money can allow you, you to not just hitting the number goal, but it can allow you to reach personal goals. Like maybe paying off debt or helping a parent or a child go to college or whatever. So it's a tool. Money is a tool that you can use to do things in your life. You work for it, you should get it, and there's nothing wrong with setting goals based on that. Anne: Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the biggest money blocks that I faced when I was growing up was that my father was supposed to be the head of the household and making the money. Erikka: Yeah. Anne: And my mother was raising the children, right? And bless them both, love them both, but that was kind of what I was raised with. But thankfully my parents were always encouraging, saying I could be whatever I wanted to be. I didn't feel like there was a limitation, but just because it was something that I grew up with, and I saw, as I became a business owner, should I feel bad that I'm making more money? I remember when I was going out to get a job, I'm like, well, how much money should I make? Like that was an actual thought in my head. Well, if I get married, my husband should make more money than me, and I, you know, of course immediately put a stop to that. But I don't want that to be a limitation at all for that. So it was always like, well, as a woman, I shouldn't be making as much money. And of course I put a stop right to that in today's world. Heck no. Erikka: Yeah. Anne: You know? For me -- Erikka: Yeah, absolutely. I always wanted as much as possible. Anne: Yeah, exactly. And for me, believe it or not, you wanna talk about how we're motivating, how to motivate when the chips are down, that's a motivator. It is a motivator. And so I am continually trying to improve. And when I set my goals and again, I love that you said the incremental-iterive not outlandish goals, but when you set decent goals that are incremental, and you hit those goals, that becomes such a motivator. Erikka: Yes, yes. Anne: And again, it doesn't consume my business, but it absolutely drives my business because you want to be successful. And so to be successful, I'd like to make a profit for this because it is my full-time career. Now, if you're in voiceover, and maybe it's your part-time career, I want you to have a goal of making money as well, because I don't want you to not care about it because then it will drive down, let's say, it may drive down the valuation in the industry, right? So every one of us should get paid, whether we're working full-time or part-time, we should get paid what we're worth. Erikka: Absolutely. Think about, even if it's, if it is part-time or just side money for you, think about what you could do with that extra money, and maybe that'll help you keep your rates up like vacations. You know, just went to Cabo and it was gorgeous. It could be saving for retirement. It could be saving for college for kids. It could be saving to take care of an aging parent. It could be just investing, you know, go buy an investment property. So don't see it as just, oh yeah, I'll do this for $100 because who cares? Anne: It's just a hobby for me. No. I want you to turn that thought around and say, hey, demand the money that you're worth and concentrate on the clients who are willing to pay you what you're worth. Erikka: Indeed. Anne: And try to even change the notion that there are some jobs that may not be worth as much. I mean, I think a lot of that is our own self-inflicted limitations on what we can charge for a job. I mean, a lot of times, you know, we have talked about negotiation before. You know, the person who mentions money first usually loses. And so always asking for a budget really helps because one of the last jobs I asked for a budget, and it was literally five times bigger than the budget I had in my brain. And I said, oh, I think I can work with that. Right? And that was a great motivator that -- Erikka: Yep. Anne: Right? Erikka: Exactly. Anne: I'm like -- Erikka: Absolutely. Anne: -- wow. You know, I could actually get that money for that job and I didn't feel guilty. I didn't feel like it was overcharged because again, like you've mentioned, you're helping a business to make money. And so, you know, you are absolutely worth the money, and even if it's more than you think. And that really, I think helps to set like little benchmarks for like, okay, so I got paid for this particular genre this amount and you know what, it's not impossible that I could get paid that again or not more so. Erikka: Agreed. And even some like external motivators 'cause we wanna balance what's motivating us, right? 'Cause money is great. Money's important. Money is probably the main reason that most of us are doing this. We wanna get paid and compensated for our time and talents. But understanding that there are other motivators as well, in addition to other goals you can set, it can be personal, just kind of growing your artistic muscles and being a great actor, but even external motivations like awards. I think that awards showing achievements that you've made in certain categories, for one, I think that they are a marketing and advertising tool, which is great to drum up new business. And it's nice to be recognized by your peers and to be able to say, I did such a great job on this that I was awarded for it. So those can be great too. Anne: Absolutely. There is such a difference of opinion with some people about the awards. Erikka: Yeah. Anne: Are they valid for us or not? But I think any type of recognition from our peers, that's validation. There's so many times when, again, we're such an isolated business and it's such a personal aspect of our brand that we're being judged on. Whether we get paid or not, right, whether we get that job or not, right, it is a personal part of us that is being valued, right? It's our voice. And so if we can have other people say, wow, great job, that really, really helps to motivate. And that includes award ceremonies. And again, there's the whole argument, well, you're paying for the award. Well, like you mentioned, consider that in investment in marketing. Erikka: Absolutely. Anne: Does it really make a difference? I say, yeah, it does. I mean, it makes a difference to the person who may not be familiar with the voiceover industry, and they say, well, they've been awarded, so they must be good. I'm not necessarily marketing to voiceover people when I get an award on my voiceover work. I'm advertising to companies or other people that might hire me for the same thing. And it does leave an impression. Erikka: Yeah. Think about, I know that we've all either had a product or a brand or something that we've seen, and they have on their website when they've been talked about in certain magazines or when they've earned certain awards. Again, we are businesses as well. So why would we see this as any different? There's nothing wrong with it. And if you have the argument, what does it help? My retort would be how does it hurt? Anne: Yeah. Agreed. Erikka: You know, like -- Anne: That's a great retort. Erikka: Hey. Anne: I mean, why not? So. Erikka: Why not? Get dressed up and have fun with your friends. Anne: Yeah. Yeah. I also think it's like, so anybody that knows me kind of knows that I'm a little competitive as I laugh, just a tiny bit competitive. And just the competitiveness of it all, even if I don't win, right? Erikka: Right. Anne: Which, you know, I'll be like rrr, but anyways , but even that little bit of competition is stirs up my adrenaline. Right? It's just fun. Erikka: It's fun. Anne: And again, it's something that wakes me up out of complacency. I think if you're not motivated, you're complacent. And complacency for me is like a dead end. It is a place where I can't grow and a place where ultimately I'll just get bored, and it's just not a place to be in my career. Erikka: Yeah. I don't know if I've said this quote before on this podcast, because it's like one of my favorites. So forgive me if it's a repeat, but one of my favorite quotes, because it's so short is iterate or evaporate. Anne: Ooh, I like that. I've never heard that. Erikka: I love it. It's like keep getting better, keep doing things and kind of going back and looking at how you're doing, or you're going to fade away. Anne: That's the nicer way of saying evolve or die. Erikka: Yeah. Exactly. Anne: Yeah, exactly. Which is one of my favorite Erikka: Yeah, yeah. Anne: Actually that's so funny. Iterate or evaporate. Okay. So I'm gonna say that from now on. I like that. That's great. Yeah. So any other ways that we can help to self-motivate? Sometimes you just have to go on muscle memory, I think, you know what I mean? And just know as much as you're not feeling it, you're feeling low, you're feeling down, you're depressed maybe because you haven't booked a gig in a while. Just kind of going on memory again, play this podcast, and know that things will change. Things will change if you keep going, keep plugging away, be consistent. I think co consistency is key. Erikka: And remembering that yes, we have all these external factors like, you know, awards and money and all these things we've talked about. But personally, and as an internal factor, remember why you started. You know, why do you love voiceover? Why are you here? Why are you doing this? Why are you spending money on all this equipment and this training? And if you can get back to that love, that drive that got you started, that can be sort of a nice refresh to get you motivated to keep going. Anne: Yeah. What a wonderful way to end on this, Erikka. I love that you said it because when you remember why you got into it in the first place, that passion, that love it comes out in your performance. Erikka: Absolutely. Anne: And there's no denying that can vibrate from your soul. Right? The passion and the love that you have for it. It really, I think it's infectious, you know? And it draws people into listening. And so I think that's a really wonderful way. Hey, wanna improve your performance? Remember why you started in the first place, bring that passion back to your reads. Erikka: And that passion might get you booked. Anne: Yeah. Yeah. Back -- Erikka: You'd be surprised. Anne: -- your leads, back to your marketing, bring the passion back to every aspect of your business, and it can only grow from there and move up. So. Erikka: You know it, indeed. Anne: Excellent, excellent episode, Erikka. Starting our morning outright with a balanced breakfast. Erikka: Or a balanced conversation for those of who just have simple carbs. Anne: A balanced, balanced motivation. So, ah, I love it. I love it. I love it. So I'd like to give a great big shout-out to our sponsor, ipDTL. You too can connect like BOSSes. Find out more at ipdtl.com. And also BOSSes, here's a chance for you to use your voice, to make a difference and give back to the communities that give to you. You can find out more at 100voiceswhocare.org. You guys, have an amazing week, and we'll see you next week. Bye! Erikka: Bye! >> 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.com 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.

In order to tell a story, you have to understand it. This week, Anne & Erikka discuss how to harness musicality to make the most out of your reads. Singing can teach you a lot about breath control, pacing, and emotional expression. Taking deep, diaphragmatic breaths will keep your air flow strong. This prevents you from breaking up ideas & phrases with pauses which ultimately interrupt the story you are telling. Knowing your voice and its capabilities can inform your daily workflow & schedule. Tune in to learn how you can harness the power of your voice… Transcript >> It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere 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. Anne: Hey everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS podcast and our balance series. I'm your host Anne Ganguzza, and I am thrilled to have back special guest co-host Erikka J. Erikka J, yay. Erikka: Hey, Hey Anne. How are you? Anne: We're kind of singing that. Erikka: Yes we are. Anne: You know, you are a singer. And I was thinking about this because I used to play an instrument for many years and I also sang for quite some time. I was an avid choir member and swing choir member as well, kind of like the glee club. And so it's interesting because it affects how I teach voiceover. So I teach voiceover with like conversational melody. And it's very interesting, 'cause I'll talk about, okay, start on your middle C. And then when you're going to inflect important words, that's pretty much just a tiny nuance of a step up. It's not like crazy notes. It's C to a C# or C to a D. And I thought, because you're a singer, we could really have a conversation about how there is a melody to our voice as we are speaking. We're not necessarily singing, but when we're talking and we're communicating, there's absolutely a melody. Erikka: Absolutely. But you have to keep it in balance. You don't wanna get sing-songy because then it starts to sound like, you know, old school commercials and nobody pays attention. It's not conversational anymore. Anne: Yeah. Erikka: But yeah, for sure. Anne: So let me ask you, you were a singer before you were a voice artist? Erikka: Yes. Anne: So what skills that you developed as a vocalist, how do they help you as a voice artist? Erikka: Oh man. So definitely for one was breath control. Anne: Ooh. Erikka: Yes. Anne: That's an important one. Erikka: When you get those really long run on sentences or those big words, and it's like, we gotta make it work or you gotta read speed through the disclaimers or whatever. I'm like, boom. You know, like . Anne: Look, and you just did a nose breath. I love that. I teach nose breath. Erikka: Yeah. I don't even do mouth breath. I don't even think it's automatic. Yeah. Anne: That's awesome. Because, so I talk about nose breath because it helps you to really get a deep diaphragmatic breath. Erikka: Yes. Anne: And there's nothing more powerful, right, than to deliver words when you're not afraid of running out of breath. Right? Erikka: Indeed. Yes. Yes. Because your brain is gonna be like, oh my God, I can't breathe, I can't -- Anne: Right. And that's all you can think about. You can't think about the story you're trying to tell when you're exactly gasping for breath. And honestly, I think there's something to be said for understanding the music before you sing it a little bit or kind of understanding the phrasing of the music, because for me, words and stories are broken up into phrases or clauses as my, my English teacher would say. And in those phrases, you don't wanna run outta breath. You don't wanna like stop. Like I am talking to you all staccato, like William Shatner. . You know, you wanna be able to have that -- here, it's a smooth phrase and I'm just talking. And if you guys, the BOSSes out there, you're listening to this right now is we're talking to one another, we're not breathing in the middle of our words. We're breathing either before we say them or at a comma. And if you run outta breath, like that's all you can think about. So you can't have a conversation while you're continually gasping for breath. Erikka: It's still a balance. Anne: Yeah. Talk to me about those diaphragmatic breaths for you. Erikka: So it's definitely, like I said, the support in being able to get through those long phrases, but it's also, like you said, finding the commas and that's not necessarily the commas that are written on the script. And I think that's important to keep in mind. When you're doing a conversational method of speaking, there are gonna be times when maybe, you know, you're in the middle of thinking. Like I just paused right now and I kind of, you know, I might take a natural breath there and that's okay. So it doesn't have to be, I have one breath for the entire sentence. Just now when I'm speaking, you can hear, there are some points where I'm breathing and it's just natural. You wanna keep the natural breath in there, but not the, oh my God, I ran outta breath, and I gotta breathe. Anne: Oh my God, just, I'm at the end of the, I'm at the end of the sentence now. Erikka: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So those are incredibly supportive. Anne: And it's funny because I had to kind of learn how to breathe even better after I had surgery way back in 2012. And it's interesting. That's when I started really doing nose breaths and diaphragmatic breaths, and it's incredible how confident it makes you feel. And so it really allows you to concentrate on the story that you're telling again. And you can deliver those words. Erikka: Yeah, yeah, I can -- Anne: Just when you want to. Erikka: I can feel them in my posture. Like it actually, like, I feel like it makes me sit up because it's like, your lungs are full, and it's like, I've telling this story. You know, this is my message. And you shall listen to me. Like it's . Anne: Yeah. Erikka: Yeah. Anne: And I think it's very similar to swimmers. Like I used to take swimming lessons and be like, okay, how long can you hold your breath underwater? Erikka: Yeah. Anne: It's a muscle that you can develop. So if you are in your booth, and sometimes you just don't anticipate long, unwieldy sentences. Boo on you, because you should understand at least at some point in your analysis of it, right? I always say go through the script like a first grader so that you kinda have an idea of where those long-winded sentences are and you know where you're going to breathe. You kind of have to plan where you're gonna breathe. So it's not at every single comma, but like you said, it can be in implied commas. Erikka: Yeah. Anne: And those are the only times you should have to breathe. And the cool thing about this is if you do that, if you breathe only like before you read a sentence or after, or at the commas or implied commas, then you have much less editing to do. And those of us, which I think Erikka, you are with me, we do long format narration a lot, it lessens the amount of editing you have to do afterwards. Erikka: Yeah, absolutely. Anne: And if you're talking about a piece of copy, that is an hour finished audio, right? And you're just getting rid of the big [air intake] before the sentence, versus trying to place those words in the proper place because you ran outta breath and now you're trying to piece it together so it sounds reasonable, well, that's maybe four or five or six movements, right, or edits in your software, not including the ones that you take in the beginning. So if you take a good breath in the beginning, you just wipe that out. That's one movement or one mouse swipe compared to four or five, when you're trying to rearrange sentences to make 'em sound decent, which they never do because you've pieced them together when you've run outta breath. And when you run outta breath, your inflection is off. Erikka: Yes. Yes. You're breaking up the story. And like you, you mentioned the swimming analogy. Another thing that like music kind of taught me was budgeting my breath because it could be, I've taken this deep breath. I might have to hold this long note or a high note. You can't like take a breath and then keep holding the note. It kind of, it kills the vibe. It's the same thing with speaking. If you breathe in the wrong place, it doesn't, it just doesn't work. Anne: Now, I like how you said, hold the note. Like if you get really technical about it, right? Holding the note doesn't necessarily mean that you have sound on the note. Right? So for example, I said, right. And I lengthened that. That's like, I would say an emphasized word, which I attribute to a whole note, right? Versus the words leading up to that important emphasized word, which would be half notes, quarter notes, 16th notes. The ones that aren't as important as the long note that you're holding. So I'm just saying that holding the note, you don't always have to have sound. And what I mean is when you are pausing, notice how I says when you are pausing. Notice how I didn't go when. you are pausing. So you're holding that note and that kind of meshes your words together. That sounds very natural. There's a lot of times when I'll tell people you're on the precipice. Don't cut in between your commas. Don't cut the words off, because what it does is it cuts off the idea of the phrase. Because you don't want it to be here, I am going to talk to you in a very crisp voice. And even though I sound conversational, I'm sounding very articulate. So that holding on the precipice of like, I'm about to, right? I didn't say I am about to. I said, I'm about two. So I held my breath and I think that's important for the natural sounding melody. Erikka: Absolutely makes you sound more relatable. Anne: Yeah. Erikka: And like, you're actually a person and you're not talking at people. You're talking with someone. That's the difference. Anne: Yeah. Erikka: Yeah. Anne: Absolutely. Do you have any exercises that you do like that you used to do to warm up when you were singing that are similar for voiceover? Erikka: I am your classic horrible singer in terms of warming up. We are bad about it. And I'm the first to admit. Anne: Now why is that? 'cause there's -- Erikka: We're just lazy. Anne: -- so many exercises. Well, there's so many exercises out there, and it's funny because -- Erikka: I know. Anne: -- it's always like, okay, what should I warm up with? What should I warm up with? And honestly, do I do warmups every single day before I voice something for an audition? I might, if I just got up out of bed. I'm not hydrated or my mouth hasn't moved, you know? Erikka: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anne: So, but other than that, it's funny. Sometimes I do a lot of telephony, and little secret, sometimes I warm up with my telephony jobs 'cause they're short. Erikka: Exactly. Anne: You know what I mean? And so honestly I can say those words and those sentences over and over again. And then that helps me to warm up. But I have a great app on my phone called Appcompanist, which my singing instructor Armie -- I'm gonna actually put a link to her 'cause she's amazing -- she got me turned onto that, but that's like, you can sing your scales, and that's helpful to help you get to a vocal placement that you might want to be in. Erikka: You bring up a good point. That it depends on like what you're about to do, because typically because I know that I'm bad about warming up, and I know some things, like you said, singing scales, like bumblebee to get your, you know, blah, blah, blah, your tongue going too, and then like straw foundation and all those kind of things. Or even just singing a song that you know, is close to your natural range. Like, you don't wanna stretch for really high or really low in your first words of the morning. But if I have something like a quick job, like you said, like telephony or in-store messaging or something, and it's where my voice naturally is when I first wake up, which is kind of lower Viola Davis in the basement, I do start with that work first and work my way up to something that might want more upbeat, more a higher pitch possibly. So I'm very aware of where my natural placement is and maybe what's a stretch for me, and I warm up in that way. Anne: Well, okay. So here's my question, right? So there's little tricks, I think, 'cause I, of course in the morning I, I have a lower voice and I'm like, oh I wanna do the audition in the lower voice or this is a great gig for me in my lower voice. So if I wanna get to my lower voice again, right, I can sing it down there. And when I sing it down there, I'll just, you know, do a scale, and it'll be up to scale. And then ba ba ba, you know, I'll get down to the scale and I can feel where the voice is in my mouth or my throat or in my chest. And interestingly enough, once I feel where it is, I can then use that as a starting point for -- Erikka: Yes, absolutely. Anne: -- my conversational, authentic, believable read. And that's how I get vocal placement to kind of change the start of the read. Now, besides that in terms of song, right, and melody, there's also the emotion. Now back in the day when I was playing piano, me and my best friend played piano together. Now she was amazing. She could sight-read and learn and play these incredibly complex classical pieces of music. And it used to always like, competitive Anne, I used to always get like, mm okay, fine. But my teacher used to always make me feel better because she said you have the feeling. You have the passion. And I think that understanding that along with melody, there's passion and nuance and emotion. So if you wanna get yourself to another place, another read along with vocal placement, you can then decide to understand the story and start from a different place in the scene or have a different reaction to it. And that means a different emotion to it. And that's gonna color the melody of the song differently. Erikka: Yeah. And absolutely like you mentioned kind of knowing where the voice is gonna come from. So as you're doing your script analysis, you can kind of think about where this character, you know, even if it's not character work, it's still a character 'cause you're reading as someone else, other than yourself -- where does that live? If it's very sort of determined and you know, gritty, it might be in your chest. It might even be more down in your gut. Like you said, it might be a little more in the throat if it's kind of mid and if it's, you know, really super upbeat and you're excited and it's like a sales presentation, you might be a little more in the nose or the head. So yeah. Thinking about where that vocal placement is gonna be, that's going to tell the story from that character's point of view, is key. Anne: Yeah. And I think vocal placement, like singing-wise, for me, gets me to the starting point. Then it becomes the story, and it becomes the emotion and the character, which I'm so glad you brought up character, because character's so important. Now when you sing, did you think you were a character? I mean, that's just a question I have. Were you placing yourself in a scene or is it just the melody of the song carried you? Erikka: You know, it's very funny you say that because what was always sort of my strong point and what I would talk about in interviews for my musical performances is that I really honed in on the feeling. And I think that was why I was able to translate into voiceover so seamlessly was because I was always coming from the place of story. And if my voice cracked or something, I just kind of, you know, I hated it 'cause I'm like competitive, like you and I'm like, I wanna be perfect, but I'm like, that may have gone with the story. So it was very much from the place of feeling. And my goal was to make you feel this story when I was sang it. I loved making people cry like. Anne: Right, right, right. Erikka: I would find a way to connect with the lyrics and the way that singing the notes and the melody from the place of that emotion and not necessarily quite so technical. Anne: Isn't that awesome? Like the more you really study music and voiceover, and it comes down to what's important? What is it that connects with the people who are listening to you? It ultimately comes out to be the storytelling, the emotion. Because that's what connects us, I think, as humans. And again, those of you out there that are afraid of AI, it's nowhere near coming to that human emotion, which is where we're always gonna win out. And we're always gonna win out for those people who decide that they want to hire that. Right? To connect to an audience. And so I think we always have that humanity. We have that feeling, that emotion, that nuance, that connects with our audience, and that's what we have to work on, I think, in our voiceover careers, if we want to continue to be successful while we are evolving along with AI voices, which have their place in certain, I think, genres. They're going to have their place. I mean, I say this because I talk to Alexa every day. Do you know what I mean? And I'm okay with Alexa's voice. Erikka: Yeah. Anne: Alexa helps me get things done. And so I really do believe that the market will shift. But we always need to connect with the heart and the emotion. And it's so interesting that you vocally through singing as well as storytelling and voiceover, it all comes down to that. Erikka: Yeah. You have to make it personal. And that's, you know, kind of what we hear in, in voiceover is you have to connect to the story. And the songs that I found that were my favorite, and that I could tell were the most impactful were the ones where I found a personal connection to it. And I enjoyed like, it felt like a push. Like I literally would feel less anxious because I got that energy outta my body because I was literally like in it. And when you do the same thing, you can do the same thing with these scripts and voiceover, it's going to be more connected. It's going to naturally have a more balanced melody that sounds human because you've connected with it on a human level. So. Anne: And even though we talk about melody of conversation, there's that uniqueness of you, what you bring to it. Erikka: Yes. Anne: Even when we talk about character, I think sometimes when I talk to people about character, they think about cartoon characters, right? And they're playing another persona. Well, maybe they are, but there's always an element of you that is brought along with that character. And, and for, let's say more nuanced type of genres like corporate narration, eLearning, you're still a character. You're just maybe not as dramatic. In corporate, you're probably always gonna work for the company. You'll be a representative of the company, and in eLearning you're gonna be a teacher. And so those are characters, and those characters have emotions and feelings, and that's the special part that you and you alone can bring to the party, and to make it so uniquely yours where people say, I need to have an Erikka J to narrate that. I need to have an Anne Ganguzza to teach that. Whatever that is, it's that understanding of a vocal placement with a nuance of emotion and telling a story. Erikka: Yep. Absolutely. Anne: So let me ask you a question. Are you still pursuing, singing at all or singing in your voiceover? Erikka: You know, I've had a couple actually jobs and auditions where I've gotten the opportunity to sing as well. So I like that kind of keeps me fresh, but I haven't been pursuing it as much. I love music. I mean, it is definitely what got me here. My first love from way back when I was tiny, but it got to be a lot of, a lot of work with not a lot of return. Anne: Sure, right. That's tough. Erikka: Not as much as voiceover, it is. So maybe when my plate lightens up a little bit, I've thought about, you know, eh, maybe we'll, we'll do a little more music again, but for now it's really voiceover is the thing. Anne: I was like, why don't they bring jingles back? I feel like they're so identifiable. Erikka: I just did one. I just did one like a week ago. Anne: Did you? Erikka: Yeah. Anne: Wow. Erikka: Yeah. It wasn't super corny at all, but yeah, there are very few in far in between, but yeah, I do get a couple. Anne: And I think, you know, in certain genres too, singing can help. Maybe with kids, genres that are, they're talking to kids, there can be more melody in it. Erikka: Oh yeah. Animation for sure. Anne: Yeah. You know, there's melody in everything, in the speaking language. And I think a lot of people don't even think of it in terms of melody. They just think of it in terms of reading words. And there's so much more to it, and I can't stress enough the importance of understanding the story before you tell it. A lot of us just pick up a script and we start reading from left to right. And you don't know what the story is when that happens. And so how can you have any connection to it or how can you have any emotion about it if you don't know what it's about? And so I think that's the last layer. So many people they think about melody in terms of it should sound like this. Erikka: Yeah, exactly. Anne: But in, in reality, the sound has to be natural. The sound has to come from you organically when you are telling a story, not so much in, it should sound like this, you know? Erikka: Yeah. Anne: Because then it just, what happens is you're spending so much time. I think thinking about what it should sound like, that you take away from the amount of time you have to understand the story and then tell it. 'Cause in order to tell it, you've gotta understand it. In order to understand it. You've gotta read it. Right? Erikka: Yep. Anne: But not as a take, you gotta read it first, understand it, comprehend it and then tell it back, right? That's how we tell stories. Right? We have experiences and then we recall that experience and we tell it back. So how can you take words off a page if you don't know what they say and tell that story? Erikka: Yeah. Yeah. And probably reading it at least two or three times. And you know, maybe to yourself, as well as out loud and not performing it so that you are just, again, internalizing that story and really understanding it, having the reading comprehension of it, where sometimes I've noticed that I might switch a word around or I might do a contraction because I'm not even reading it anymore. You know, and of course your client will tell you if it's like, oh, we really need it to say can not, and then you'll go back and fix it. But to me that has been a clue that like I'm really into the story. Not like a true misread, like something that's, you know, really integral to the message. But if I'm naturally contracting something, it's like, okay, my brain's on auto pilot. And I really understand what I'm saying. So making sure that you're balancing that melody and rhythm. Anne: Yeah. I think for me with corporate, I do so much corporate that I've kind of gotten away from the contractualization. Not that I don't wanna do it. It's just simply usually those of the scripts that, and e-learning are usually they go through so many rounds of approvals. That's true. And if it's written one way, I pretty much just voice it. But what I will do yeah. Is if I do feel a contraction will make it sound easier, I will give that as an alternate take. Erikka: Absolutely. Anne: Hopefully that just is you, by the way, in case you wanted this, they have it. And then they're like, oh, that Anne, she takes care of us. Erikka: Exactly. Anne: She's wonderful. Let's hire her again and again and again. Erikka: And as corporate is becoming increasingly conversational and they wanna really relate to their employee base, I find that they're more open and amenable to that stuff, but great point that some of this stuff is really locked down because of legal. Um, so yeah. Anne: Also the thing is with corporate, because again with corporate, just, there's such a vast amount of corporate work. The companies that know how to story tell with their brand will write good scripts. And so you won't have those run on sentences. You won't have things that maybe aren't contractualized that will sound awkward. They hire copywriters that will write something that will sound good when it gets put on production. So. Erikka: Yep. Agreed. Anne: Yeah, it's a thing. So there is a thing, guys, BOSSes out there, called melody, and it does affect our performance. And so try not to think so much about the technicality of it, but understanding how technically there are certain things that happen in a conversational melody that in order to sound natural, dictate how we're going to tell that story. So we're not gonna be too high or too dramatic with our changes in notes. We're gonna start in a certain placement and then just concentrate on telling that story. And I think the melody will follow. Erikka: Indeed. Couldn't have said it better myself. The more that you're naturally connected, that melody is just gonna come out in the way that it should be, because it'll be natural for you. Anne: Such a cool conversation. I love talking about conversational melody. Erikka: Love it. Anne: Yeah. So BOSSes, a good way to really start to understand it is just listen to two people, having a conversation, for example, listen to all the episodes of VO BOSS. And you can really start to break apart what does conversations sound like? And you'll know that unless we're really excited, we don't go very high, and we have all sorts of rhythm besides just the pitch. That's all about rhythm and timing and imperfection, believe it or not. You know, I wish I was speaking Pulitzer Prize-winning sentences, but I don't. And therefore that causes the rhythm and the timing and the pacing and all sorts of things to make it sound just natural and believable. So thanks, Erikka, for a really cool conversation. Erikka: Thank you, Anne. This is lovely. Anne: Yeah. Yeah. So BOSSes out there, you can make a huge difference in someone's life for a small, quarterly contribution. And you might think that as a small company, you can't make a huge difference, but you really can. Visit 100voiceswhocare.org to find out more. And of course, a huge shout out to my favorite, favorite networking sponsor, ipDTL. You too can connect and sound like BOSSes. Find out more at ipdtl.com. Thanks so much, BOSSes. Have a wonderful week. Erikka: Bye! Anne: See you next week. Bye. >> 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.com 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.

There is no perfect voice for a genre. This week, Anne & Erikka let you in on the secret of genre exploration. Every genre has sub-genres and adjacent genres, but you'll never know which ones work for you without trying a few out. Examine what kind of work you are drawn to and where your passions lie. That will inform what jobs creatively challenge you vs. ones that make you feel stagnant. As Anne advises, always follow your passions. With a growth mindset, focus on the message you send with each script + a little help from your Balance hosts, you'll be on the path to success! Transcript >> It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere 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. Anne: Hey everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS podcast. I'm your host Anne Ganguzza, and I am with the lovely and talented Erikka J this morning. Erikka: Hello! Anne: Hey Erikka. Erikka: How are you, Anne? Anne: I'm doing good. How's it going with you? Erikka: Going pretty good, man. Hanging out, you know, just another day in voiceover land. Anne: There you go. Another day in voiceover land. And it's so funny because we're so like, oh yeah, this is our day. This is what we're gonna do. We've got our auditions to knock out. We're gonna go find some new clients. We're gonna be working in the booth. I do have a lot of students that always ask me when they just get involved in the industry, well, first of all, how do I know that I have what it takes? And what genre, what is my niche? Where do I go in this industry? And for me, that's always a wonderful question of self discovery. Erikka: Yeah. Anne: I think there's lots of ways to find your niche in this industry, but I think it would be a good topic to talk about how we found our niches and what our recommendations are for BOSSes out there that are just getting involved. Erikka: Yeah, absolutely. Balancing to let the genre find you. Anne: Yeah. Yeah. I think that it's kind of like letting your brand find you too. I think they're very similar. They're on parallel paths. And I know for me, the genres that I ended up doing, number one, I'm a big believer in following my passion. I've been that way all my life. Now, I don't know if that's just a thing that I just decided to listen to since I was young, but I've always followed things that I've enjoyed doing and found joy in doing, and I followed my passion. When I was young, I played music, I played piano. I had a love affair with horses. I owned a couple of horses, rode horses as a little girl. I would teach my dolls. All these things that I loved, I did and I explored, and I have to say that the same is true in my career. As I went to school, what I studied, what I ended up working in, in the corporate world, and in the educational world. And then ultimately I've found that I've been able to kind of bring it all together in voiceover. Because for example, I love to teach. As a little girl, I taught my dolls. I ended up 20 years being an educator in front of the classroom for kids, adults, college kids. And I find that I love eLearning. So the genre is kind of paralleling where my joys were and where my experiences brought me to. So eLearning, I worked in corporate for a short amount of time and then did a lot of corporate consulting. And so I love the corporate read. All of those things have kind of allowed me to do the things that I love to do. And obviously, because I love to teach, I'm a coach as well. And so for my business that is so wonderfully my own. And I feel so lucky and so joyful that I am able to do what I love and be able to support the household be able to support myself with it. So what are your thoughts, Erikka, on how do you find your genre? How did you find your genre? Erikka: Yeah. Very similar. Anne: Or genres. Erikka: Yeah. Yeah. So for me, like I'm always like somewhat ADD with my interests. Like I like that. Ooh. And I like that, and I like that, and I like that so , but sort of my foundation and where I started, I had worked in corporate for quite some time and still do, in primarily in tech sectors. So I absolutely adore tech explainers or products because a big part of what I did as a project manager, sort of understanding the layout and then also breaking down requirements so that when somebody says, I want a widget that does this, having to break it down and be like, okay, so you want this to come out, kind of breaking that down for the user and putting it in layman's terms, so to speak. I enjoy doing that sort of breakdown, but maybe in shorter forms. So as opposed to like where you're talking about how you love eLearning, I'll do some eLearning, but I really love like the short form 90-second, let me help you understand this thing and what it does. And, you know, taking something complex and making it super simple to understand. I love that stuff. So that's really where I started. Corporate narration, same thing. Because of coming from the musical background, which essentially is storytelling in usually three to six minutes, see for a really long song in six minutes, but that's why I love like the commercial work or the short corporate narrations where, you know, I'm really sort of telling a story, sometimes getting more dramatic or using comedy to be able to tell those stories in a short amount of time, it just aligned with where my experience was and what I enjoyed doing. So those were sort of my foundations along with video games, love games, played games a lot as a kid, not as much now as I'd like, . I'm surrounded by gamers in my house. So constantly watching that. And I lean towards the dramatic and the dark more than the comedy. So I like using that, but yeah, those are kind of like my genres that hit me in the narration. Just loving to tell stories. Those are -- Anne: Yeah. I love that. And I think anybody that's just starting out in this industry, take a look at who you are from young age on up and where you've evolved and if you've followed those joys or those things that you really enjoy doing, and then try to translate into genres for voiceover. Or not even just for voiceover for your business, you know, the other part, it's not just the genres, right? But it's also letting the entrepreneurship follow you. Erikka: Yeah. Anne: There's the whole period of my life where I like to solve problems. I mean, you and I were both in technology, right? It's always solving problems and I also have an engineering background. And so because of that, I love the whole entrepreneur owning a business, kind of a thing, where I'm excited to build things, to build my business, to see where I can grow, where I can expand, how I can achieve success, how I can continue to reinvest in my business and grow in my business. I think that's the most important thing for me is if I am stagnant -- it's like, for me, I'm building a character, but I'm really building a business, right? Erikka: Yeah, yeah. Anne: I keep adding to the story, and I have to keep evolving the character. I have to keep evolving the character of my business. And for me, if I don't, if I become stagnant, then number one, it's boring. And I don't do well with boring. But number two, it always allows me to grow kind of the whole, think of how do I make money the whole, how do I make money challenge? I even do like a class on money blocks where some of us have built in money blocks from long ago where maybe women weren't supposed to be earning as much as men or those types of things or the way you were brought up, the male was the breadwinner. Don't be greedy. That kind of thing. Well, I consider it part of the entrepreneurial game, right, how to make money with my business. And so it's not that money is like my first love, but I think it's the challenge of the game to be able to invest my money and then make a profit. And so I think what we all want to do with our businesses is to make a profit. And so that also evolves. And that was part of my personality. A big part of my personality is loving to solve challenges and solving problems. Yeah, I took that right into my business. Erikka: Yeah. I love that you said self discovery 'cause that's something that I talk about often too, is that you have to figure out sort of who you are as a person. And that kind of leads you to who you are as an artist. And as that evolves and develops, staying in touch with that is gonna tell you when maybe a genre isn't for you or if a genre isn't necessarily your primary. Like for instance, I love reading. I never get enough time to do it as much as I'd like, but I am not really into doing audiobooks. I know that I like the short form stuff. My attention span gets like mmh, so it's just not for me, even though I love books and I fully appreciate them, but it's not for me to do that as narrating. I had learned that about myself and be okay with it. In coming from a performance background, I discovered live announce was something that I really enjoyed. I'm used to being able to, you know, like on the fly, something live might happen and you've gotta be able to react and not be flustered. I did that on stage. So I was like, huh, didn't even know this would really be a thing for me. Anne: That's a special skill. Erikka: Right. Yeah. Yeah. So. Anne: The whole live thing. Erikka: That self discovery is really key to letting that genre. And your business, like you said, it's a persona, but you're building a brand your brand has an identity. It's a story. So you've gotta know who you are that's gonna align with the brand that you're building. Anne: Absolutely, absolutely. And interesting that you said being the voice of God. So back in the day, when I used to have to record onto phone systems, you had to do it live. And so you had to be on. If you screwed up the prompt in the middle of it, you had to start all over again. So there's a special skill in being able to, to be quick on your feet and to execute without mistakes. To me, if I were figuring out my rate sheet for that, that becomes a factor in the special skills like for medical narration. I mean, I worked in the orthopedic industry for six years, you know? And so I love medical narration, and that kind of found me. I mean, I kind of evolved because I started off in the engineering aspect of things. And then it kind of brought me into a narrower focus with biomechanical engineering at my job at the orthopedic company, which then ultimately translated into medical narration here. And the medical narration has expanded so that I'm not just talking orthopedics, and I'm certainly not a doctor, but the challenge therein lies in learning and discovering new topics in medicine that also I find I love to do that discovery, and that translates to my voice. So if somebody were to say what genre, I think really it can be any genre that you find that joy of discovery or that joy in. And sometimes you don't know it until you've tried it. Like you said, for the voice of God, you didn't know, right? Until you tried it and then you realized, oh wow, this is something that my theater training has prepared me for. And so I think every one of us should explore different genres. That's why I think workshops and sessions are a great thing. And one of the reasons why I developed the VO peeps so that I could have special, amazing guest directors come in from all different genres so that my community could have a lot to choose from and a lot to experience, a lot to explore and a lot to learn. And I think that letting the genre find you, finding what you enjoy doing, I think is probably at the very core of it. And you know, for me, like you were saying audiobooks, I did one audiobook and then I said, nope, not for me. I've kind of found the things that I love to do, but again, I don't wanna close my mind to trying new things. So for right now I've done a little bit of character work, but I've not really expanded into animation or even into like promo as much. But I know that I've got an interest in it. And it's something that I wanna look at. Erikka: And that's why I think that workshops are such a valuable tool to use in the beginning or as you start to make a foray into different genres, because it's more cost effective. Right? Anne: Yeah. Erikka: Usually they cost less because it's a group as opposed to like one-on-one coaching. You're able to hear what other people are doing and how they're getting directed, seeing all types of different coffee, experimenting with different directors, different coaches in these group settings. And that way you can kind of see like, is this really my thing? Like for me, promo, I sort of assume that since I have this lower register voice that, you know, has a lot of power behind it, that it might be something I really wanna do. And I always love beating the boys if I can, no offense. But... Anne: Hey, I hear that. Erikka: You know what I mean? And it is still something I wanna get into, but I found that it ended up being lower on my priority list because I wasn't getting as much traction as I was in other areas I was moving faster. So I was like, you know, maybe let me really refine and kind of get to expert level and everything else and consistently look. And then I'll come back around to promo. So it can help you prioritize your genre list as well. Anne: I like that you were talking about kind of letting it find you and you were getting hired in other genres. That's a really good indicator to find out what genre you might pursue in a more targeted, strategic fashion is what do you tend to get hired for? Do you tend to get hired for explainer videos? Do you tend to get hired for those one-off commercials, or do you tend to get hired for audio books? Whatever that might be, might be the genre that you really flourish in. And again, it doesn't have to be just one genre, but again, it shouldn't be every genre. I really don't know many voiceover artists that do every single genre. I think we all tend to just narrow down the focus a little bit and it doesn't have to be just two genres or, you know, it can be like narration. There's a lot of closely related -- corporate explainers are very closely to corporate narration. It's very close to corporate training, which is very close to medical narration. It's all part of the corporate world anyway. So all of that really kind of works for me. So there's multiple genres there that I can excel and flourish in. And then explore the ones that I haven't really had time to do before, because I've been working so much in these other genres, like character or promo or imaging. Like see, I've always wanted to do radio imaging, but I've never even tried it, like never But I'm always like, I wanna sound cool. So for me, I'd be like, oh, that would be a cool sound, but I've never tried it. I've always been a little shy actually. Erikka: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anne: About it, but I don't wanna not try. Erikka: Exactly. And that's the thing is like, unless you really do it and you're like, this is not my thing -- I feel like audio books are probably off the table for me, other than I did like a couple kids books. And I have like a couple like mid-length books that I've entertained or that I'm like, I might just do this one. It's, you know, public domain. I'll do it as a passion project one day just to kind of practice. But if I get one that's expected to be like 12 hours of audio, like I'm not gonna do the 48 Laws of Power. I know I'm not gonna be able to do something that long. God bless the voice actors that have that type of stamina. I know I don't. And I'm okay with it. Anne: You know, where I might go because I love the geeky stuff all the time, right, if there was a book that was completely geeky about, I don't know, a business book. And if it was something that I would discover as I read, I think that that could work, but the editing I would have to outsource. . Erikka: Yeah. I just, I just don't think I could, maybe that answer will change in a few years for me, even though I love reading it and consuming it or listening to audio books. Anne: Sure. Erikka: I just wanna be in and out. I just wanna get it done and to be done. Anne: Yeah. Well, I think it's important that we don't get complacent. Erikka: Yes. Agreed. Anne: And for me, that's just always been a thing where I haven't felt comfortable when I get complacent. I think I get nervous. Maybe it's more that than bored or maybe it's a combination of both, right? I don't wanna get complacent in one job for too long. And, and to be honest with you, my 20 years in education, I think my job, I had actually, believe it or not, in my job, there were certain levels that I traversed. And I went from getting my hands dirty and learning a bunch of stuff and really challenging like, oh, why does the network not work here? Oh, let me go and dig the wiring or look at the wiring in the ceiling and see what's going on there. And I love the whole challenge of that, kind of getting my hands dirty. Ultimately I started, year after year, I would, I would advance, you know, then I would go into like the networking. Then I would go into the administration. And then ultimately at the last part of my career, I was a project manager. And at that point, I wasn't getting my hands dirty anymore. I was managing people who were getting their hands dirty. And for me, I found out that that was not where I flourished. For me, I wanted that challenge of getting my hands dirty, figuring out the solution, not necessarily managing people. And at that point in my career, I had started to become a little bit restless. And that's when I really said to myself, well, I need to do something that's gonna allow me to grow. And I think that selecting your genre and balancing your genres or your performance or discovering what that is really comes with a lot of self-reflection in what it is that brings you joy and what it is that you're getting hired., a combination of that, what it is you're getting hired for. And if you're just starting out, try to focus on what are your past experiences. Like for me, I had experience teaching, which led me into e-learning. I had experience working for an orthopedic company, which led me to medical. I installed phone systems as part of my job that led me to a lot of telephony. So take a look at your experience and see what genre that might lend itself to, because when you can speak with familiarity and with confidence about something, it's going to be reflected in your voice. And that I think is gonna make you good at what you do. Erikka: Absolutely. And the other thing is to like not necessarily write off an entire genre to maybe to explore the sub genres, right. 'Cause like there's animation and I really kind of thought animation was off the table for me. I was like, everybody wants to do that when they come in, eh. Maybe video games, which I do think that that's still more my lane than animation. What I love, I love doing the villain stuff in animation. So I'm not really necessarily gonna too often -- I don't really see myself doing like the 14-year-old boy, like some women are able to do, but gimme a villain role I'm in and I'm excited about it. Anne: Now psychologically, Erikka, why is that? Where is that? Because that relief of tension -- Erikka: -- in real life. Anne: That's right. And then the alter ego kicks in. Erikka: So then I get to rrr, you know, it's fun. Anne: Yeah. Well, Hey, there's a creative challenge. And I think that, so BOSSes, we are all brilliant. Right? We are all brilliant people. This is the way I like to think of it. Right? We like the creative challenges. And so what is it that challenges you? What is it that you think will give you a challenge that you will enjoy? And so for me, the medical, of course it's because I feel like I'm helping somebody. I feel like if I do a voiceover for anything medical, right, it's helping somebody. But even more than that, there's like that challenge of, okay, what's the largest word that I can say eloquently? Erikka: The verbal acrobatics (?) of medical. Anne: Effortlessly? There you go. That to me is like, ooh, it's such a challenge. And I love it. Like I dig right in once I get a medical script and there's all these words. I dig in and I create my little phonetic spellings and I practice it so I can say it effortlessly, so it sounds like I'm a doctor. But that sort of stuff, I think letting the genre find you and letting your joy find the genre too is something to really think about. And so is there a voice for a genre? I don't think so. I think a lot of people consider like, oh, to do promo, I have to have a low voice. What are your thoughts on that, Erikka? Erikka: So not true. And the thing is that the more that you study the genre that you're trying to get into, and I don't just mean workshops and being coached, but I mean actually like watching TV, like going to watch the promos that are on -- it's been such a male-dominated genre historically that we just assume you have to "come in there and sound like this, tonight at eight." And that's just not it not now. So like I've heard women with much lighter voices than me that are super conversational to the point of sounding like a commercial, and they're booking promo. So I think that was a challenge for me and kind of was why I wasn't booking there at first because I had the idea of what it supposed to be, instead of bringing more of the authenticity to it. The reads are much closer to commercial now for promo, finding a promo voice. Anne: I love the whole authentic thing do and because -- Erikka: Yeah, me too. Anne: -- I think that voiceover artists, like in the beginning, it was always like, for me, when I got behind a mic, I was like, ooh, my voice is amplified. Erikka: Oh my goodness. Anne: And then I was like, I like to hear that in my ears, you know? 'Cause it was something like, I think sounds good or that somebody would want to hear. And I love the whole "let's get back to being authentic and being ourselves." Some of the most beautiful stuff that I've listened to is not a voice that many would consider to be like, oh a voiceover voice. Every time somebody asks me on one of my consult calls, so do you think I have what it takes or do you think I've got the voice? And I'm like, it really honestly, you know, and I've said this before, BOSSes, you guys, if you've listened to the podcast, it's only the first few seconds, maybe 15 to 20 seconds, 30 seconds that people are listening to what your voice actually sounds like. And then all they care about is what you're saying. Right? And what does it mean and is it of interest to them? And that connection that your voice has to them and how it can help them, that's really where it all counts. And I think that's why the authentic, the genuine is what sells, you know, in advertising, and it's what connects people together. And I think that's what we all, as humans, we really want. And a lot of this talk about the AI voice, there's going to be a place for that. And I know Erikka, we could have a whole podcast episode on this. There's definitely a place for that, but only when it's transparent. And I know that I'm talking to a voice that is not a human voice. Like, well, I talk to Alexa all the time. I talk to Siri all the time and I'm okay with it. Siri helps me, Siri has a job to do and she helps me. So when I don't necessarily need a human to help me, I am okay with that. But for everything else, right, our human voices need to connect. And I think that's one of the most important things. What genre can you divulge your authenticity in and connect with the audience of that genre. 'Cause different genres have different audiences. There's a different audience for corporate training than there is for promo. Right? People listening to promo voices are trying to find out information of what's on television. What's the next exciting thing? Or maybe it's like, oh what's happening next on HGTV? Right, there's your in-show narration. So depending on the genre, there's different audiences. So figure out not only what genre excites you, but know who is listening to the genre and who your audience is, because that's where that connection's gonna happen. Erikka: Yeah. And I think it's important to not limit yourself mentally and just say, well, oh, I'm not gonna do that. But try it. Like I said, like the audio books, I did a couple of kid books. I did a couple of mid-length narration for like news and I enjoyed that, but I was like, I couldn't do much more than this. So I know it's not for me. But like if you don't even give yourself the opportunity to see if you would like it, you might miss out on something that you're really good at. And/or like if medical intimidates, you try it anyway because those skills can translate. So if you're practicing reading multisyllabic words, you know, you finally get it, imagine how much better you're gonna read commercial copy now because you exercised your mouth to be able to get those kind of words out. So now when you get to just sort of regular English, you're gonna have that skill that you can translate into another genre. So I think it's good like you said, to just stay limb, stay flexible, learn how to play, not get stagnant ,and play with other genres, but know what your primaries are. And if you do have hard boundaries to just know, like that's not for me, . Anne: That's not for me. I know a lot of students in the beginning will spend a lot of time like investigating all the genres. And I love that. I think there's lots of good things to be said for that. But then there's also students who might spend time in every genre because they're afraid to start. That might be another podcast, but at least I think exploring the other genres, taking a few classes in the genres. I mean, I took some promo classes with a coach that I loved. I've really explored. I've taken some audiobook classes I've taken -- like I said, the one thing I haven't done is radio imaging, but I know a lot of people that do radio imaging, and I'm still like thinking about, oh, that's kind of like such a older genre. I'm not sure how well it's faring these days. Because I do believe I heard you . Erikka: I did do -- Anne: I heard you the other day. Yes I did. So it's very cool. Erikka: But that was fun. Like it taught me how to play better. Like, and I actually did a little bit of character development and I've taken that into some commercial copy. So. Anne: Well, that's an excellent point about that because the crazier and the more dynamic your character is in imaging, it really can help you in other genres. And I think a lot of times people that take my corporate narration, 'cause I'm always teaching how to be the real authentic voice. And that's not what people expect with narration. They expect to have a narrator's voice, and I'm like, no let's connect people. And so they can take that technique that they use in narration and apply it to commercial. Because learning how to be real and authentic with words that aren't yours is something that applies to every genre. So BOSSes, if you're out there trying to discover that genre, make sure that you are also getting those skills that allow you the acting to be real and authentic in those genres. So take acting classes, get coached on it. That'll do nothing but help you in any genre you decide to pursue. Erikka: And corporate narration I'm finding is increasingly having more opportunities for us to play. So it's obviously gonna be corporate to an extent, but I've seen some copy where it's like, they kind of want you to have the joke, land the joke, you know, be a little funnier, be a little more, you know, laid back. Anne: Or be dramatic, be passionate. Erikka: Be dramatic. Yes, absolutely. Anne: Yep. That's the corporate gold I've always talking about. It's good stuff. Erikka: Yep. Anne: So yeah guys, what genre are you? Erikka: Yeah. And prioritizing them. Yeah. Anne: Yeah. Look back, look at your passion. What brings you joy? And don't forget that even though you have genres, if you do have genres that you're already pretty well settled into and familiar with, don't forget to always play in other genres 'cause you just never know. You never know. Good stuff. So question for you, BOSSes, do you have a local nonprofit that is close to your heart? Because if you do, and if you want to help them, you can join an organization called 100voiceswhocare.org and help them extensively even if you don't have a lot to contribute. So find out more at 100voiceswhocare.org. And big shout-out to ipDTL, our favorite way to connect and network like BOSSes. Find out more at ipdtl.com. All right, BOSSes. Have an amazing week, and we'll see you next week. Erikka: Bye BOSSes. Anne: Bye. >> 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.com 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.

Do not apologize for little mistakes during a session. You are human! This week, Anne & Erikka teach you how to overcome performance anxiety. Certain elements of voice acting get easier after years in the booth, but sometimes the nerves never go away. Taking steps before a big gig like walking outside, spending time with a furry friend, or breathing can calm you down, but what happens when you feel anxious in the moment? Stay calm in the booth and know that it is a safe space for you to perform and be your best. BOSSES, if you're unsure of how to take control of the situation & your anxiety, listen up! Transcript >> It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere 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. Anne: Hey everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS podcast. I'm your host Anne Ganguzza, and I am excited to bring back to the show the lovely and talented Miss Erikka J. Woohoo! Erikka: Hey, Anne! Anne: Hi, Erikka. Erikka: How are you, darling? Anne: I'm wonderful. How are you? Erikka: Pretty good. Pretty good. Just the trucking along. I was thinking back this week actually about a workshop that I was in, and I really had like some anxiety. It was like crazy when I was on the mic. So I was in a class with the Andrea Toyias of Blizzard. Anne: Oh, love her. Erikka: I mean, I was waiting a year and a half to take this class with her, right? And I had actually just found out I was pregnant the night before, and I was just like freaking out because it was super unexpected. Great surprise. But I was just like, what am I gonna do? And all of a sudden, I start getting symptoms like I'm nauseous, right? Like super like, ugh. So I am now this class I've been waiting for for a year and a half, video game, you know, you have to use your whole body. I had like this beastly character, and I'm a ball of nerves and nauseous on top of that, whether it's from the anxiety or just the baby. But I'm like, how am I gonna get through this? And, you know, I realized that this was an opportunity for me to channel that anxiety into the energy of my character. And it really turned out great. Like she gave me good reviews, and I was just like, oh my God, thank God. Like I cried after, it was like all the emotions came out, but it was a great opportunity to sort of, rather than letting the emotions take over me and impact the authenticity of my performance, to actually channel that energy and be able to use it in an effective way that worked. So I was thinking maybe we could talk about how to overcome performance anxiety. Anne: Absolutely. Well, number one, I love that topic. Number two, I love that you are so open and upfront about it. Because a successful voiceover talent, you know, people seem to think, well, we, we have it all together. We don't ever get nervous when we come in the booth or perform, or we're live directed, but in effect we actually do probably more than people even realize. And I think it's just that maybe we've had a little more experience in dealing with it and trying to maybe turn that into something positive. I do have a lot of newer students that I've seen come into my workouts, my VO Peeps workouts, and get nervous performing in front of other people, let alone the director, but just performing in front of other people. And I know myself when I first started in the voiceover industry, believe it or not, I was almost like afraid myself to let go and explore my voice, because I didn't wanna hear it in my ears, because I thought, oh God, that sounds stupid. And so I think that's a really great mental emotion to talk about and how we can get over our performance anxiety so that we can make it work for us and not against us. So what are your tricks when you start to get nervous? And first of all, when we get nervous, there's so many things that can happen, even if it's a good nervous, right? Erikka: Yeah. Anne: If you're an excited, happy nervous, it's still, it gets you all your adrenaline hyped and your shoulders up, and it just makes your voice also with that same anxiety. Erikka: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there are a few things. So like for one, coming from performing on stage as well, like that was sort of where I learned how to channel anxiety, because at the end of the day, it's just energy, right? But it's just like a really strong, sort of urgent energy, and what that can do when it works against you, if you don't have it in balance is like, sometimes I catch myself, it'll make me make my voice more higher pitch. And then they're like, well, can you we want you to speak more like kind of how you just were when we were talking. And it's like, oh yeah, Erikka, you're anxious, calm down. So that is kind of a way it can work against you. I tend to talk really fast too, when I get anxious. And I just have anxiety in general, sort of as the disorder. So I have to kind of manage that. Things that I do to get rid of it, if I feel like before a session I'm already kind of high strung about it, maybe it's a job I'm really excited about or, or nervous about, getting outside and really getting some fresh air breathing, the deep breathing thing -- I know it's like cliche. Everybody talks about breathing, but it really literally tells your brain everything is okay. There's plenty of oxygen available. I'm not gonna die, because that's what anxiety feels like. You're dying. It's just like, everything's wrong. And if you get that oxygen flowing into your body, real, really plentiful oxygen, that can help calm you down. Sometimes I'll go sing something really loud or scream. Like obviously safely, getting that scream energy out. 'Cause anxiety is just energy. Again, if you can kinda get that out of you to help you calm down and do that. Things like warm tea, just things that help you feel mentally safe are nice. Hug or going to your pet, you know, and playing with them and touching them and letting love on you a little before a session, all those things help me. Anne: I think that's wonderful. And I really am a big believer in the breathing, you know, and the taking a breath. And so if you're in the moment, right, okay, so this is maybe before the performance, right? These are things you can do. So when you're in the moment, right, and let's say you're being directed or you're in a workshop, a session, first of all, in any workshop or session, I just wanna kind of throw this out there that they are called workshops and classes for a reason. They're meant to be safe spaces for you to get that anxiety out, to experience that, and then experience recovering through that or whatever it is, working out your performance issues in a class. And so I hope that we can all feel safe or whoever's directing that workshop can help you all to feel safe. A lot of times the directors that I work with, they make a point of saying, look, get it out now. Do it now in this workshop, 'cause that's what we're here for. And that's the safe space. Where you probably don't want it to happen so much is when you're in a live directed session. So when you're actually in a session, I'm a big believer in the breathing. Now there's a couple of different things. Are you on Zoom, right? Are they watching you, number one, or are they not? And I am a big fan of you don't need to see me necessarily perform. And if I can actually get that to happen, I feel much more comfortable. It really helps me mentally relax. And it also allows me to do things in the booth, like maybe step away from the mic and, and breathe and instead of right in the booth or so that they can see me doing whatever it is I need to do to relax. And so I would say the breathing is a big thing, and also in the middle of a performance, if you happen to freak out, just know that you're a human being, and the people that are directing you are human beings. And so there's a lot to be said for that. I say that sometimes you don't really wanna admit that you're nervous necessarily in front of the director or whoever might be on the call, but you just do what you need to do. There's no rush, right? There's no like, oh my gosh, I have to get this done in the next five minutes. If there's any session where you feel like you're being pressured to get that read out in a short amount of time, I would second guess that client. That's for sure. If you can be with that client and you are not on camera, do whatever you need to do, you know, shake it out, breathe, mute your mic for a minute and do whatever you scream, sing, whatever you gotta do, breathe because they're never gonna really know . So that's kind of something you can do kind of behind the scenes. But if you are on camera, number one, I would try not to be on camera if you can help it, but you can always turn your camera off for a moment and/or mute whatever you need to do to kind of get there. I mean, unless you're in the middle of a sentence, right? There's no need to necessarily explain. You can just say, I need a moment, and do what you need to do. What about you, Erikka? When you're in the moment, what are some key things that you do? Erikka: Yeah, those are all great points, fully agree and sort of to elaborate on some of them, in the middle of a session -- well, for one, I usually start the session by taking control of the whole visual aspect. I'm like you, Anne, I'm a fan of camera off. So what I'll do is, in the very beginning of the session, I'll flip my camera on, say, hey, you know, I just wanted to introduce myself and kind of have that initial conversation to have the human connection. And then as we're getting ready to record, I'll say, okay, I'm gonna go ahead and flip video off so I can make sure that the audio quality is as high as possible. Anne: Oh, Erikka, golden nugget! Oh my gosh! Erikka: And they love that. Anne: Say that again. Say that again, because we can go home now. That was the best like piece of information, I swear. That, that's a great idea. Erikka: The pandemic educated everybody video takes up more bandwidth. And if you have video off, the audio is less likely to drop out. Nobody wants the audio to drop out because they wanna be able to critique the quality of the voiceover that you're giving and give you feedback so that they get what they want. So that way they're like, oh yeah, sure. Turn video off. I'm gonna turn video off. And then if they don't want video, it makes them feel comfortable. Like, oh thank God. I don't have to have video on Anne: I think a lot of people believe, it or not, are more relieved than not just because, you know, I don't know if we're having a little bit of anxiety from the whole, like during the pandemic, all we did was Zoom. Although I'm a big fan of the video connection that we did have. We just did it a lot. And so, you know, I did it to keep connected with my family and my clients, and I think, yeah, everybody could use a little vacation from the video being on all the time. It really has put on another added layer of potential anxiety for us as voice talent. Because most of us got into the business because we didn't wanna be on camera. We wanted to be behind the mic. And so I love how you said that you turn it on to say hello and make the human connection. And then just say, look, I wanna be able to flip this now so that we make sure we get the best audio. What a fantastic idea. I love that. Erikka: Sometimes I even make a joke just to keep it lighthearted, feeling the client out, if that works. And I'll just say, so you don't see my weird actor faces and they'll laugh, you know? And like that works because that's the truth. I'll flip it on at the end, you know, to kind of close it off and say, bye. I do make sure that particularly on Zoom or whatever platform I can, that I'll have my headshot so that they can see me. Even though they're not seeing me. So that kind of keeps the human connection as well. Anne: That's excellent. Now, Erikka, you know, that's funny because mine always just appears, but I don't ever remember putting it there. Where does that come from? That Zoom headshot, is that in the settings of Zoom when you set it? Erikka: It is, but you have to be logged in. So you have to actually be logged into your Zoom account and then you can set your picture and it'll come up. But if you just like click on their link, and you're not logged in, it'll just show your name that you typed in. Yeah. Anne: Ah-ha. Oh, that's an excellent point. I never realized that 'cause I'm always the one hosting the Zoom sessions for the most part. And interestingly enough, when I say to patch into my studio, if they don't wanna use the ipDTL link, or usually I use ipDTL, or usually I'm not the one providing SourceConnect, they would be the one providing SourceConnect link. But if I'm providing the link, then I'll usually give them an ipDTL link, and there's no video involved in that. And most people are relieved. And the reason why I tell them I do that, I'll give them an ipDTL link as a phone patch rather than Zoom is because it's better quality. And so it delivers better quality audio. They can hear me better, and it's always better to be able to hear better so they can direct me better so that I can do my job better. Erikka: That's what they want. Anne: So there's all sorts of kind of cool ways around being off camera if you so desire. Erikka: And you know, there really have been studies that have said that in the whole pandemic period that there was increased anxiety because if -- Anne: Being on camera? Erikka: Yeah. Because if I'm face to face with you, there's a safe distance, but there's a perceived closeness if like my face -- Anne: Oh, interesting. Erikka: -- here. And it's like, you're in my personal space, and it's more threatening. So it literally can makes you more anxious being on video on a digital platform as opposed to being in person, and you don't get to feel out and kind of mix the other person's energy. It's just this digital face. So it's natural that it makes you more anxious. Just take control of it. And I've never had anybody say, well, no, we want you to keep camera on. the only place I can see that ever happening is maybe video games. But even then, they're more concerned about audio. Anne: Yeah. And I think that, yeah, definitely. Let's just make the point though, that this is for a live directed session where it may not be necessary for you to have video on, even though your clients may like it. The other thing is that it might be the only form of communication that they have, right? Zoom, video, or Skype or whatever that is, or Google Hangouts. A lot of times, that's how they get a community of people together to listen and direct. And even in that case, you can absolutely take control of muting your camera or turning your camera off while you're performing. And so now what if you're in the middle of a sentence and you flub it up, Erikka? Erikka: Oh man. Anne: What is your course of action? Erikka: Yeah. So I talk about this with a few people. So for one, remember that you are human, and we make mistakes. We all stutter, even in regular conversation. Sometimes I'm able to catch it fast enough where it sounds natural. Because you know, one of the things of acting is that as just now, when I was thinking about what to say next, I hesitated. We don't have a script in real life. So we don't know what we're gonna say next. So some of that hesitation actually makes a more authentic performance. So if you can catch yourself and not get to the point of, oh my God, I just screwed up and just kind of get to the next word and it still sounds natural, sometimes it works and it actually makes the performance sound more natural. So I try to really just get back in it. If it's obviously like, you know, oh, I just screwed that up. I just pause and pick up. And there's a couple reasons for that. For one, if you kind of say, oh, I'm sorry, you know, you've already kind of, you've taken some power away from yourself with your client. Kind of told them, hey, I messed up and you've told your brain, you messed up, which is going to increase your anxiety and increase the risk that you're going to mess up again probably on the exact same word. Anne: Yeah, yeah. Erikka: And your brain is learning. It's like, okay, we may, we mess up there. We mess up on that word. We mess up on that word. Whereas if you just stop and then just pick up, it's a professional thing to do. It also makes it easier for editing so that they can just cut, if they like the first half of that sentence, and it was great, they can just Franken-take it, you know, and put it together and make it work. Anne: Yeah. Yeah. No, I love that advice to stop. So I always say to my students don't ever apologize. Yeah. You're human. It happens. You simply stop and pick up. Now you don't necessarily pick up from the very beginning of the entire piece of copy. You wanna probably stop and take just as you would be editing right in your own home studio, pick up where you would naturally pick up. And for me, that's at the beginning of the sentence, for the most part or at the comma, if it's that much, if I've still got the melody in my head and knowing where I'm gonna be. But for the most part, just simply stop. Never apologize. If you apologize, like you said, it definitely takes the power away. And a lot of times people may not even notice that you've flubbed up. And so you simply start it at the top of the sentence again, and that is an entirely acceptable thing to do. I mean, I've done that for years thankfully once I learned myself never to apologize, because again, we are human and just pick it up from the beginning. It does make it, number one, makes you look a lot more professional and number two, it makes it easy to edit. And the simple fact that you know this, right, you know, enough not to go into a bumbling "I'm sorry" apology or whatever it is, even if you have to cough or sneeze or what, whatnot, knowing that if you are silent and then pick up as if nothing happened makes it a really nice block of white space for that engineer to make it easy for them to fix. Erikka: Yeah. Yeah. Anne: For sure. For sure. Erikka: And maybe that can also help you get outta the habit of saying, I'm sorry. It's just stop talking. Just, just get your brain to just stop. I make a mistake. I just stop. Anne: Just stop, breathe, know that it's normal and we all do it. We do. Erikka: Yeah, we do. Anne: We all do it. You know? And I always say to people, I wish I could do a read perfectly the first time. Right? It doesn't always happen. But I like how you also used it to talk about how to make that pause almost a natural part of things. Now I know that when I'm anxious, and I'm in the booth, the whole natural in the scene acting sometimes goes bye-bye. And so there's one thing that breathing can help you to come back to the scene. And always remember, even though you've got people watching you, I mean, imagine like you're performing like in the scene just as you would if you were on stage, or if you're not a stage actor or an on-camera actor, if you've got that video off, you are in your booth. That is your magic place. That is where you set your scene. You are in the scene, you're immersed in the scene. So just try, if you can, to block out the other external factors that are making you nervous and continue to be in that scene, because that's gonna make your performance more natural. And that's what they hired you to do for the most part. I mean, unless they told you to be crazy in character and you know your character, even then, right, you have to be in your character. So I would say, no matter what you're doing, you kinda have to be in character, even if you're doing an e-learning module, you're a teacher, right? Erikka: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Anne: If you're doing a corporate narration, you work for that company. So you're a character. So you need to remain in that character, and the booth where you are, is kind of your theater so to speak. As in a studio that you might be in when you're being directed live to. Now what about going to a studio and being directed live? What are your thoughts about that, Erikka? Erikka: Oh boy. I'll say maybe one, maybe two more things that I do use in my booth, but one of them might translate to in the studio too. In my booth. I think I mentioned before that for, just for performances and sort of a, who am I talking to, I do keep pictures of my family in the booth. And I found that sometimes that helps with anxiety too. So it's just like, you know, if you would look at the people that you love and that love you, sometimes it can just kind of help to bring you back. Anne: I'm opening, I'm opening my door, but you can't really see it. See if I can. Let's see. Erikka: Is, is that a kitty cat? Anne: Yeah. It's my studio cat. And on the other side of the door, which I can't, there we go. There's Anne and Jerry. Erikka: Yes. Anne: I have my family in the booth with me, the people that I love. Erikka: Yes. Anne: And I also have a booth buddy. Erikka: Yes! Anne: So this is my little booth buddy. Erikka: I got a booth buddy, but it's a (?). Anne: Oh. So you talk -- Erikka: My warm and fuzzy reads. Anne: There you go. So you talk to your booth buddy to help you in the scene. There's your audience right there. Erikka: Yep. Yep. Yep. Anne: So. Erikka: You can't see my family 'cause they're behind where the mic is, but yeah. I've got my kids, me and my boyfriend, and then ultrasound picture, my little boo-boo that's coming. Anne: Aww. Erikka: Another thing that I'll use too is I've got one of these stress balls. Anne: Oh. Erikka: And when you mentioned going to the studio, this is something that's more portable and not very -- it's discreet. So I could just have this in my pocket. So again, anxiety is just an abundance of energy. So one of the grounding tools that I know is used by some people that, you know, teach anxiety management is like literally like holding the tension in your hand for like five seconds and releasing, and you can do that with a stress ball. So it's just like, you're using all this strength and it's like, mm, get this anxiety out. And then you [breathes out], and you should feel some sort of relief. Anne: Yeah. And you know, what's good about that is like literally you don't want the anxiety to be in your mouth or in your brain. So having in your hand, having it transfer, and that's one of the good things too. I talk about with physicality behind the mic, right? When people don't wanna look at our silly actor faces behind that mic, when you are in that scene, you need to be in that scene, like physicating with your, with your hands, drawing things, jumping up and down, whatever you're doing, and that will help to divert the energy that might be all up in your shoulders and all up in your mouth and in your speech. Right? And kind of dissipate it so that it will be a little bit less. And so that's great. Erikka: And these are quiet. They don't make noise so much, so. Anne: Well, if you go to studio and you're flailing about, and you're doing like -- well, alright, I'm gonna say, how many of you have ever watched right behind the scenes, right, when people are at studios? I mean, there's all sorts of physication going on. As a matter of fact, that's the, the sign of a classic actor, right, behind the mic, who's physically making those silly faces. And I always talk about when you look at musicians on stage too, they always make funny faces. Right? Always. Erikka: Singing faces are way worse than actor faces. I know. Anne: I'm gonna tell you, singing faces are way worse. Erikka: I've been caught before. Like, Ooh, that's not going on social media. Anne: Yeah. But, but you know what? It creates the performance. And I always talk about Mariah Carey. She does a lot with her hands when she sings. Erikka: She does. Anne: How she like trills with her hands, and I'd be like, yeah, what is she doing there? And then I decided to do voiceover and I get what she's doing. It's all about the dissipation of energy and helping her create more energy and also dissipate energy. Which is really a great way to also relieve performance anxiety. Erikka: Yeah, absolutely. I used to grab my stomach a lot was my thing. And I don't know if that was from like the breathing exercises I learned, and they'd be like, why you grab your stomach? I'm like, I don't know. It's my thing. But it's just like, I don't know. It felt like everything that I was trying to get out was from my core. So I just kind of would hold my stomach and it would help me, ugh. I don't know, so. Anne: Yes. Consider whatever those silly faces are or what you think are silly moments of brilliance. Really. Turn it into a moment of brilliance and just who cares. Because if it gets the performance out of you, that the client is looking for, you're a genius. Like I dare anybody who gets an amazing performance out of you to laugh at what you do behind the mic. I mean, maybe they'll chuckle, but hey, they're gonna chuckle all the way to the bank. Erikka: That's right. Took the words outta my mouth. . Anne: Because you're the one that is absolutely giving them the performance that they're looking for and whatever it takes to get there. I would say for the majority of the time, if you're in your home studio, right, and you're being directed and they can't see you, what a blessing that is to be honest. What a luxury to be directed these days. Rather than us trying to like, oh my God, what are they looking for? How should I self direct? It becomes something that maybe you can start to look forward to. And you're not nervous about because for me being directed is a luxury because finally, somebody, just tell me what you're looking for. I can do it. I'll deliver it, whatever you want. 'Cause that's better that you tell me, rather than me trying to think of 100 different ways that you might like it. So if you can directly tell me -- let's say it's someone who's not familiar with directing, even if they might, like, I know a lot of people are like really, what if they line read for you? Now saying that the people behind the booth may or may not be able to line read for you, but if it helps them express what they're looking for, I'm not offended by that. And I don't think that if you have a client trying to express what they're looking for, and maybe they're not as successful, you know -- just me being a director for so many years, like I know what it's like when you're trying to express what it is that you're looking for. It's not always the easiest thing in the world. And for people who aren't used to doing it, give them some grace and just try to listen and give them what they want. Even if they say something completely weird and you're like, oh, so you want a little more smile or you give them more smile. And you're like, that was totally not what they said, just go with it because it's not easy for people who are not familiar or people who don't direct all the time to actually direct you. And don't let that increase your anxiety. Unless of course it becomes like two hours and you've given them the exact same take. You've come around circle and now you're giving them the take that you first gave them. And they're like, that's it so. "I gave them 100 takes. And the one that they took was the one that I just did like my first take." Erikka: I know, I know. Yeah, one thing that I'll do too, to sort of lower my anxiety and maybe even theirs, especially if they are relatively new or don't hire voice talent often and kind of are feeling their way through directing, you have to kind of feel the energy out, obviously in the client to make sure that this is okay. But for one, I'll kind of paraphrase back, especially if I get the line read, I'll also kind of explain. So you mean like you're looking for a little bit more upbeat, but still grounded? You know, like trying to do that because that way we're both clarifying what we mean and that can lower the anxiety on both sides. And/or I'll offer, would you mind if I did some triplets on this to play around with it and try different ways? They'll usually be like, yeah, sure, absolutely. So you do their line read and then kind of your interpretation of it, and they have options. They love having options. Anne: Exactly. So I think that's a great piece of advice. Give them options. I'm always, when I'm being live director-ed, I'm always giving them multiple reads just in case, you know, maybe there was a click or something that's hard for them to get out in one of the words, they can grab it out of the second take. And that way -- I do that a lot with self-directed sessions, I'll give them multiple takes for them to choose from, but also in live, I give them the full session and I'll give them multiple takes. I'm like, I'm happy to read this again. A lot of times when they're happy and they'll say, oh, that sounds perfect, I get a little nervous. Because I'm like, what if there was a little -- like I've edited myself enough to know that maybe there was a little click or mouth noise or I don't know, something could happen where they could use an extra word that might be clean. So I think giving them options and I think you taking the initiative and telling them, how about if I give you a set of three, so you can just pick and choose what you want later makes everybody happy and reduces the tension for sure. So I think in regards to being balanced, right, balanced in the booth and not overly anxious, these are some really excellent tips that we can take, whether we're self-directing or being directed by others on camera or off. Erikka: Yeah. Preferably off. Anne: Preferably off. Well, great episode, Erikka. I loved it. Erikka: Yeah. This is fun, me too. Anne: I love that we got to show our booth buddies and our pictures and our booth too. So I'd like to give a shout-out to my sponsor, 100voiceswhocare.org. You guys, if you ever wanted to do more to help your local community and give back with your voice, you can find out more at 100voiceswhocare.org to learn more about that. Also great big shout-out to our sponsor, ipDTL. We love ipDTL because it allows us to connect with our other BOSSes and also with our clients. So you can find out more at ipdtl.com. You guys, have an amazing week. Ah, get rid of that performance anxiety, that booth anxiety. Erikka: Breathe. Anne: Breathe, and we'll see you next week. All right, guys, take care. Erikka: Bye. Anne: Bye. >> 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.com 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.

Do you have a vision board in your office? Because it may just help you achieve your goals. Anne and special guests Leah Marks & Nic Redman dive into what it takes to make your dreams a reality. The small steps, to-do lists, and simply articulating what your goals are can help you reverse-engineer your way to success. If that sounds overwhelming, do not fear Bosses! Leah & Nic co-authored The Voiceover Career Planner to help. It is part daily planner, part personal VO coach, featuring 52 experts offering weekly encouragement. Want to learn more? Keep on listening. Transcript >> It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere 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. Anne: Hey everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS podcast. I'm your host Anne Ganguza, and I am here with a special episode with the lovely and talented ladies from the UK's most popular podcast for voiceovers, the VO Social. Welcome to the show Leah Marks and Nic Redman. Leah: Hi! Nic: Hello. I love how you say the title of our podcast. . VO Social! Anne: VO Social! Nic: That's amazing. Anne: Yes, it is good to have you back here on the podcast. Leah: Oh, we missed you so much. Oh, it's been awful, Anne, terrible. Anne: Well, I think we should catch up a little bit then since we last spoke. So tell me a little bit about what's new in the world of voiceover for you guys over there in the UK. Leah: Well, Nic, you go first. You go first. Nic: I have nothing hugely exciting to say about voiceover. Leah: Okay. I'll go first. . Nic: Okay, great. Thanks. I mean, I've been doing all the amazing, exciting jobs. They're all under NDA. I can't tell you about anything. Anne: There you go. Leah: Of course. Yeah. You're basically the queen of voiceover right now, but no one can ever know. Nic: Yeah, yeah. Anne: No one can know. No one can know. Yeah. I can't tell you about it or we'd have -- Nic: I'm coaching (?) so busy say, so I've just sort of been focusing on that. Anne: Fantastic. Leah: Yes, yes. I've been throwing myself headlong into acting, and I've been writing a play, which I'm now halfway through one draft of, which is not enough the way through any of the drafts so far, but I'm getting there. I'm getting my way through it. I am. So that's what that's, what's new for me. Definitely. Anne: Things are changing all the time. Right? I remember the last time that we spoke, I had to look this up, 'cause I felt like it was forever ago. It was July of 2021, right? Smack dab in the middle of that pandemic. Well, we were thinking it was the end, right? or the end of the pandemic. We were hoping. Remember when it was supposed to be like a month or two and we'd be okay? Leah: Remember when there wasn't one? Do remember when there was absolutely nothing to worry about? I liked that time. Anne: Exactly. Gosh. Well, you know, we had a big conversation in that episode about having a plan B, because things change and evolve. And I think, gosh, we had a discussion about AI and synthetic voices and how do we evolve and keep afloat during tough times or even just evolving times with the voiceover industry, 'cause it changes so rapidly. So I, I thought we should have a talk about that. Leah: Yeah. About the future and how to cope with it. Nic: Well, actually I'm speaking to you with my AI. This isn't real Nic, this is AI Nic . So that's how my life has evolved. Leah: Oh Nic, do your AI voice. Do it, do it, do it. It's amazing. And get ready. Anne: I'm ready. I'm ready. Nic: I don't know why, but I'm very good at doing an AI voice. Leah: Yay! Oh it's so -- Anne: That's fantastic. Nic: Really bad AI voice, a really bad one. Yeah. I'm working loads in that one; that one's really busy. Leah: Anne: Well, I remember we had talked about one of the things that we were doing having maybe not necessarily plan B, but just yeah. Plan B for when you evolved to expand your genres or expand your acting. Right? Expand your performance, which I think is always important. And I think acting is a great part of that, in terms of always evolving and creating new voices that are something that people want to hire. Leah: Yes, exactly, exactly. And I think you're right about planning and trying to be prepared for whatever may come. We've got a lot of things to say about planning at the moment. We've got like both of our heads absolutely stuffed with planning and goal setting and how to achieve your goals and all steps. Oh God. The lot of it. Yes. Anne: I'll tell you what. I have my personal experience, and I've actually spoken about this as well. First of all, I have to write things down. I have a notepad, old school or not -- actually I love my notepad because I can actually write things down, and when I finish them, I can cross them out. And that is so satisfying. Leah: That is nice. Nic: Satisfying. Anne: So satisfying. So I have that on a daily to do, but I also have spoken about the importance of goal setting. And I will tell you in my experience, when you set goals and you write them down, it really helps to make them happen. What are your experiences? Leah: So my experiences of making things happen, I'm a list person. I work out what I want, and then I work out to all the things I need to do in order to make it happen. And then I work out when I'm going to do those things. And then I break it down into whether I'm going to do them that month or that week or that day or in the morning of that day or the evening. And I break it all down so that I can't fail or does I feel like I can't fail. 'Cause I'm on a path then. I'm never in a situation where I have nothing to do to achieve my goal. So for example, with the acting and the playwriting, I want to be working in more audio drama. So in order for that to happen, I need to get audio drama produces to see that I'm a great actor. In order for that to happen, I need to be in more theater. In order for that to happen, I need an acting agent. In order for that to happen, I need to be on stage in the first place. In order for that to happen I need to write my own show. And so -- Anne: Well, and you also need acting, right? Maybe you want acting classes too, right? So you're working on all aspects of it. Leah: Exactly, exactly. Anne: That's like you just took what you wanted and worked backwards. Leah: That's exactly, exactly it. That's exactly it. Well, what we've done is we've reversed engineered. Anne: Oh that's it, that's it, reverse engineered, that's it. Leah: Yes. Yeah. So we've created this book, a tangible, hold it in your hand, change your life with one item book that allows people to do this exact thing, to work out what they want, work out how to get there, and then actually make it happen. So it's called the Voiceover Career Planner. We actually launched it last year. Anne: Awesome. Leah: We printed 100 copies, and we sold that right away; within less than a month, they were gone. And then what we did was we got all of those people who bought the planner to send us feedback. We squeezed as much information out of them as we possibly, possibly could. And then we poured all of that information into the second generation planner that is out September 2022, which I believe is when this episode is coming out. So we've got a lot of real life user experience. Nic: Yeah. Social proof, I think they call it -- Leah: Social proof. Nic: -- in the business. Leah: Social proof. Exactly. Anne: So let me ask you what makes it different than my list, my to-do list? Nic: What makes it different to a list? I don't wanna comment on the aesthetic of your list, Anne, to start with, but it's incredibly fit. It's dead fit and attractive as a planner, it's really glam. It's got gold on it and stuff, but joking aside. Anne: Well, there's something to be said for that. I mean, aesthetics. Nic: This is it. Hopefully enough. One of the things that came up, I was doing a session in my vocal empowerment program, which is an online voice technique training course that I run. And I bring in this guest expert to talk about habit creation, because the whole point of the program is to give people the vocal skills to want to do their warmup every day and feel like they can do and fit it in their routine. And she talks a lot about like one of the things that you need in order to build a habit, IE, make sure you do things to get towards your goals, is to make it attractive. Like make it seem like a nice thing. Anne: Yes, I agree. Nic: So this is why people love vision boards and they love, you know, putting things on like nice post-its that are pretty and stuff. 'Cause if you -- it's, like you say, the version of attractive for you with your list is, it's attractive for you 'cause you write it down, you get to put a gorging line through it, which is really, really sort of satisfying. And I think with the planner, what's nice about it is a you think, A, look at me, I've bought this. Aren't I dead good? I've got this and I'm committed. I'm gonna use it every day. Look at me with my planner. I'm so professional. Anne: Look at me with my planner. Nic: And it's so pretty. Yeah. And then you open it up, and it's got all this amazing information at the start, which has loads of different insights into even stuff like studio troubleshooting, website and SEO, vocal warmups, habit creation. Anne: So it's a daily planner? Nic: Yeah. And then it's got like a page a day. Anne: Okay. Nic: Oh no, the new one's -- Leah: So we've changed it slightly from the feedback from users. We realized that we could improve the usability even further and create a bit more room to write essentially by making the planner itself a little bit bigger. And so it's now somewhere between A5 and A4 size, if that means anything to you. Anne: Yes, it does, actually. Nic: Planner size. I dunno if you're into planners. I've gone about 49. Anne: Well, I used to scrapbook, so I understand page sizes, and I did a lot of printing. So I understand page sizes for sure. Nic: This is what mine sounds like. I've got it. Here, look. Leah: Oh nice. Anne: Oh! Leah: But this is -- so the way it's structured -- Anne: ASMR. Wait. Planner, ASMR. Leah: Oh yeah. Anne: Go ahead. Do that again. Ready? Leah: Oh. Anne: Oh. Leah: Lovely. Anne: That is satisfying. Well, let me ask you a question though, because first of all, I like places to write, that's for sure. And the cool thing is, is that I think if I'm trying to write down, it's not just a list of to-dos. There's other things. Leah: No, no, no. Anne: We talked about goals. Leah: Let me take you through it. Anne: Yes. Take me through it. Leah: So the first thing that happens is it guides you through setting goals, helping you work out what your goals are, whether they are achievable, and how they can be achievable, and then the different actions that you're going need in order to be able to get you there. So there's loads of like supports and structure in terms of that, several pages of that. Then once you've worked out what your goals are going to be, the majority of the planner is taken up with 52 weeks. So it's not dated. So you can start it at any point in the year. It's a 52 week planner. So at the beginning of every week, there's a plan out your week page with a special section for planning your social media content for the week as well. And then after that you have Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday has half a space each because we're trying to encourage people to also take some time off. And then you set at the top of the page, what you want to achieve during the day. And then you can work out if you want to, what time during the day you want to achieve those things. And once you've got it all written down, then that is such an encouragement to actually go through it like you say, and draw a line through it. But it's not just the sort of overwhelming blank space that you would get if you just had a notebook. It's structured for you. It feels, I think, more comfortable to walk into it, to use a book like that, to use a page like that because it feels supportive. It's saying, okay, here are the things. Here is a space in which you can achieve something. And here is a way that you can do it. Why don't you just pop the details in here? And then it makes it happen. The other thing that we've got then is we've got reviews throughout the year. So like you say, the world changes, things change, you change, your circumstances change. And so every quarter, there's then an opportunity to review how your goals are going so far and whether you want to add in some more, whether you want to adjust the ones that you've got, whether you wanna change deadlines, what you might need to do in order to achieve those things. Again, you can assess that again. So it keeps you going all the way through the year, checking in with you. The other nice thing that happens is at the beginning of every week, we've got 52, and you know about this already, Anne, but 52 experts to give us their top tip. We've asked 52 people at the top of their game, across the audio industry, what is the one thing that you need voiceovers to know that will really benefit them, that you are the perfect person to advise on? And uh, so Anne, as you know, you are one of my 52 experts. Anne: Wow! Leah: Because we've put you -- Anne: So honored. Leah: Do you want to know where we've put you? Anne: So honored. Where? Leah: We've put you on the final week. So we are building up all year. Nic: You're the headliner, Anne. You're the headliner. Anne: Save the best -- no, I can't say that. No. Thank you. I'm so honored actually. Leah: You very, very welcome. Anne: Thank you very much. Wow. Yeah. So it sounds like what you're describing to me -- because I have done research on planners. I'm always looking for the perfect planner. Like there are different planners and they have different things. And I think first of all, one customized for voiceover, our industry, number one, is brilliant because I want quotes that relate, that relate to me. And I think that if there's information and quotes and goal setting that can particularly relate to our industry, first of all, that's super helpful. And I had decided back in the day, and there's people that go back and forth about which planner's best -- well, I settled on a Panda planner. But it sounds to me like you've got all the functionality of all these really great planners that are best sellers in this VO planner. Leah: Well, what we've done is Nic's been using them for years and having the same experience as you. Nic: Let me tell you, I love a plan. I love a list. I love writing stuff in a place, and I have been searching for the right planner. I've tried lots of planners.- Anne: Right. For years, right? Nic: For ages. Yeah. So I've got like, well, I won't name all of, but I've got loads of different ones, loads of different sizes and different vibes. And most of them are quote, unquote business planners, which is fine, but there's something really special about having something that you open that you can completely relate to. And instead of seeing some, to be honest, like generic NAF quote about like agree, living the dream or the sun rising over the money pot, whatever the hell it is, in manifesting this nonsense into your life, opening it and seeing a really useful quote about a voice type thing or a studio thing or an agent thing is so much more comforting, I think, and inspiring. Anne: Right. And it gives you ideas for your goals, I think. Nic: Yeah. Leah: Exactly. Yeah. Anne: Because I think that there's a lot of people, they may or may not think so deeply into their goals, but I think one thing that helps me when I'm goal setting is to break them down into realistic goals. And I think most people, when they say, okay, I'm gonna plan or they try to do something in the new year, they'll be like, okay, I wanna make six figures in voiceover, and I wanna get an animation job with Disney or something like that. So they're picking these lofty goals, and I don't think a lot of people really take the time to kind of break that down and reverse engineer it like we were talking about earlier to find out, okay, what is it actually going to take to get to that step? And I think something that can help you or encourage you or give you this space to break that down will make it easier. Because I'd love to have like a great coach every day saying, okay, what is your business plan for today? How are you gonna grow your business? And it's one of these things that we all have to do kind of on our own. We can get business advice. We can have maybe a coach that does that, but a planner that can help you on a day-to-day basis to do that, I think is really fantastic. And I'm not trying to take away from business coaching at all, but I think it can be a really great supplement, so that whatever you are thinking in terms of goal setting, this can help you break it down into easier, more manageable steps and give you inspiration along the way. Leah: It's like you've read our website. That was brilliant. . Nic: That's exactly it. Anne: Wow! Nic: Okay. Bye. Leah: Thank you! See you later! Anne: It's so funny because it's exactly my experience. I mean, I've been in the business for a long time. I know you ladies have also been in the business a long time. And I think it's something that we ultimately arrive at. This is what we need to do in order to really grow our businesses. I mean, I know for myself, I'm still going through evolution of growing my business. I don't wanna stay stagnant. First of all, we're creatives. Right? That becomes boring to me. And so I'm always trying to look for new things, new ways to grow my business and especially adapt to the way that the industry is evolving today. I mean, we've got more competition than ever -- Leah: Yeah, of course. Anne: -- in this industry. And I think the people who are smart and can plan ahead, and women of a certain age myself, I'm talking, I'm looking towards retirement. I wanna be able to -- Leah: Oh, stop it. Or unless you're, you're saying that you want to retire extremely early. 'Cause you're doing so well. Anne: That would be nice. Leah: Fine. Okay, good. Anne: But no, I'm at that point where now that this is a full time gig for me, right? I mean I used to work back in the corporate world day to day, and people took care of my health insurance and my, I got paid no matter what, you know, every so often. Now having my own business for this amount of time, I'm still looking to the future, and I don't wanna have to worry when I retire. So I'm constantly planning my business, how I can maintain and/or improve and grow it so that I can put enough money aside for that day when I retire and I just have a ton of fun traveling the world. That's what I want to do. Leah: That is a great goal. Where are you gonna go first when you've got all the time? Anne: Probably Italy first, but I do love the UK. I have to say, I have said this since I visited the last couple of times, I have said over and over again. I really, really love, I really love it there. Leah: Oh great! Anne: Yeah. I would love to spend some time and maybe spend part of the year in Europe, Italy, the UK, and then maybe come back to California. That's my goals. Leah: What a lovely dream, I love it. Anne: My financial goals -- right? And I need to be able to set those plans in place and I love to write things down. That's the other good thing. Leah: That's it? Anne: I really believe -- and I'm telling you, it's funny because I never really believed. I'm like, oh, that's kind of like that fluffy stuff, set your goals, write it down. And honestly you just have to do it once. And then you realize that, wow, you kind of manifest it when you write that down and you break it down. Right? Leah: It's so funny you should talk about that because one of the things that we did over the last six months or so is choose a voiceover who in no way used a planner to follow while he used a planner to see how it adjusted his outlook or changed any of his outcomes. Nic: Our planner; he used our planner. Leah: Yes, yes. Specifically our first generation planner. Yes. Um, so we got a guy called Joe Troy, who is a UK voiceover. And the only way that he planned at all before he met us and our planner was by writing down what he wanted on a piece of paper, and then like, squirreling it away somewhere. And then looking at it again at the end of the year, see how -- Anne: Right, right. Leah: That was it. And that is one way of doing things, sort of magical thinking kind of thing. And uh, and he was doing all right, like he was winning awards already. So he was doing pretty well for himself, but then he started using the voiceover career planner. And every month when we put out a new episode, we'd check in with Joe, we had a little jingle. Could you sing the jingle? Anne: Oh my God, that's -- Nic: Joe Joe, Joe, Joe Joe Joe, Joe, Joe, Joe the VO. Anne: . Leah: Yay! That was great. I, I was gonna try and sing it with you, but then I realized the delay would make it awful for everyone. But yeah. So that was the jingle. . And so we'd catch up with him, and he would talk about a different element of the planet that he was using and how that was affecting things. Ad it was brilliant because it was making such a difference to how like aware he was sure of what he was doing in order to make himself get to where he wanted to be. Nic: And that was accountability as well, wasn't it? Leah: He was already doing well, but yeah. Yes, that's exactly it. Yeah. Anne: I think the part of it is not just writing it down, but then also looking at it, and it serves, I think, as a reminder, on a day to day basis. Or, you know, you've gotta look at your goals, I think, more than once a year, because it helps you to cement that goal in your head, in your brain, in your mentality, in your flow to really, I think, move forward. So I wanna know, if there is space for me to write down my accomplishments or things I'm proud of. Leah: Yes! Yes, yes, yes, yes. So we have a wonderful feature, which was actually, um, thought up by somebody in our focus group originally called Brendan -- shout out to Brendan, 'cause this is my favorite element of the planner. At the end of every week, there is a prompt to tell you to go to the back of the book and write down the one big thing that you achieved that week that you're most proud of on one page. And at the end of the year, you then have 52 things that you've achieved that year that you can be proud of staring at you in the face, congratulating you in one big, massive page of text. And I think that is such a wonderful thing. Anne: Oh, so important. Yes. Leah: 'Cause otherwise you can so easily forget. Nic: There's also a job tally chart, which I quite like. So every time you do a job, it's on a monthly basis. So you can like put a little tally in when you've done a job and then you can write down how much you've earned that monthly bottom corner. So there's light financials, nothing too intense for the financials. Leah: But it's good for an overview, isn't it? Nic: Just encouraging you to go, but how much have I earned, yeah, to keep a track on things 'cause that helps you forecast for the next year. Leah: Exactly. Anne: Well, in addition to that, I'm -- the financial yes, absolutely. But the accomplishments I think are so overlooked. When you look at what you've accomplished, it really -- first of all, not only does it make you feel amazing, right? Because you see everything you accomplished that you might have forgotten about, and you, and you might be down on yourself and saying, well, I don't feel like I've progressed at all or have I done any better this year than last year or even this month versus last month? But when you can look and see all that you've accomplished, it also sets the foundation for moving forward and progressing and growing. So I absolutely think that's one of the most important things you can do is not only to write down what your goals are, but write those accomplishments and celebrate them. No matter how big or small they are, they don't have to be huge accomplishments. Leah: You've really gotta feel like it's worthwhile, haven't you? So there's a couple of things. One of them is yes, you can see what you've done, but also like you were saying earlier about being able to see your goals, not just pinning it somewhere and forgetting about it. But also being able to look at your goal and remember that that's what you're doing it for because I think that as creatives, we can sometimes feel a bit like -- and what I'm about to say is not true for everyone, but it can sometimes be true for me, is that I want to be in the studio recording. Right? And I think that's what the goal for most of us is wanna be in the studio recording, but a lot of the work that we have to do in order to be able to get there -- so all the entrepreneurial stuff, all the SEO and the marketing and the business management, all of that is essential in order to get us there. But it can feel like such a drag for me sometimes. But then when you've got your goal right there in front of you, and you know that every single thing that you do is working you towards that end game, that thing that you want more than anything, that creativity, that purpose, then it makes it feel much more worthwhile, and it can make you feel less alone and less bored. Also. I think Anne: Of course that whole less alone too, because again, we are entrepreneurs; we're kind of our own businesses. Right? And I think there's a lot of, we seek support in others, in groups. But I think also to not feel so alone in terms of how your business is growing and being able to share that with others, let's say if you have a mastermind group or something like that. I think that's also really important to be able to have that in order to grow that business. And I know there's so many, so many of my students have been really frustrated lately in terms of like, but how do I get the work? I feel like I'm going nowhere. What can I do? And I'm always trying to think like most of the times my answer is, it's a marathon, not a sprint. And I think if you have something that you can just record and document your achievements, you know, your goals, what's happening on a day to day basis, and just go back and review it, that's an important thing too, is really helpful in helping you feel like, okay, I've got something solid here that is growing, is advancing even though I don't think it is. And I think your mental state about your business really has an effect on your performance as well. Nic: And I think it's about like keeping yourself accountable as well. It's very easy to sort of like you say, things change a lot and you know, you might think in your head, oh yeah. I'd quite like to do something in animation this year. But you know, two, three months in or first quarter in, you suddenly realize you've forgotten about that because you've been so busy with the usual corporate stuff you do, and you've not made any steps towards that, but if you've written it down, and you keep going back to it and going, oh yeah, I did say I was gonna do that. What steps do I need to get there? What could I feasibly do today to help me get a wee bit further? So for me, like accountability is one of the most powerful things in business. It's having someone or something to remind you of what you should be doing or checking in on you a little bit, you know, and that's almost like what the planner does 'cause you open it and you see you see your goals and it's like, have you done this though? So I think that's really useful. I mean, it doesn't talk to you. It's just a book. So don't don't think it's -- Leah: Oh, there is a little bit of that. Nic: -- cards that you open with my AI voice. Anne: Well, wouldn't that be cool? Leah: Well, we've extended beyond just paper though. 'Cause obviously we're not at app stage yet if we ever will be, but we have got a lovely little QR code at the back of the book, which is sort of an exclusive thing for planner users. So if you scan that QR code, it then takes you to a secret page on the website, which is absolutely full of additional use for content links, to some of the things I mentioned in the planner. There's going to be one of the new things with the second generation planner is. And actually I think you're the first person we're telling about this at this moment. Anne: That's fantastic. I love it. Nic: It's exclusive. Anne: It's not just the planner, but it's a website full of resources. Wow. Leah: Well, the QR code and the website full of resources was there since the first generation. But the new thing that no one else has heard about is the new way of presenting warmups that we put in this second generation. So what we wanted to do was create a resource for people so they would, they would know what warmup routine to use depending on what job or what type of job they were about to go into or what sort of session they were about to go into. And so Nic has worked very, very hard and developed these extraordinary four different routines that kind of -- between all four of them they cover almost every eventuality you can imagine. So it was not just about if it is a corporate job, if it is a five minute job, like it's everything that you can possibly think of. Anne: Wow. Leah: So when you scan the QR code at the back of the planner, so not only do you have the list of the different warmup exercises, but you also, when you scan the QR code at the back of the planner, it takes you to Nic guiding those warmups. Nic: Hiya. Anne: I want it. I'm sold. Leah: Yep. Anne: All right. So tell us then, because I'm so excited; I hope you're making more than 100 'cause I have a feeling. Leah: We are this time. Yes. Anne: It sounds amazing, number one. I want one of course. But how can BOSSes out there get ahold of this? Because it sounds amazing. Leah: Right. So we are doing a very different and special thing for our international customers this year. Because last time round, it was very tricky to get planners out to people outside of the UK. It was a palaver, the delivery cost, the distance, that, oh my God. This time we're doing it completely differently. We're using global distributors and people can find out how to get their planner simply by going to thevosocial.com/shop. And they'll be directed then to where to go, if you're an international, IE, outside of the UK customer straightforward. Anne: And when will this be available again? Leah: 1st Of September. Anne: 1st Of September. And I think we were talking about a special thing for the BOSSes. Leah: Yes. Especially for VO BOSS listeners. All you have to do when you get to the point where you are buying your planner is type in the discount code section, BOSS10. And you will get your very own 10% off the planner. What a deal. What a lovely time. Anne: Thank you. I love it. Leah: You're really welcome. Anne: BOSSes, you are getting in on this deal as early as we possibly can or we know about it. So I think we're gonna probably sell out. Better get there quick. So we don't sell out in 24 hours. Leah: Yeah. Anne: Okay, fantastic. So I am so excited about this planner, and I wish I had it now Now if BOSSes want to connect with you guys, how can they do that? Leah: Well, first of all, we're going to be in New York next week. So if you are in New York, then immediately come and find us. We're gonna be speaking at VOcation, which is very, very exciting. Nic: Yeah. But we'll also be eating all of the food in New York. so you could probably find us in any of the places that sell foods. Leah: I'm going to make a duvet out of pizza slices. Anne: Yes. Yes. Leah: That'd be great. Anne: I'm so glad that you can appreciate the pizza from New York. That is for sure. Leah: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nic: I don't get a giant pizza like in Friends, I'm, I'm not coming back ever again. I want a pizza with a diameter bigger than my entire arm span. Anne: That's awesome. Leah: But then if you are not in New York, if you are just outside of New York, you don't intend to come to New York, that's fine. It's okay. Each to their own. We're also available online for your every whim. Nic: Where can people find you, Leah? Leah: Yes. Okay. So @Leah_ETC. That's me. Yep. Nic: For all your Leahs, etc. Leah: Wherever you might go for that sort of thing. Anne: For your every whim. And Nic. Nic: I'm also in the internet when I'm not in New York eating a giant pizza. And you can find me at @NicRedVoice on the ol' Instagram, or you can just find everything about me in my other podcast, The Voice Coach podcast , at my website, which is www. -- that's three W's dot NicRedmanvoice.com. Anne: Love it. Love it. Well, ladies, it was such a pleasure having you today. And I cannot wait for this planner. And BOSSes, go out, get yourself a planner today, as soon as you possibly can. Don't forget about our special deal. BOSSes, here is a chance for you to use your voice to make an immediate difference in the world and give back to the communities that give to you. Find out more at 100voiceswhocare.org to commit to this. Also a big shout-out to our sponsor, ipDTL. You too can connect like BOSSes like we have done today and find out more at ipdtl.com. Thanks so much, ladies. It's been a pleasure. BOSSes, have a great week. We'll see you next week. Bye! Leah: Bye! >> 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.com 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.

Prioritization is the most important skill for entrepreneurs. In this episode, Anne & Erikka go through the essential skills you need to balance multiple careers. Whether you are working from home or juggling a corporate and creative career, you can't forget to take time for yourself. Breathe, and know that once you step in the booth, the time you spent recharging on a small break between meetings will pay off. Career balance includes finances, family, personal needs, passion and most importantly a long term vision of your career… Transcript >> It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere 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. Anne: Hey everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS podcast and the balance series. I'm your host Anne Ganguzza, and I am excited to bring back to the show as always the lovely and talented Erikka J. Hey Erikka. Erikka: Hey Anne, how are you? Anne: I'm doing good. It's been a busy week. How about yourself? Erikka: Oh yeah, definitely been busy and prepping for another busy one. So, you know, as you know, I've got my corporate job, I've got my kids, my family, I'm pregnant and you know, I've got voiceover, which is like, you know -- Anne: Voiceover. Erikka: -- all in its own, a big old thing. And we've got a holiday coming up soon here. So holidays, everybody likes to get their work in before everybody goes out. So, I got tons of meetings and stuff and projects at the job. I've got tons of sessions next week for voiceover, and I am just really finding ways to balance it all, 'cause it's a lot. Anne: Look, I know that when I had a corporate job and I was doing voiceover part-time it was the hardest thing. As a matter of fact, whenever I talk to a student that comes to me, I'll just say it is very, very difficult to dedicate time to voiceover when you've got a full-time job and your career that you're already engaged in. And I look at you, and I'm like, my gosh, because you've got the family on top of that, and you're in It just the way I was. So I know how crazy it was for me. I'd love to talk about how you balance your careers and be so successful at all of them and your family. Erikka: Yeah. Yeah. I actually just a couple weeks ago or so talked to eVOcation about this, different strategies and things. One of the biggest ones, and something is kind of like a lesson for my corporate career, is prioritization because sort of accepting and knowing that you can't do it all -- and that's whether you have a job or not even just being in VO, probably not gonna be able to get to every single audition, especially if you wanna make sure you get the jobs done and all of your marketing work and all of that. So being able to prioritize appropriately and know like what's first to do. Anne: All right. So when I know that and I know you've got a number of agents, and they're all vying for you, right? Especially when you're doing well. And I know you're on a really great success track, and I'm so happy. I know what it's like when I can't do an audition for my agent. Like, it's almost like, oh my God. Yeah. Oh no. You know, and I feel bad, I feel guilty. And sometimes they'll write me and say, where is it? Erikka: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Anne: And so how do you deal with that? That's gotta be something. Erikka: Yeah. Anne: Like how do you prioritize? Erikka: That's a great point for me. Definitely the ones for my agent are number one. I very rarely, these days audition on Voice 123, where I am present. But I rarely am going on there to find jobs to audition for. It's more like if somebody DM's me either for a job or for an audition, or I get like one of those client invitations where they've specifically said, Erikka, we'd like for you to audition for this. And even those, they're last on my list. Agents, managers, theirs get number one. When I do have to kind of look at those and say, okay, I might need to prioritize, I got a ton of them today, I do wanna make sure that it's the right audition for me. And I'm trusting 9 times outta 10, the ones are sending me are great. But you know, if I'm really not sure, or if I'm not really filling the script, or they kind of like want it read three times and it's rather long, I might email and say, hey, I'm gonna pass on this one. And they usually understand because I don't do it often. So yeah. That's how I prioritize that. Anne: Right. Well, I think you probably prioritize agents too. I mean, in my certain cases, I have agents that are more local to me in LA, and I have to prioritize those agents that are local and the ones that I'm booking with. There are some other agents that, how do I say it? They're not not important. It's just that I have agents that I kind of, I have to prioritize them, if they're more local to me and they expect that as well. Erikka: Yeah. Absolutely. Your mother agency, they call it, you know, like that's -- Anne: Yeah, yes, exactly. Your mother agency. Yep. They do. They get dibs and they get priority. And so if there are five auditions that come out, and one of them is from the mothership, if I can only do one, that's the one that gets it. Erikka: That's the one. Yep. And you can look at things like the job you want too like for the rate or like, you know, if it's like a category or a brand you've really been wanting to work for, like that can help you with those prioritizations decisions as well. But yeah, definitely take care of your mother agency. Anne: Now you also go into work, right? You have to go into work or are you working from home? Erikka: No. The only way I'm able to do this is because I'm full remote right now. And I have been for three years. Yeah. Anne: Okay. That's great. That's great, 'cause I know some IT, you have to be there because you physically have to be present to take care of equipment or something like that, but you can do everything from home. That I think is one advantage of the pandemic for people that have been working full time, if you have been kind of re-homed to a home office, I think that that actually is a benefit for people who are looking to get into voiceover because you can sneak away to your studio to do a 5 or 10-minute audition. That was something I did not have the luxury of doing when I worked in IT, because I had to be on site on premise, even though a lot of my time I was doing remote work, but I also had to be there to physically turn machines on and off or, you know, install machines and that sort of thing. So I do think that that is one of the biggest advantages from the pandemic, if you are now able to work from home, having a voiceover career as well is a lot more accessible. Erikka: Absolutely. And that was something that I brought up in my talk is that yes, I fully recognize that not everybody has my position, and I feel very blessed that I'm able to work 100% from home. And even now like my position, it's more like product management. So I'm in software. So thank goodness I don't have any hardware that I have to be physically present to manage. But now after the pandemic, there are an increasing amount of remote jobs. So it's not just necessarily me. It's like jobs that were not remote before, these companies are recognizing that they're able to retain their talent better if they're able to offer that sort of perk. And actually a lot of people are more productive when they do their corporate jobs from home in the corporate work. So yeah, it definitely allows me the flexibility to come in and outta the booth. Like my desk is over there, my booth is here, and I just back and forth between meetings and sessions and auditions. And it's crazy, but yeah. Anne: But here's an important session though. How do you turn it off? Right? You're at your home. So where's the family part of that and that family balance come in? How do you work with that? Because that's gotta be tough. Erikka: Yeah. Yeah. I think it's a couple things. For one, in the beginning, I was very, very -- I'm already a workaholic, so... Anne: Hah. My name is Anne Ganguzza, and I am a workaholic. Erikka: Hi Anne. Welcome. Anne: Yes. I'm right there with you. Erikka: So I mean, they already knew that I was like that, but I was kind of in overdrive and my family was like, hey, you need to chill, Erikka. You know? So like I did have to find the places to set boundaries. Like I mentioned that I had a recurring great client that had booked me for a Sunday once, and I did it that one time, but I said for the future, I really don't do sessions on Sundays. And they were like, oh, okay. And it was great. So now I know that that day is like set aside for myself -- Anne: That's my day too. Erikka: -- my family. Sundays, I generally don't do anything unless it's like huge. And I tell them, and I'm like, this is huge. And they're like, okay. They have to be on board too I think is the big thing. Like they understand this industry. They've seen how hard I work. They know it gives me flexibility with other things. I was able to pay off my debt because of voiceover, so that helps us all. So having them on board and setting boundaries so that you do have some special time with them is really important. Anne: I agree. You know, the Sunday is my boundary. The workaholic in me is like six days a week. But, and you're right. Sometimes I work on Sunday, but only if I have to. And what's interesting is sometimes when my husband, if he has to travel for business, and he is gone over the weekend, on Sundays, I may work and not feel guilty. 'Cause if I end up having to work on a Sunday, I feel really bad, 'cause I'm like, I need to spend time with Jerry and the family and whatever else we're planning on doing, 'cause we need to make plans as well. And I'm one of those people that I'm so planned ahead in my planner or in my calendar, if I don't block off on my calendar up to a year ahead, I will be scheduled with something. So again, busy is good, but sometimes busy isn't good. And so was there a time that you realized "I don't have the proper balance right now" and you need to reevaluate, and what was it that happened and how did you readjust? Erikka: Oh yeah, this was probably about maybe -- even though we're still technically in the pandemic, but like midway, you know, when it was like, all right, we know that this is the way of life for now -- I had been just like throwing myself into so many workshops and a lot of 'em were LA based. So, you know, I'd be working all day, doing auditions, maybe cook dinner, and then, you know, in a workshop 'til one in the morning I was exhausted. I was drained. I was burnt out. I could tell, like I was less motivated to do auditions. You know, like I said, my boyfriend, my partner, he's just kind of like, you are doing too much you know? So other people kind of calling me out, and that's when I was just like, all right, you know, these workshops are great, I'm enjoying learning, but you know, maybe I don't have to take every single one I see. Maybe I can just do a couple a month, you know? And so that was kind of the turning point for me. And also I had developed to a point that I didn't need to keep doing them as much. I almost got like addicted to workshops at one point, 'cause I just loved learning and, and developing, but I'm like also from an ROI perspective, am I spending too much money now on workshops and training where I'm already at this point? So that was another turning point to be able to say, all right, I need to spend more time on working and making the money and maybe -- Anne: To reinvest. Erikka: -- go back some on the training. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Anne: I think that's a good point to talk about that point where you are evaluating the numbers. And I think it's important that when we get to the point in our career, you need to evaluate your numbers. I know a lot of people don't look at the numbers sometimes, and they're just like doing jobs, spending money, buying microphones, upping their home studio, but yet they haven't really looked at their numbers. And I think it's important that you look at your numbers. Where is your outgoing expenses and what's incoming and where do you need to make adjustments? But I think having money to reinvest, I think you're probably at the point where you're being successful enough that you've forgotten to kind of figure out, oh, I need to pay the bills, or you've got that cushion, but you've also forgotten to look at your numbers to find out really what are you spending? And I think that's an important stop point in any career. You need to regularly evaluate the numbers, incoming and outgoing, so that you know when you can reinvest and when not to be. And in terms of like myself, I know myself, when I don't have the right balance -- and this is not balancing corporate career, but balancing my own career -- when I'm too busy, working too many hours, and I start to get like panicky, where I'm like, oh my God, I just don't have enough time to finish this and I've gotta finish this and I can't stop. And I will start to have like panic attacks. And that's when I know that the balance has got to come back because it's not healthy for me to be in that high. My blood pressure probably spikes. Erikka: Yeah. Your body will tell you, for sure. Anne: Yeah. And so do you have certain days that you set -- do you have time limits? Do you say I'm on the job from nine to five or I have an hour for lunch? I've got an hour to do auditions. How do you split your time? Erikka: Yeah, so I think it does vary for me from day to day because sometimes it might make sense for me to do a session at 12, when I know that I'm not gonna have any meetings. There might be days where I have no meetings. So it's kind of more like, you know, I have a project to work on on my own time, and it's not necessarily that I have to be right sitting in front of my computer for eight hours. And I might be able to have some sessions during that day, that do build in some breaks. Like I make sure that like, if I have, you know, meetings from one to four, and you know, sessions at some point, like I will set a boundary and be like, I'm not available at this time because I know I just need to breathe. I need to get outside, get some air, eat, you know. Anne: Yeah. I think mentally for me the performance, right? There's the business aspect, right, where I'm doing accounting, I'm sending emails, I'm responding to clients, and then there's in the booth. And I think so much of what's in the booth is mental. And that takes time. Like you forget to give yourself grace and time to prepare for that or build that into your calendar. That's where I find that I am lax sometimes, because I'll be so exhausted after I'm doing all the other stuff that I get in the booth here, and I'm like, oh God. Erikka: Now I have to act. Anne: And then what happens is I wanna get through the audition quick and I have to stop myself 'cause that does me no favors in my performance. How do you deal with that in the booth? How do you get back that peace? That, you know, restoration. Erikka: Yeah. Just kind of reset, yeah. Anne: How do you reset to have that balance? Erikka: For me, getting fresh air is a huge one. Like I've been either sitting in meetings, or I've been in the booth, or I've been sitting at my desk doing invoicing and all the admin stuff that comes along with our business as well, right? And like, I'll be like, all right, I need to get up. My butt hurts. I need to stand up. That tells me I've been in the chair too long. Anne: Yep. Erikka: And you know, these days I, I have to get up pretty frequently to go pee. So that helps, but I really do like try to get fresh air and that's a good reset because it literally getting the oxygen to my brain is like telling my brain, you're okay. And there's an abundance of air to breathe. And like that is something that I have learned. It tells your whole body, relaxes. One thing I did mention to one person at eVOcation is that I learned in therapy, particularly for people with anxiety or they get really high stress or high strung, if you kind of take a second to pause and do like a body scan and check, 9 times outta 10, if your stressed, your tongue is like resting or pushed up against the roof of your mouth. Anne: Oh really? Erikka: Yes. Anne: Ooh. I find it in my shoulders. Erikka: Absolutely. Your shoulders get tensed up, but it's like, if you check and it's like, your tongue is like just resting up there, and it's like, if you just relax it and like drop it down to the -- Anne: Oh my goodness. Erikka: -- bottom. Yeah. And -- Anne: To the bottom. Erikka: -- drop it to the bottom and just kind of scan -- Anne: My tongue is at the bottom. Erikka: -- your whole body, you can just feel everything just drop. And you're just like -- Anne: Oh, you're right. Erikka: -- huh. I was stressed out. Anne: Including my, including my posture though. But that's, that's good in way. Erikka: Yes. Anne: You know? Erikka: Yeah. Yeah. So that's a great one to reset too. Anne: Wow. Erikka: Definitely the air does it for me. I wanna go back to real quick to something that you said about the money too and the reinvesting. I think that as someone who has both incomes where I have the corporate and the voiceover, so I'm not necessarily paying bills out of my voiceover income right now. That's what the corporate job is doing. So it's really easy to overspend in reinvesting Anne: Yes. Yes. Erikka: You know, because everything is, is somewhat extra, right? Like it could be paying off debt or whatever, but you still wanna watch and make sure that you're getting an ROI from where you're spending your money in your business. And you're not just spending because you have it. Anne: Right. Erikka: I got into that, and that's how I have like a million microphones and headphones and I started looking at my numbers, and I was just like, all right. If I wanna build this to a point where it is gonna be my source of income, I've got to start making strategic decisions about where I'm making expenditures, just like businesses do, setting budgets for different categories so I can watch my spending, just make sure that's aligning with what I'm bringing in. So I wanna bring that up. Anne: Mm. Yeah. It's easy for us to forget, to check those numbers. Even myself. This is what I do full time. I'm not even talking about balancing one career against another. I find myself that I'm not looking at the numbers enough, but what's really cool -- again, I say over and over and over again, the best investment I've ever made was my accountant. I have her on retainer. So she'll be doing monthly. She's the one that will alert me. "By the way you realize that you're spending so much per month on this subscription or your income that came in last month was little less than it was this time last year. So let's make some adjustments or whatnot," because she's also keeping track of my quarterly taxes that I have to pay. So that keeps me in check. So if you do not have somebody watching over you, looking at your numbers and you're doing it yourself, remind yourself at least once a month, if not more than that, in reality, if you're active doing this full-time, you should really be looking at your numbers once a week, if not every day, seeing what's going on, what's in and what's out, and just taking a brief look so that you're aware. Erikka: Yep. Yeah. Anne: I think that's important. Erikka: Yeah. I have a Google sheet, and I should be outsourcing to an accountant. I have somebody for taxes, but I'm just, I'll get there. It's taken me some time, but I'd have this Google sheet where I'm looking at my average income per job, also the median. So that way, if I get like a whopper, you know, when it's a five figure job, it's not throwing off my average. I can also see where I hit the median, 'cause that tells me when it's time to raise my session minimum. Anne: Yeah. Erikka: I'm looking at, like you said, year over year metrics. I'm looking at monthly, how much I brought in so that I can compare. I'm looking at quarterly averages of what I've brought in, and I have all that automated, the calculations are in the Google sheet. So I'm not having to calculate this every time. Every time I put in a booking, it's calculating that based on what's in the other sheet and, and showing me that number and I just look at 'em from time to time. Super helpful. Anne: So let's talk about mental balance and joy, right? So a lot of people that are in their corporate jobs want to escape. Is that how it is with you? Are you at that point in your job where you're like, I gotta get out? 'Cause I was at that point where like, I am so stressed out, I need a change. I was becoming stagnant myself in my corporate job. And that is the worst thing for me, just knowing my personality. It is the worst thing for me to remain stagnant and not grow. So I was like, I need a way out. I need to get out. And that escape was moving to California and then going into voiceover full-time. What about you? Where's your mental state there? Erikka: I think I'm okay right now, but I do think that, especially since I've got a whole new obligation coming along here, it's definitely on the long range plan to move out of corporate and to focus on -- I don't think I'll ever just do one thing, but kind of having voiceover and maybe something else that is my own personal endeavor. And I do think that you have to know what your plan is, like is this for short term or you're just trying to use this to build up some capital? Is it like a mid-range thing where you're building a career, and maybe you're gonna do voiceover after retirement or something like that? Or if you have a long range plan where you're like, I'm gonna have an exit strategy, I'm gonna build voiceover to a point where it can sustain my lifestyle and I'm comfortable, and then I can leave my job and that's more me. So I know like on the long range sort of roadmap, I will eventually probably leave corporate and just do voiceover because it's growing to the point where I'm gonna have to at some point. Anne: Right, right. Erikka: And knowing things like that, you have to prepare, right? You have to have balance in your approach. You have to start looking at -- Anne: You have to plan. Erikka: You have to plan. You reverse engineer how you're gonna get out. Don't just be like, I'm tired of my job. Bye, I'm gonna do voiceover, and wing it. You're gonna be miserable. And I don't wanna be a starving artist. Anne: Honestly I'm so glad that you said that because I have so many people that are like, yeah, I'm not happy at my job. I'm gonna get outta my job and just quit and do voiceover full time. And I'm always like, okay, whoa. First of all, you wanna make sure you've got a plan because it takes a while to get established in voiceover, unless you're a prodigy, and there's very few of those out there and it's with any good business that you are growing as an entrepreneur -- they used to say five years. I'm like, make it closer to 10 years, you know what I mean, that it's gonna take for you to really see a good ROI. And maybe like, this will be your way of life. You can support yourself. I'm not gonna say it takes 10 years for everybody. But I had a certain standard way of life that I like to live. You need to make a certain amount of money to do that. And so for me, that did not happen right away. It took me many years of growth. And thankfully I had a financial cushion, which was what I had put in place. And my husband also, who was working at a job. I was able to get healthcare benefits; so important healthcare, to have those benefits. And as a matter of fact, even now I'm always telling my husband, I don't care what you do. Just get me my health benefits. So I'll make money if you want, just get me health benefits, because that's a huge, huge part. Erikka: Yeah. I'm glad you said that, 'cause it's not just about the dollars that you're bringing in. Yes, absolutely. The benefits that you lose after you leave corporate, whether that's health, dental, maybe vision insurance. You know, right now I'm carrying debt for our family 'cause my partner's also freelance. Anne: Yep. Erikka: So if you know that that's not gonna be an option for you, either planning for that expense, or getting enough union work where you can qualify for the union health insurance. And that's kind of where I'm at. Looking at now that you're not gonna have a 401k, what are you gonna do for retirement? Anne: Right. Erikka: Are you gonna open, you know, SEPs? Are you gonna look at, you know, individual IRAs? So kind of having that for yourself, just looking at all of what you're gonna lose and coming up with a contingency plan for that, for when you're on your own or just being willing to do without it. You have to consider more than just the dollars, the taxes -- the fact that now the income that you're gonna have from voiceover is not only gonna support your business and you're paying your own taxes, but you're gonna have to reinvest in your business as well. So you have to make enough to cover all of that. Anne: And support the family. Erikka: Yeah. Anne: Right? So whatever you have to do. And I remember those first years when I made that decision. Before I quit, and I say this all the time, I said to my husband, you're going to have to make one and a half times what you make now. See if you can get a transfer to California, but we're gonna have to make one and a half times, because I'm gonna quit my job, and I'm gonna go full time into voiceover. And you can't just can't depend on my salary after that happens. Erikka: Yeah. Anne: I had money put away in savings, but again, we're talking about a move across the country, that was expensive. Buying a new home, that was expensive. Even though we sold our home, we were buying a home that was brand new. So we did have to invest a little bit as well. And it just was something that we had to plan out. I said, make sure that you can guarantee this salary. And then, you know, it worked out and we moved. And then unfortunately my husband was laid off nine months after we got here. And then people said, when are you moving back? And I said, no, we're not moving back. So we made it work, but you still have to prepare for those unexpected things that happen. And so an exit strategy is important. Make sure that you have some money put aside that can support you in the event that you need to live off it for a year, I would say. That is so important and know that it's going to take time to build up your career in voiceover. I mean, at least give it five years. If you're at the point where you're working full time, and you're doing part-time voiceover, and you're making a considerable amount in voiceover doing that, first of all, congratulations because I know how difficult it was for me when I was working full-time, but I had to be on site, right, at my job, it was very difficult for me to make any money at voiceover 'cause I couldn't audition easily 'cause I was away from my studio. Now I think if you have the luxury of working from home, that's a whole lot easier. But still even if you can work from home, build in an evolution of here's transitioning from full-time to maybe consider your skillset and you can then be a part-time consultant in it while you're doing voiceover as well. And so therefore you are kind of compensating for the time it takes for you to build up the voiceover business while still utilizing your current skills in a consultant fashion, in a part-time fashion, that can supplement your living expenses and/or whatnot, your investment in your voiceover for the time being. I think that is something very important to put in place. And do not obviously, anybody listening to this podcast, do not think that voiceover is the easy job that you can just do from home. That just scares me when I do consults, and I hear people, they're like, well, I got laid off for my job and I wanna do voiceover. And that just scares me because that it's not that simple obviously. That transition takes time. There has to be an investment, and it amazes me again how many people don't have money to invest in voiceover to make it a sustainable career. Erikka: That's one thing too that I always kind of bring up, and it might be a little bit of an unpopular opinion, but I think that you should have a balanced approach when you're looking at exiting to not just have savings, but to also go ahead and build up a portfolio of credit that's available to you. Because this is a high investment industry, right? To be able to be in voiceover, you're constantly having to either spend money on equipment or you know, have subscriptions for connections or get training, you know, conferences, all these things, they do help you grow. So it's not like a one-time outlet. You do need to have some money for when technology fails and you have to replace it. It's easier for you to get approved for credit while you have that W2 income. So you don't have to use it. But kinda have the lines of credit available so that if the sky falls down, and you don't have enough savings to take you through that whole period, you have another fallback plan. It's like, you know, have your plan ABCD . Anne: That's a great idea. Erikka: Yeah. Anne: That's a great idea. And also I'd wanna mention on that line, consider if you're going to move low key into a new home. By the way, they don't look upon freelancers or people who are self employed very highly when you want to buy a new home for a mortgage loan. And I found that out very like firsthand when I moved here like two and a half years ago, and I've been established in the business. But I had to prove over and over and over again, here, I made this much this year, here are my bank records. Here, have it all. We can afford this. And it just was painful. It was painful. So if you need to make a move, make a move while you work at a job Erikka: The banks highly favor W2 work. Anne: They do, they do. Erikka: Yeah. So take advantage of that and then make your exit. Anne: Yeah. And then make your exit. That's actually a really good strategy plan. It's not that it can't be done because I did it. But you've got to basically hand over every piece of documentation that looks at your business and shows your income. And then you have to make sure that you can define where that income came from. You cannot just transfer $10,000 from PayPal into your bank account and say that it was for voiceover work. They're gonna wanna know really, where did that come from? And it's that type of a thing. Any large deposits into your bank account, you need to account for those. And if you say they're from your business, you gotta be ready to show the paperwork. That is just part of the reality. And especially now it's crazy out there in the housing market. It's expensive. So it's gonna make it that much harder even. Erikka: Cars too, like the other major purchase, you know, buying a car. And that's why, even if you do have W2 income now go ahead and get in the habit of keeping meticulous records, not just for taxes, but so that when you're in this situation, and maybe you're a year into your only freelance career, you've left your job and they want two years of history, you're gonna have to be able to show everything that happened over the past year and voice over plus that W2, which is gonna be easy. But get in the habit now, so that when those come up, you're able to really just show it and yeah, you want this fine? Yep. I can show you, no problem. 'Cause they wanna make sure it's not coming from illicit sources, right? Anne: Exactly. Exactly. Money laundering. That's it. I'm like, what look, what, where do they think it's coming from? Well, you could be laundering money. I'm like, oh, like that didn't even occur to me. Like, so I don't have a criminal mind there, but anyways, your last piece of advice for balancing everything so successfully the way that you do to the BOSSes out there; what would it be? Erikka: Oh man. I would just have to say, it's probably multi-pronged, but know your plan. Know what it is that you're trying to do with voiceover. If it's just something that you wanna do on the side, that is okay. But you need to know that and not kind of purport like you're trying to build something long term. Or if you are trying to build long term, start making long term plans. Start making steps to get your financial house in order, to prepare your family for this change. Don't want an emotional whim because you're tired of it. Grin and bear it, you know, just mm-hmm and know what you're doing and why you're doing it and who you're doing it for. And in the meantime, just set boundaries for yourself. Take care of yourself, know that you're not gonna be able to get into everything, but just know that you having both is also an asset. You're able to double dip for retirement, do a SEP and get your 401k. You're able to have another capital source to invest in your business. So just be patient with yourself. That was a lot of advice in one point. Anne: That was great though. It was sage, sage advice. Thank you so much, Erikka. You are an inspiration, for sure. Erikka: Thank you, Anne. Anne: Yeah, absolutely. All right. BOSSes. So as individuals, it can seem hard to make a big impact, but as a group, we can contribute to the growth of our communities in ways that we never thought possible. And you can find out more at 100voiceswhocare.org to learn how you can make a difference. Also big shout-out to our sponsor, ipDTL. You too can connect like BOSSes, like Erikka and I, and find out more at ipdtl.com. You guys, have an amazing week, and we'll see you next week. Bye! Erikka: Bye! >> 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.com 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.

You deserve to take up space & feel valued for the work you are doing. In this episode, Anne & Erikka discuss how saying no to jobs builds your career as much as saying yes! There is morality involved with lending your voice to a person or company. In making these difficult choices, it is essential to keep your brand & personal integrity aligned with the jobs you take. Bosses, have the confidence to say no, and if you need a little boost, your favorite hosts are here to help. Transcript >> It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere 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. Anne: Hey everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS podcast and our balance series. I'm your host Anne Ganguzza, and I'm excited to start my day again with the lovely Erikka J. Hey Erikka. Erikka: Hey, Anne. Anne: How are you? Erikka: How are you? I'm pretty good. Anne: I'm doing good. I'm doing good. Erikka: Hangin' in there. Anne: It's been a crazy year or a couple of years. Hasn't it? Erikka: It has. Yeah, for sure. Anne: And I have to say that I got a job offer the other day to do something for a political candidate. And it made me think, because my thoughts about voicing things for, let's say, political and/or let's say anything else that maybe I may, may not believe in have changed and have evolved over my career here. And I thought it might be an interesting conversation to have with you. Maybe our moral compass, so to speak. Erikka: Yeah. Yeah. Balancing that and balancing your yeses maybe, you know what I mean? Like what you say yes to and your no, 'cause your nos can shape your career just as much as what you do decide to voice. Anne: Oh, right there. That's a golden nugget. We can go home now because that says it all. Honestly, I think sometimes no is even more powerful than a yes and can really help define in so many ways. Well, just a little more on that job that I was talking about, you know, it was for a political spot, and I literally went so far as to look up the candidate because it wasn't evident by the content right away what was happening there. I ultimately, I ultimately said no to it because it did not align with my beliefs and not just the copy, but because I said it was hard to tell with the copy because it was a candidate that wasn't as well known. And so I just said no, and I'm thinking about myself, maybe, I don't know, five years ago, or even later than that. I might have said, you know what? It's, it's a gig. It's a political gig. Let's do it. Let's get on board. What about you? I know you do a lot of political work, and it may not just be political work, but -- Erikka: Yeah. Yeah. I do a lot of political, and in the very beginning of my career, like literally, like I had been probably doing voiceover for like a month, and I did have a quasi-political sort of thing come to me. But now kind of looking back on it and it was weird because when I did it, I was like, well, you know, I'm just starting and oh my gosh, they booked me and they want me and I can do it, you know? And it's like, yeah, it's kind of borderline, but I'll just do it. And I've regretted it ever since. And it probably lived for like two weeks. It was something that was very short term, but it was supporting a candidate that I was not in support of somewhat. Like I said, a roundabout, like, I didn't say their, their name. But it was just that I learned that not all work is good work if it's going to misalign with your gut and how you feel and your own beliefs. And if from a more business standpoint, misalign with your brand. You don't want to jeopardize the trust that you've built with your clients that do align with your values and your brand. And then they're like, well, why is she voicing this? So I stopped doing that. Anne: Yeah. And I find that now, especially now, 'cause it's such a divisive climate these days politically that I think it's just shaping my business in a way that I didn't anticipate, number one. Not that I do a ton of political. I mean I do enough political to know now I'm absolutely like checking on the candidates, finding, going to their webpage and finding out if their beliefs align with mine, because I'm just not willing to have my voice recognized, and then another client, like you were mentioning, a longstanding client, maybe, I don't know, not align with that and then maybe have issues with me voicing for them in the future. But it's not even so much about that. It's become now about my performance too. I wanna make sure -- it's hard to create a believable performance when you don't align with the client that you are voicing for. And it doesn't have to be political. I think it could be anything. You know, now we've got, one of our next episodes probably gonna be all about AI, but with AI jobs, right? Are they gonna recognize my voice and then will there be, I don't know, judgment in one way or another, because that's also something that people have very strong feelings about. Erikka: Yeah. Yeah. Like you said, definitely not just political. Yeah. Just kind of, it definitely comes out in your performance. Like, yes, we can take on feelings and emotions and words that are not our own. I truly believe that when you're not enjoying the performance, when you really are not totally invested in it, it's gonna come through somehow, some way. And you know, the client may say there's something about it or it might just be a difficult session when they're really trying to pry it out of you. It's gonna come out in the wash and when it's not real. So yeah. I just prefer to say no. And I find that when I say no, the right things come along to replace it. So it's kind of having that, that kind of mindset, not having the scarcity mindset of, oh, I have to take the job 'cause it came. You know, having a more abundant mindset of I'll release this thing that isn't for me. So I can go to the right person and the right thing will come to me. So. Anne: Exactly. And you know, that applies in so many things if I can, the power of no. And especially when you're negotiating also, I think that, that makes a huge difference in terms of, I don't have to take this. If you have that thought process of, you know what, I don't have to take this job. And I have the confidence that if I say no to this job, that it will give me room for the next job to come along and fulfill my need for, I don't know, money to support my, whatever to support me in this career. So the power to say no is huge. And when you are negotiating that confidence that you have the power to say no, and that you are okay knowing that if you say no, everything's gonna be okay, and that something else will come along and fill its place. That is huge. And I think that a lot of people, when they first start out in the industry, it's a scary thing to negotiate a job. Because they're afraid that they're gonna lose the job if they quote too high. And so therefore they settle. I think you only have to have a few negative experiences when you settle, and then you get that client that doesn't align with what you want your business to be. And then they kind of nickel and dime you on every little thing that they want from you. And those are clients that when I get really, I only had a couple that really came back and nickel and dime me. And I was like, you know what? I did not quit my full-time cushy job to come to a job where I could be beat up by my client. Erikka: Yeah. Yeah. Anne: This is why I got out of it. And so I wanna just tell any voice actor out there that is beginning, you do not need to suffer through a client that is abusing you, so to speak. Erikka: Oh my goodness. Anne: Right? Erikka: Yeah. Definitely talking about balancing yes and nos, that is such a great point on rates, because like you said, the ones that don't necessarily want to pay your price are the ones that are gonna have the most demands, want the most pickups or little changes or, well, could you, you know, say this one with a, like going up like they really like line reads you type things. And you know, things like that, but yeah. Not being afraid to fire clients. I think that that's so important. Anne: When they don't value you. Erikka: Exactly. Anne: It's all about the value. Right? You've gotta understand that what you do is of value. And we say this over and over and over again, but it's so interesting how it always comes back into play in these, the power of no, the moral, ethical compass that you have in working. It's not just, oh, do you take a political side? It's a moral compass when working with a client who may not treat you as if your services are valued. And that I think is huge. And like I said, I did not give up my cushy job you know, and thankfully I had a cushy job. I say thankfully and gratefully, but I did not give it up to go into business for myself to be handled by my clients in a way that is not aligning with what I want my business to be and someone that doesn't value me. And that is a huge, huge thing. And it's a huge thing when you talk about AI, right? And we think that the AI industry is out to get the voice talent and to take away their jobs and to devalue them. I personally, just through the VO BOSS podcast and all of my interviews, have been fighting to have AI companies value the artist and value the voice and value the asset of voice because they value other assets. Right? If you think about some of these big advertising companies, they value the product. Well, if the voice is representing the product, how can you not value that voice? How can you not treat that voice with the respect that you treat the product? Because it's a part of it. Erikka: Yeah. You're bringing a branding element that nobody else can bring. You have something, this voice, this tone, this way of delivery that they have chosen to represent their brand. That's the value and, and should be given the proper respect for that. And even to your prior point, I do still have my nice job But I think the thing is like, even at work, not to take it too far off topic, but just valuing yourself and whatever value you are bringing to the table in any business transaction, really in any transaction at all, any relationship. And if you command that respect for yourself and knowing that when you set those boundaries and say, you know, Nope, that's not for me or I'm not gonna allow you to treat me that way, you make space for the right things to come. So that comes with rates. That comes with the way clients treat you, that comes with the way your boss treat you. If you have a job and they're not treating you right, find something else. Anne: Absolutely. I love that you brought that up, especially in the corporate environment, because I know a lot of reason why people may be getting into the voiceover industry, right, is to escape the job where they don't feel valued. You know, I worked in the corporate world. Corporate is one of my specialty genres in coaching and in what I do in voiceover. And I always felt that corporate became the way that I was winning 'cause I would do corporate voiceover. And I thought, here's the way that I don't have to go in and be mistreated in a board meeting, right, by members of the company or, you know, not valued. Here, I can do the job, don't have to go to any meetings -- well, maybe a meeting with a person that's paying me, but basically I'm in, I'm out, and I got paid. Erikka: Exactly. Anne: And so therefore I win. I win at corporate. But I do happen to love corporate and I understand the corporate way. And in reality, as voice artists, we are hired pretty much by companies, whether they are companies that have a product or broadcasting companies, they're still companies. And again, you want to be valued by that company that you work for. And it's just something that resonates, whether you are in a company wanting to get out to form your own company, right, that you need to be valued. You need to be valued and you have the space to morally and ethically say no to create a good balance in your life for not just getting paid, what you're worth, but just having joy in what you're doing. Erikka: And you have to remember that like these businesses, they're not saying yes to every single partnership or every contract, and you as a voice talent -- I know that it's easy for creators and artists to kind of see us, ourselves as beneath or as you know, well, we're so grateful to get a job, but we are B to B businesses. So when we are working or deciding to choose to work with another company, that is a partnership. And you have to decide if that partnership is right for you, just like the big corporations do. You're no different. Anne: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. That's such a great point. Wow. So do you have any examples of jobs that you've said no to yourself? Erikka: Oh boy. I know. I do. Let's see. I've definitely said no for rates. And the couple times where I might have bent, I regretted it. Anne: Because then they would come back and want every little pickup. Erikka: Either they wanted more or it was just like, when I did it, it wasn't as fulfilling. And I was just kind of like dreading it. And then I send the invoice and I'm like, I can't believe I put myself through that for this. You know what I mean? So I kinda stopped bending. The times that I do kind of bend more on rates are like, if it's something I really wanna do. And I really believe in like PSAs or for non-profits and stuff like that. But yeah, I have, more times than I can count, you know, just said, hey, this is my rate. This is what it is. And if they say, you know, it's not gonna work for us. Great. Definitely say no a lot for usage, and that's something, you know, I'm open about the fact that I do participate on P2Ps. Just really Voice123 right now. But I'm very careful to make sure that anything that says in perpetuity, these contracts or these blatant boiler plate, things that they send out, I gotta make sure that I'm protected, that they're not gonna use it for broadcast use or try to use it in perpetuity without it being totally kind of safe from creating conflicts in the future. And I'll say no very quickly for those. Anne: Yeah. Yeah. I wanna point out that a lot of times there's a panic, right, if I say, no, I won't get hired again. And I just wanna say like in life right, think about the products that you buy. You can choose to buy a product that's maybe cheaply made and that doesn't last as long, or it's not as good value, or you can buy the stuff that has served you well in the past, right? A trusted brand that lasts a long time or you can depend on it over and over again. And when it comes to that, you don't care what you pay for it for the most part. Right? And I think that even though we think voiceover might be going down the tubes because online casting came and, and now AI is coming and, and people think, well, it's just be devalued, and so what's gonna happen? Well, I think it it's human nature that there's always gonna be the division of, okay, so there's good value. Or maybe there's not so good value. And I don't think that's going to change whether pay to plays are in the picture or AI is in the picture, because people are always gonna want to buy the thing that gives them the best value. And that does not always equate to money. Erikka: Yeah. Yeah. Anne: Right? Erikka: You'll always have buyers for the Dollar Store sort of, you know, genre. You'll always have buyers that are more in like the Target sort of realm and then you'll have your Neiman Marcus folks. Like it's always -- Anne: Right. Erikka: There are people that are, that are price driven and those that are quality driven, and there's just different types of buyers. And it's just which one do you align with. Anne: Right. Erikka: Yeah. Yeah. Anne: And those buyers can change at any given moment. There may be times when I feel like I don't need top of the line, I don't know -- I always go to the girl thing -- I don't need top of the line lipstick now, but but I always need a good hairdresser. Erikka: Yeah. Anne: Do you know what I mean? Like, I feel like I wanna be that voice of our artist where people say, well, all right, I can forego maybe this part of the project, but I cannot live without Anne Ganguzza for my voice. Erikka: There you go. Anne: But that's what you wanna try to manifest for your business. Right? They say, Erikka J, man, she is like no other. She delivers. I love her voice. I can't live without her. And that's the type of client that you want. And there's a lot of clients out there, guys. I don't think we need to be worried that you're not gonna be able to get a client that will support that value and support your business. And I think you just have to believe, and I know a lot of times it takes -- it took me years to kind of get that belief and that confidence. And it's funny because it's still evolving, and I've been in this for over 15 years now. Erikka: Yeah. It's like a muscle. You have to keep stretching it. Yeah. Anne: It is like a muscle. It keeps growing, and you just like every day you realize, wow, you know what? I'm gonna be okay. People are going to want to hire me, right, because I deliver value. And then even if there are other things like pay-to-plays have become, it's tough. It's a lot of competition. Well, maybe that's something that you evolve out of and you do something different. And again, you always have to have that balance of this is aligning with my business, morally, ethically. And what's my other word? Does it bring me joy? Erikka: Yeah. Anne: Right? Erikka: Yeah. Yeah. Anne: There is that balance that makes my business go around kind of thing. And makes me happy that I do what I do. And when it no longer makes me happy or no longer fulfills my quota of, I need to support myself, right? Well then maybe I evolve into something else and what's given me the strength to be okay with that is the fact that I have built my business up. And that I have succeeded. I always say this. If the voiceover industry were to fall out, I'd be okay. Because I have learned how to operate a business myself, and I know that I can evolve, and I will evolve because I've proven it to myself before. And I know that you BOSSes out there can do the same. Erikka: Absolutely. Anne: I'm not anybody special. I think there's something to be said for longevity and in following your moral compass. Erikka: Yeah, yeah. Anne: Right? And having that balance. Erikka: Yeah. And I think part of balancing those yeses and nos, we talked about the moral compass. We talked about financially making sure the rates are right, the usage, making sure it brings you joy. I think another part of that is do you have the time? Because you don't wanna jeopardize your relationship with a client by you keep saying yes, yes, yes, yes. And you start falling behind on deadlines or you're not delivering the quality that sets up to par because the hours in the day are finite. Right? Your energy is, is finite per day. So sometimes you might have to say no, simply because you don't have the bandwidth, and you have to be okay with that because it'll be worse for you to deliver a subpar product. Anne: Right. Right. Erikka: Because you didn't have the bandwidth to really do it. Yeah. Anne: And I think it works. I mean, if you want it to, I think it can work in your favor and especially, Erikka, for you, I think because you are juggling a full-time job, a voiceover career, I mean family, everything. And so the fact that you don't have the time makes it like a little easier to say no. And a lot of times when you say no, that makes people want you more. Erikka: Yes, I totally agree. Anne: Just sayin'. And that makes people value you more. And that actually can turn out to be a wonderful thing for your business. Erikka: Yeah, yeah. Anne: Right? Erikka: Yeah. Or like, for me, like I say no to longer form projects, because I know it's gonna be harder for me to fit that in. So it makes room for me to get more of the short term stuff. And like you said, it does kind of be like, oh, well you didn't have time for this, but I'd love you to do this. You know, like, could you do this one? Anne: Or even, I dunno, has it ever turned around, whether you've said, no, I, I don't have time for it. And they offer you more money? Erikka: They offer me more money or they offer me more time. They're like, well, if we wait until next week, could you do it? And I'd be like, well, yeah, actually I could Anne: Yeah, so in a sense, absolutely. I mean, it just works out, and I'm always saying being busy is a good thing as long as you're balanced and you're not going crazy. And like your health is at stake or something like that. But the being busy is good because then it's a great time, I always say, when you're that busy to raise your rates and see what happens and it's scary as hell, but when you raise your rates, and then you say, let me just see what happens, and people just, they take it. And you're like, damn. And it's so funny because to us, it's like this big, like, oh my God, I'm gonna raise my rates. Erikka: Yeah. Yeah. Anne: And then the next thing you know, somebody's buying it and you're like, oh, well that was simple. Why didn't I do that before? Erikka: I am so glad you said that, Anne, because again, the laws of business, which we have to remember as BOSSes, that we are not just talking into a microphone, we're not just artists. We are entrepreneurs. We are businesses. What businesses do, the law of supply and demand. If the demand goes up, guess what, the price has to go up, because there's not as much supply to fulfill that. So yeah. Anne: That's right. It's a really wonderful thing. And I think there's too many people that let it get to them before they realize that, wow, this is how I can raise my -- this is how I can actually survive because there's not too many people that are just doing this as a hobby. I mean a lot of people, oh yeah. It's kind of fun. I'm dabbling in it. But in reality, the ones of us who are concerned about how do I market, how do I get the jobs? We want this to be a living. We wanna be able to do this and be successful at it so that we can support our families or whatever it is that we wanna do with that. And I think when it gets to that point, you've gotta figure out how you're gonna make that business work for you. And there are some scary, scary challenges. I'm -- like I say this all the time, you have to be scared of something every day, honestly. And I think that really is good for you to be a little bit scared. And I'm still scared when I raise my rates, and then I'm still like, oh, damn, that was easy. Somebody picked up on that. Erikka: Right. Right. Anne: It's like -- now I think you just have to be careful that you're within a market. Erikka: For sure. Anne: You don't wanna price yourself out of the market. And that is something that you have to, you know, understand. And I think that's something that, again, there's a balance of worth plus the market, because you can be a little more expensive than what typically is on the market. And that's where I kind of like to -- I don't wanna say I'm expensive, but I like to say they are my values. This is my price because I honestly, I don't have time to not have it be my price. Erikka: Amen. Yes, yes. And deliver the goods to match that price. Anne: Yeah. Erikka: You know, so that they are happy to pay that. Anne: Well, exactly. Happy and glad to pay it over and over and over again. And I don't feel guilty. Erikka: Yep. Anne: Right? I don't ever feel guilty. Erikka: Yep. Anne: Right? I don't know. Have you ever felt guilty when charging a client? Erikka: I, I might feel guilty when I first say it, but then like at the end of the job, I'm like, yeah, well that was worth that , you know, and they're happy. Anne: Yeah, if you work hard. Erikka: They didn't have to come back, you know, like they got what they needed quickly and yeah. Anne: Well, you know, that's so interesting that you say that too. I was on a live directed session the other day, and it boggles my mind, right, because I said, oh, do you wanna, you know, gimme some direction or you want me to just read it? And then you can gimme some comments later. They're like, yeah, let's do that. I delivered the read, and they're like, wow. That was perfect. And it's funny because that was quick. They're like, okay, no, that was perfect. We don't need anything else. Bam. I did it. They were like, wow, that's perfect. That was perfect. And they were so shocked and surprised and happy. And I was like, gosh, I wonder who they've been working with? Erikka: Really. Anne: Because for me it was just like, okay, let me just do this. And I was confident. I think confidence has -- we should have an entire episode on confidence. Erikka: Oh gosh, we should. Anne: You know, just because I was confident, there was no reason for me to be not confident. I do get nervous before a live session, but I'm confident in my abilities and to be able to deliver that, but they were so surprised and I was like, well, I'm so happy that I could deliver. And guess what? They hired me again. And so it just became like, it was quick, but it was worth it for them because it was quick. And I delivered what they needed quickly. Erikka: They're trading their money for you to make them spend less time. So the better that you can efficiently deliver with the read and what they're looking for, so that they're not spending hours directing you on a session, they're gonna appreciate that. And they're gonna happily pay you 'cause they can get more money. They, they don't have a lot of time. And yeah, I love what you said about, you know, it kind of just being ready, because if you get into that session and you're nervous -- I get nervous before live sessions still too. Anne: Yeah. I do. Erikka: One thing to kind help with that is I'm not afraid to like ask questions, especially if I have a client that maybe hasn't hired a lot of voice talent, so that I get clarity on the direction that they wanna go. You know, I'll do that at the top of the session. So then I'm more secure and more confident in what I'm delivering because it's not the guessing game and feeling it out in those first 15, 20 minutes. Right? And now I've just saved them 20 minutes because I took five minutes to ask questions, delivered the read in two, three takes -- Anne: Exactly. Erikka: -- we're done. Anne: Yeah. That's it, that's it, it's really delivering what they want. And that's the thing. 'Cause maybe, you know, you're confident in your performance, but you're not necessarily confident that you're gonna deliver what they want in their ears. So asking questions I think is, is super important. So guys, balance, I think balance in moral ethics, your value. I think that it is so important for a happy, successful career in voiceover. And I think that compromising -- look, I think anybody that gets into this industry, I think if they're coming out of the corporate world, which I have a lot of people, you know, trying to come out of the corporate world to do it full time, and I'm always like, well wait, just a moment before you do that. Erikka: Yeah. Yeah. Anne: Right? And I think that, that is also another worthy topic for the podcast is, you know, your full-time job plus voiceover, how do you make it work? Which -- Erikka: And balance, and a balanced approach to the exit strategy. Anne: Yep, exactly. Yeah, exactly. But I think morally, ethically and worth-wise, you have to have a great balance and a great sense of who you are and your worth and to make things successful. And I believe in all of you, BOSSes out there, that it can be done. I mean, if I could do it, like like I've learned a lot over my 15 years, and, and that is a big part of what I've learned and a big part of what helped me become successful. And Erikka, I'm sure you see that every day. Erikka: Every day, balancing the yeses and the nos, balancing what I'm gonna do and not do. And yeah, for sure, eevery day. Anne: All right. Well, BOSSes, I'd like to give a big thank you to our sponsor 100voiceswhocare.org. This is your chance to make a difference using your voice and give back to the communities that give to you. Find out more at 100voiceswhocare.org. And also our sponsor ipDTL. We love ipDTL. It helps me to connect with BOSSes like Erikka here and all of you out there. Find out more at ipdtl.com. You guys, have an amazing wake and we will see you next week. Erikka: Bye! Anne: Bye! >> 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.com 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.

In this Bonus Episode, Anne is joined by The National Association of Voice Actors co-founders, Tim Friedlander & Carin Gilfry. NAVA is a new association that aims to advocate and promote the advancement of the voice acting industry through action, education, inclusion, and benefits. The three discuss why & how NAVA came to be, what their specific goals are, and how voice actors can join. If all goes to plan, NAVA will be the first organization to offer health benefits to voice actors. Bosses, you definitely don't want to miss this! Transcript >> It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere 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. Anne: Hey everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS podcast. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzza. And today I am very excited to bring the founders of the National Association of Voice Actors or NAVA to the show, Mr. Tim Friedlander and Carin Gilfry. Welcome, guys, to the show. Thanks so much for joining me. Tim: Hello. Hello. Thanks for having us. Carin: Thanks for having us. We're excited. Anne: Well, I'm very excited to talk to you about this brand new initiative, which I think is only, what, a month or two old? Carin: Couple months. Yeah, a few months. Anne: So tell me, what is the National Association of Voice Actors? Tim: National Association of Voice Actors is a national association of voice actors. We made the title nice and simple to keep . It grew out of some groups that car and I have put together over the last, I started mine in 2014. I believe Carin, you were around the same time, 2016 or so? Carin: I think 2015. Yeah, something like that. Tim: Yeah. And these groups we have, uh, you have the voice actors of NYC. I have Gardner Street Voiceover Collective, various other groups I'm involved in. And over the years, we talk about business. We talk about how to get into the, into SAG AFTRA. We talk about what it means to go Fi-Core. We talk about various other different parts of the voiceover industry. Currently that conversation is around synthetic voices. So we're having that conversation in our groups as well. And we decided we wanna take that to a broader audience. And so we kind of took this off of Facebook and put this into a national group that we could offer education and support and financial support to on a much larger, much larger scale. Anne: I love that. Carin: In addition to that too, over the past few years, Tim and I have also, through our groups, been kind of creating emergency funds and donation funds for people in the voiceover industry, particularly during the pandemic. My group and Tim's various groups, we had emergency funds set up for people who lost their jobs during the pandemic, or who just needed extra money to pay bills or get a new microphone, 'cause theirs broke and they didn't have any money to do it. And so we were giving out payments to people, no questions asked without having a nonprofit. And so we thought that by forming a 501(c)(3), we would be able to do that in a much better way than just having a PayPal account and paying it out to people when they asked. Anne: Absolutely. Now it's membership driven. Is there a fee to join or can we join free? How is that working right now? Tim: Currently it's brand new and we have a membership committee that is going to be setting those standards for us on what that will be. Currently it's free to anybody who wants to join. And so there will always be a free membership tier that people can access the information. Definitely we wanna be a resource for people who are getting into the industry to find a trusted area for information. So we'll have a free tier that our membership committee will set for us. And then beyond that, there will be dues at some point, but we don't have that currently in place. Anne: Talk to me a little bit more about the resource-driven initiatives that you have. You mentioned before resources for the union or for Fi-Core for non-union people. What's that look like? Tim: Sure. We're currently calling it Pathways, different VO pathways that you have. And a lot of people think it's very black and white. It's either union or non-union. And in voiceover, for many of us who work in this industry know that it's very gray. There are non-jurisdictional jobs, which means it's not covered by a union contract. So what does non-jurisdictional even mean? What jobs are non-jurisdictional ,what can we work on? How do we join the union? If a voice actor wants to be in the union, what they need to do to get in that union? I was eligible for two years before I even know I could join the union. 'Cause I didn't know I worked under a contract that was a union contract. I didn't even know I worked under a contract. So that's just -- you know, I worked under an AFTRA contract for an audiobook that made me eligible. And two years later I was trying to get my eligibility and I was already set. I didn't know these things. And then also this concept that you can convert jobs. You can take a job that is currently non-union and convert that into a union job. So a lot of voice actors look at this concept of joining the union as having to give up all this work that I do in the non-union realm. And for a lot of people, that's not a tenable situation to be in, where you're gonna be giving up a massive amount of money, your entire living that you support your family with, to move into someplace where you may not even have access to auditions and jobs. So we are gonna show, we wanna provide that information on how can you navigate this industry. If I wanna go union, this is what I do. If I wanna go Fi-Core, this is what that means. If I wanna stay non-union, this is what it means. And the union is great when you can reach them. And their information is very solid when you can reach somebody over there, but they don't deal with voiceover specifically, and voiceover for everybody who knows is such a very unique niche aspect of what SAG AFTRA and the arts industry and community in general is, that we want something that's very specific to just voice actors. Anne: Very important. Carin: We also, we have an incredible advisory board of just people from literally every genre of work that there is in voiceover. We made a point of asking people from audiobooks and video games and commercials and TV narration, and all just across the spectrum of voiceover so that we have people advising NAVA on all of those different aspects. And we have people as part of our advisory board who are very important people in SAG AFTRA who are very pro-union and want everyone to join the union if possible. We also have people on our board who are Fi-Core and we have people on our board who are non-union. Our goal is to be voice actor first and to be as unbiased as we can be as a group and just provide accurate information out there for people to have, because I think SAG AFTRA is absolutely wonderful. But when I called and was trying to figure out whether I should join or go Fi-Core, I called them and I didn't feel like the information that I got about joining the union and converting work specifically -- they basically didn't tell me that I could convert work. And so I really thought that I was gonna have to give up every non-union job that I would book in the future. And it's mostly just because I think people are unaware that it's possible to do that. This group we hope is a resource for people with unbiased, accurate information. That's very voice actor forward. Anne: I think that's so important because I know there are so many questions when people get into the industry, like, what is the union and how do I become eligible for the union? Should I join the union? And it's always those questions that, you're right, the information has not been really readily available anywhere to find out that information, and it's complex. And so the different avenues are, I think each one of them has a special set of circumstances, and there are advantages and disadvantages to whichever way you decide. And I think having a resource to provide that information to voice talent is so very important for that. So that's a wonderful initiative, and especially things like -- I know that you've started something for healthcare or you're attempting to try to lobby for voice talent that, if they don't have healthcare, they can get it. Talk a little bit about that. Carin: Yes. Tim: Yeah. I mean, it's, it's something, you know, for anybody who is, those who are SAG AFTRA and have health insurance in SAG AFTRA, they know the benefits of having that access to phenomenal healthcare. And one of the things that we learned after forming this group that we did was that there is a possibility of providing healthcare for members of our association. And that is about the extent of the information though. It's about as far as we are in this, in this process. I started working on it before we actually had a group in this capacity. And I started in November of last year. I had been in discussions about possibly offering this for a year before that. And it was actually kind of put into motion of November of last year and is just for anybody who's dealt in healthcare, i's just a convoluted process of misinformation and different information and, and what information is accurate and what information is inaccurate and -- Carin: And changing what changing laws. Tim: Changing laws, yeah, exactly. Anne :Yeah. And it's such an important component for us as entrepreneurs, right, to have health insurance. I know we don't like to think about it, like we could ever need it, but I'll tell you, when you least expect it, you could really use that healthcare. And I know that first hand. And I was thankful that I was able to have healthcare, but it was through my spouse. So, and for those people that, that may not be an option, this is a wonderful initiative, and the best of luck with that. I think that's phenomenal. That's something that's very important. Tim: We look at it as, you know, I've, I've always thought of it as one of the things that can help advance people in their career. and it can help get you into that level where you are able to get union healthcare. It can get to that point. You know, the more work people can focus on -- I've always been somebody who in all my spare time, I personally don't wanna wait tables to support my career of being an artist. I wanna be an artist. Anne: Yeah. Sure. Absolutely. Tim: And I'm a musician all the time, and I want more people to have access to doing the art that they want to do, and love to do and make a living at it, and not have to stay in a job they don't wanna -- this is one of Carin's talking points that she brings up quite frequently is, you know, this, this concept of staying in a job you don't want to be in be just purely because you need the healthcare. Anne: Yeah, absolutely. And being able to have the income, right, coming in so that you can be confident in pursuing more work. And so I've always been, you know, a big proponent of have that little bundle of cash. And if you're spending that cash on something, when it goes wrong on healthcare, the whole thing kind of crumbles. And so I think it's important to have something like that put in place so that you can pursue your creative career and grow in it. Tim: We're just in the process of building that. So we just don't have, we don't have answers yet that are fully formed for us to give rates and to give who's gonna be covered and how it's gonna be covered, which is why we're here today talking about this. You need help from people to, you know, because -- Carin: We do have a plan of action. Anne: Yes. Let's hear the plan of action. I love it. Carin: Great. You can see, we have an infographic up on our website, which is navavoices.org. And you can see it's called, I think, the road to health insurance you'll see a little map on there. But basically the idea is we, as an association, have to come up with a pool of applicants who would apply for this health insurance. The health insurance companies wanna see who are these people, you know, what is their average age, where do they live, those kinds of questions. So we have a health insurance census, and we are hoping to get 800 to 1000 people to add their information to the census. Once we have that pool of applicants, that's when we can go to all the different health insurance companies and say, here we are, this is what we are. This is what we do. Our job is very low risk. We're not like construction workers, or even on camera actors have a more dangerous job than we do. We're literally sitting in a booth talking into a microphone. It's not very dangerous work. So this is who we are. They look at the full group and they say, okay, these are the rates. These are the plans that we can offer you. Then we choose which plans we think would best suit the needs of our members. And then during the open enrollment period this year, November and December, hopefully fingers crossed, if all goes, according to plan, we will have options for people to be able to purchase that health insurance, which will then start January of 2023. So the main thing right now is that we need as many voice actors who are interested in having this health insurance option to fill out the census. And also I should add that if you are on the census, you have the ability to purchase health insurance in November and December. If you're not on the census, you will not be able to purchase health insurance until the following year. Anne: So the next enrollment. Carin: Yeah, until the next enrollment. So, so if you have even like a little bit of interest in, maybe this is something that I might wanna consider, depending on what the rates are, fill out the census so that when we do get those plans and those rates, you will have the option to buy it if you want. Tim: Yep. And you can look at the compare rates when offers come around, and if it's not right for you, then there's no obligation to sign up on our plan. Carin: No obligation. Tim: But again to reiterate, if you aren't on the original census, and the rates come out and it looks like something viable you would want to get into, you wouldn't be able to join until the next open enrollment. So we definitely encourage everybody who is even just slightly and should want to compare rates. We have a question on there about "how interested are you, I'm just comparing rates," you can just check that section so we know that you're somebody who is just kicking the tires and just trying to compare rates. Anne: Fantastic. Carin: Just to clarify, you must be a voice actor in some capacity in order to be a member of NAVA and or qualify for this health insurance. So. Anne: Fulltime or part-time or in some capacity, paid jobs? Carin: Full-time, part-time doesn't matter, just in some capacity. Yeah. Paid jobs. We're working on what the vetting process is gonna be because we don't want it to be like an earning threshold. It's not gonna be like SAG AFTRA where you have to make 25,600 or whatever it is, almost $26,000 in union earnings to qualify for health insurance. It won't be like that. It will be like a vetting process where we'll see, oh, this person has a website. Oh, this person has a demo. Oh, this person has done a little bit of VO work. They qualify. Or, oh, this person has a profile on Voice123, they're probably doing some work as a voice actor. They qualify. And again, we don't know what that is yet, but it will be something like that, not an earning threshold. Tim: Yeah. And that kind goes in parallel with what the requirements are gonna be for the health plan. Like what level of connection does this group have to have between its members in order to show that they're part of a single group of association. So it all fluctuates, but we do, we have a membership committee who is handling that for us, and that we'll have something in the next, hopefully the next month or so that will, um, have some information on what different membership tiers will look like and what those dues will be and, and what the, what will be offered for those people who have different tiers. Anne: Fantastic. Now, as I look at the front page of your website, you have some lofty goals, which I really love, not only the health insurance that you just spoke about, but also you mentioned earlier financial assistance through scholarships and emergency funds. And I think that that's a really wonderful thing because prior to having this group put together, they were kind of all over the place. And I know at one point long ago, I offered scholarships through VO Peeps. And so since then there have been other groups that have offered scholarships. And of course there's the Brad Venable fund, which is amazing. Talk to us a little bit about what your plans are for that. I love having it in the central place. Tim: Yeah. You know, as I said, kind of some part of this started with us based on this financial aid that we were offering to some of our members in there and the kind of the foundation, what got the NAVA started in the early part of the year was we received a donation from Bev Standing and Rob Siglimpaglia after Bev's TikTok lawsuit was settled last year. They donated their GoFundMe money they had raised to the Brad Venable scholarship into that fund. And that became the foundation of what started NAVA. That allowed us to pay for the lawyers, pay for all of the incorporation, pay for the things that we needed. And also allowed us to put a decent amount of money aside into a basis for a fund which provided three full scholarships to VO Atlanta for three voice actors, which covered tickets, covered airfare, covered lodging, covered food for the entire duration of the time they were there. So we were able to cover all the expenses out of that fund. We also have been able to use that fund going forward to help some people, a little bit of money here and there. It's currently not public because we are still setting it up, and we have to wait until all of our final paperwork gets through for us to officially be fully sanctioned to do the things we wanna do. So currently it's on hold, but we will be able to take donations which will be tax deductible donations. So voice actors can donate to the group. We have a lot of people who over the years have just donated here and there. Somebody books a good job, and they turn around and donate a little bit of money to the fund just to help have our group. I think we've probably done $40 or $50,000 in the last 18 months to two years out of our group. Carin has done, you know, something similar along those lines. Carin: Yeah. Same, same number from my groups. Tim: Yeah. And a lot of voice actors, we all know, you know, $200 here and there sometimes is the difference between us getting through the weekend and not getting through the weekend or a client is late on paying or something doesn't come through. Or we do a lot of ACH. You know, we do direct bank transfer and your deposit gets made, but it's not gonna hit until Friday because it's a holiday. So sometimes just that $200 gets somebody through the weekend, gets somebody through the next 24 hours or the 48 hours until something come through, which we all know is small business owners. And as cash flow is tough sometimes, it's, those are the little things that help. And we help a lot of people in that little way that we wanna continue doing. Anne: Fantastic. Now you also have education and inclusion. So speak about education, resources. That's gonna be on your website? You're gonna also thinking of hosting classes maybe, or workshops or NAVA meetings that, uh, you would provide that? Carin: Yeah, I think we'll probably do a Zoom every month or so for our members about various topics, but also we are kind of partnering with different resources around the voiceover community that provide educational materials. So like GVAA for example, um, is -- Tim: VO peeps Carin: And VO peeps. Yes. Anne: VO Peeps, VO BOSS. Yeah. Okay. Carin: Yes, yes. And VO BOSS. Great. Anne: Thank you. Carin: No, but the GVAA rate guide is definitely something that we are fans of. And so that is part of our website, and SAG AFTRA has a lot of educational resources that I think people don't -- when they go to the website, it's not like totally 100% clear exactly where it is. So we can have links to those on our website. So people can just find a central place where you can go, where if you have a question, you can look up that information on our site, information on converting work, other things like that. Tim: Yeah. And there are lots, there's so many great coaches out there that we can, we want to help support and advocate for those who we know are trustworthy, who we know are great to work with, different people. And also I think Carin I've worked with most everybody in, in the Los Angeles area. I know who are some great people to work with, who personalities -- one of the great things, you know, a great coach, a great coach. If they're the great coach for you, some people work better with other people. And we know these things would help, help guide somebody into a great mentorship with a great coach or a great group of people who are offering classes and things along those lines. So that's kind of where we're looking at and promote. Anne: And the VORG is coming back. Tim: The VORG, the voiceover resource guide. Anne: The VORG. Carin: It's the VORG. Anne: I'm on the VO. Yeah. Tim: Voiceover resource guide goes to print. It's 4:30 on a Friday afternoon, hopefully tomorrow. And we go to print tomorrow. We have to. Anne: Wow. Tim: We're going out. Anne: That's incredible. The VORG was all there was back and see, now I'm gonna date myself. But the VORG was all, there was back, I wanna say in the eight, was it the 80s? It's the -- Tim: Voiceover industry's oldest publication since 1988. And actually up until about four years ago was the only printed publication in the industry. Anne: Yeah. Absolutely. And when I saw that was coming back, I was so excited to see that. Also now an online version as well, so absolutely. Recommending the best of the best in LA and New York and fantastic stuff. So, get your copy of the VORG. You can pre-order, right? Pre-order the printed copy, which, hey, who doesn't love, who doesn't love a good book? Tim: My stack of voiceover resource guides right here. So. Anne: Yeah, I was gonna say, do you have, I don't have one. I don't have one with me, but I do have one. So fantastic. Awesome. Talk a little bit about -- I know you mentioned this in your, in your meeting the other day, inclusion and diversity and how you support that. Carin: Yeah. So we are also partnering with kind of the people in the industry who have formed groups that are really interested in, in representative casting and authentic casting. And so Queer Vox and the PGM list are two groups that we are partnered with. Maria Pendolino is also starting a new group for disabled voice actors, which we will hopefully be able to be a part of. It's just about supporting all of our colleagues and supporting the voiceover industry and moving toward this authenticity and representation that I think we all are -- it's about time and Anne: Absolutely, absolutely. Carin: -- excited about. Yeah. So that's something that NAVA is supportive of. Anne: Oh, fantastic. Tim: And hopefully to be able to take that next step and be able to then educate and work with casting directors and productions on what this means to cast authentically earlier in the process, so it's not a, not an afterthought or something that's happening. Either when it's too late or when it becomes too difficult to find what's needed authentically. Anne: Well, congratulations guys. I mean, what a beautiful, wonderful initiative and resource for the community. Thank you so much on behalf of the BOSSes out there and everybody in the community for putting in the work. I know, again, I date myself, and I know how much work you're putting in, especially I had my own 501(c)(3) back in the day. So yeah. Good luck with that. And really thank you so much for everything that you're doing for the community. Tim: Oh, well, thank you. Carin: Thank you. Thank you so much for having us today. It's great to get the word out. And the VO BOSS is fantastic, and thank you for all the work you're doing -- Anne: Well, thank you. Carin: -- with all of your podcasts and information and all of that. It's just fantastic. So thanks for having us. Anne: Well, thank you. So that website, BOSSes, is navavoices.org. Any other links I need to be shooting out to people? Tim: That's our main link. Yep. Carin: The census is on the front page of the website. So if you wanna take the census, go there, click, and you're in. Tim: That's it. Carin: To the census. Anne: Awesome. Yes. All right. BOSSes. Sign the healthcare census and become a member now. All right, well, thanks again, guys. I'd like to give a great big shout out to our sponsor, 100 Voices Who Care. You guys can have an opportunity to have your voice make a difference. You can find out more at 100voiceswhocare.org. And of course, to our sponsor, ipDTL. You too can connect like a BOSS and find out more at ipdtl.com. You guys, have an amazing week. Thanks so much for joining us this week, and we'll see you next week. Bye. Tim: Bye-bye. Carin: Bye. >> 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.com 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.

We all get a lot of spam messages, but how many of us are sending cold emails that could be perceived as spam? This week, Anne & Erikka are here to help you clean the spam from your inbox. Using discernment is key, but checking for legitimate business websites, email domains, and avoiding sketchy links is a great start. As for sending spam, any #VOBOSS knows that their website, email signature, and patiently awaiting a response will help, but keep listening for the whole conversation! Transcript >> It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere 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. Anne: Hey everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS podcast. I'm your host Anne Ganguzza, and today I am excited to bring back my very special favorite co-host Erikka J. Woohoo! Erikka: I'm sure you say that to all the co-hosts, Anne. Anne: Hey. Hey. Erikka: Well, we are matching today with our headphones though. Anne: So, oh my gosh. That's pretty awesome. Erikka: Yes. Yeah. Anne: Wow. Wow. We're doing a little experiment, BOSSes, that not only are we recording audio, but we are recording video this week, and that was quite an event because I had to put some lipstick on. Erikka: Just gloss for me was the best I could do. Anne: And try to look good for the camera, but you know, we'll give it a shot. So Erikka, it's been a crazy week. It's been, goodness, what's been going on with you? Erikka: Man. Yesterday. Actually I posted that I got this really crazy spam email and um... Anne: Uh-oh. Erikka: Well, well, okay. I'll take it back even further. It went -- on a good note -- Anne: Crazy spam. Erikka: Oh goodness. All spam is crazy, right? But this one was, was probably the worst I've gotten. I had just gotten featured in this magazine called Voyage ATL and posted the article. Anne: Oh yes. Erikka: It's like really cool. And with that comes SEO juice, and there's good juice and bad juice. And it looks like this juice kind of fed some bad. I got a form submission actually from my, my site, which is based on Squarespace. And so I'm saying, okay, when, if somebody's wanna hire me, I click it. And it says it's from the Spit in Her Butt Show. Anne: oh my gosh. The Spit in Your Butt. All right. Erikka: Her. So particularly women. Anne: Oh, Spit in Her Butt. Oh! Erikka: The Spit in Her Butt Show. And they said that they found me on Voyage. Like they actually told me that that was how they found me. Anne: Wow. Erikka: And I was like, oh, ok. Anne: So that was not a job proposal. Erikka: I don't know, but I, I would decline whatever it is. Anne: Yeah, I think I'd decline. Erikka: And then they left a link, and it was like -- Anne: Oh my. Erikka: -- it's a valid show though. That's what's nuts. I didn't click the link because you know. Anne: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That looks suspicious. Erikka: But Googled a little and apparently this guy does and I was like, ew, you know, but spam. Yeah. Anne: Spam is, spam is ugh. Spam is annoying. That is for sure. And I think, you know what? That kind of is a great segue into what I think would be a great topic to talk about. 'Cause I get questions all the time about emails and email marketing. So we should talk about email marketing today. And spam is a concern. I think, let me just open up by saying there's a lot of people which will go and kind of mine the internet for production companies and email addresses to where maybe they should send their demos to and try to get on their rosters. And while that's absolutely a method to do that, the risk that you take with that is that you are probably going to be cold emailing someone. And I think that there's some considerations that you need to think about before you do that. Spam is most certainly one of them, and spam is in the broadest sense is receiving an email that you did not give permission or request. And so as business owners and trying to sell a service, we have to be very careful when we email people that we have their permission. I mean, that is the ultimate way that you need to be doing your marketing is to having permission to send to these people. But what do you do when you don't know these people? Right? Erikka: Yeah, yeah. Anne: How do you make an introduction? How do you do it without being considered spam? Because I know when I get spam, as you just mentioned, like the last thing I wanna do is contact these people ever again. 'Cause I'm annoyed, number one, how did you get my email address? How did you find me? At least the person told you how found you. Erikka: True. True. Anne: But a lot of times, yeah, a lot of times I'll just get an email in my inbox and it'll be like, hey, I can help your SEO or I can do your website or whatever that might be. And the interesting thing is that they never seem to be from a valid company. It's just like kind of an indescript email address and no signature file. And I don't know, what are some things that you look out for when you're getting emails to see if they're spam or not? Erikka: Oh man. It's the common stuff. Anne: Warning signs. Erikka: Yeah. The misspellings. Honestly, sometimes the all caps. Anne: Yeah. Erikka: Because humans just don't really write that way. Particularly like if it's coming to me in another language that I only speak English, I only have English everywhere on any presence on the web, maybe a little Spanish every once in a while, but yeah, nothing -- Anne: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Erikka: Yeah, definitely stuff like that. I don't know. Just the context. I'll I'll look at it. I definitely don't click any links, but I'll read it. But yeah, the misspellings and all that kind of stuff, usually it's in the text, you can tell. Anne: I think for me, the first thing I see is, is there a signature file, and is it coming from a proper domain? Erikka: Yeah. Yeah. Anne: Right? Erikka: There you go. Anne: If it comes from like a Yahoo address or a, even a Gmail address these days, and I know there have been talks with people about, well, it's okay to just have a Gmail address for your business. And I'm like, I, I kind of have a disagreement with that because I feel like if you want to exude professionalism that at least have a domain name that is your business. And that domain name can be your name. But I feel like if it comes from Gmail, you didn't take the time to like really set up your business in a professional way. That's me. But I've had so many people say otherwise that, oh no, it's perfectly fine now to get an email address from Gmail or Yahoo. But if you're gonna do that, and then have a signature file that links back to a webpage maybe of yours, of your own domain. Right? I still feel like, again, if you wanna be, show professionalism, you should have a domain name. AnneGanguzza.com. That's me. Erikka J, right? Or even Anne Ganguzza Voice or whatever that is, it goes back to a domain that hosts a website that tells people about you. Erikka: Yeah. You've gotta establish that trust. Right? And I mean, it's so inexpensive. Like I said, I personally use Google domains. It's $12 a year, a dollar a month. I mean, why wouldn't you, you know, just to have that domain? And then setting up an email, I think it's like an additional six or something. Yeah. The Gmail or the Yahoo is definitely one. Another one to look for, particularly with spam is that they'll try to use like a known brand name, but it'll have like an extra dot or something in there. And you have to watch that 'cause you might see like Bank of America, but it's got like Bank of - America. And like that's not Bank of America, like watch that type of spam too. Anne: Right? Erikka: Yeah. Get your own domain name. It's, it's so easy. Anne: Yeah. And I think that will really do a lot. It'll do wonders for having people respond to that email, which is what we want. We don't want people to take a look at our email and get angry at us and then say, oh my gosh, I'm so annoyed that they just emailed me that and trying to sell me something that I don't ever wanna contact them again. Because that's what I do silently. I'll be like, oh I'm so. And if, especially if they send it more than once, right? If it comes like a day or two or again and again, and I can tell in Gmail 'cause it threads. Erikka: Yep. Anne: And I'll be like, all right, that's it. That's like the fifth time you sent me email and I, then I might write back. But as a business, if we're sending out emails to people who have not given us permission and guys, I say it over and over again, when you are mining the internet or you are finding production houses, and you are sending emails to the contact there, they have not typically said it's okay to send them emails. So you have to be very, very careful about what you say in that email that you're not gonna get them upset or annoyed that you are just reaching out to contact them because 200 other voice talent have found their name as well. And all they do is field off these, "hey, I'm a voice talent. Here's my demo." So I think it's important. Erikka: Yeah. The trick that I hate that people will do, and I see this probably more with like spam, legit, spam and bots. But like they try the re and the subject line to make it look like they were replying when you know, you never sent anything to them. It's like, stop trying to trick me. I know I didn't email you . Anne: Yeah. Yeah. And you know, it's interesting. What made me think you were talking about using a known brand or trying to kind of spin off of a brand -- I actually got like an invoice in PayPal, which was an invoice that I certainly did not -- I didn't buy anything from this person, but it came so legit with the PayPal logo 'cause it came through PayPal, but it was spam coming through PayPal in the form of an invoice where once they had the invoice, if you open the invoice, right, then they had links to probably, I don't even know 'cause I didn't click them. So people try anything to to, to contact or maybe it was phishing. Whatever it is, I think that again, as voice talent, we have to be very, very careful. There are laws. There's the Spam Can Act of 2013. There is the GDPR. There is the California Privacy Act. There are so many laws and, and regulations set in place that theoretically, if you do not put your address on the bottom of your email, and you do not offer an unsubscribe, that is considered spam. So even if you're sending an individual email out through Gmail, if it's unsolicited, if you don't have your address or a way to unsubscribe, that is considered spam and somebody could potentially legally take that up with you. Erikka: Yeah. Yeah. Things to watch out for. Anne: So, then what do we do? Right? What do we do? How do we market with email? That's the question of the day. VO BOSS has a direct marketing program. And the one thing that makes it different is that we have a list, but it was not a list that was something that we mined off of the internet. This is a list that was purchased. And with lists that you purchase, of course you have to be careful with that too, because you don't know how many times that list has been sold. Let's say, oh, it's a list of e-learning companies. And we sold it to 2000 voice talent already. And so you don't wanna have a list that you don't know how many times it's been used. You don't know how old it is. We don't know if there's current addresses on it. The list that I have purchased is a large list that has been in business for many, many years. They continually update addresses, and it's 90,000 plus creatives and companies that have in-house media production divisions, copywriters, creative directors, owners of companies. So this list that we have purchased, they have agreed to allow VO BOSS to market to them. And that is, I think, the number one advantage, if you want to do a direct marketing this way. You can also buy a list that has permissions built into it. This list costs a few thousand dollars, but it's one of the reasons why I started the VO BOSS blast because I was like, wow, I'm gonna buy this list. It's pretty expensive. So I can offer, uh, this 90,000 people, I can offer marketing to this list, and it's already what I call vetted. It's a vetted list. And so these people are okay with anybody from VO BOSS, sending them a marketing email. So essentially the product basically gives you a VO BOSS address. So Erikka, you would be like ErikkaJ@VOBOSS.com. So therefore it gets sent out to these companies who have already given permission. They're already expecting to hear from us, but the reply to is set to your individual email business address. So therefore when somebody wants to hire you or ask you for an audition, they basically will just reply or send an email to you. And it also has links in the email that go to your website, that go to your demos. We usually feature a project or something new that you've done. And that's essentially the concept around a direct marketing method that uses a list where people have already given permission. And that's like half the battle. Really. Erikka: Yeah. For sure. And I mean, if you're not gonna spend, you know, the thousands of dollars, obviously there's the grassroots, the organic route, right, is where you are talking to people or you have it on your website where they can actually subscribe. So they're making the choice to subscribe to your list and giving permission that way. And if you have those sort of tools built in, they obviously would have an unsubscribe option. So yeah, permission is, is the key for sure. Anne: I'm so glad that you brought that up 'cause people will say, how do I get permission? And that is, I think one of the leading ways to get permission is to have one of those pop-up windows. I have 'em on every one of my websites. And any platform has a way to do that. If you have a WordPress website, there are plugins. I used to use the plugin called Bloom. And that was the one that allowed a popup to appear once somebody was on your website and says, "hey, subscribe to my email list to get special offers or whatnot. If you wanna keep up with what's going on, sign up here." And I wanna say that that is a very valid way to get a permission based list of people that you can market to. And it's very valid. I mean, I've been doing it for years on all of my domains, on Anne Ganguzza, on VO Peeps, on VO BOSS. So anytime you see that pop-up and you say, yeah, let me sign up and keep up with what's happening with your business, that person has given you permission to email them. Erikka: Yeah, absolutely. Anne: And so there are ways to create your list. It takes a long time, I'm gonna say because not everybody that comes to your website's gonna really wanna keep up with you. I mean, a lot of us have email. I have, we've discussed my email before. Erikka: Yeah. You beat me, but mine's pretty bad too. Anne: Uh, yeah. I got a lot of unread messages and a lot of, yeah, I get a lot of email, so. But it's one of the ways, interestingly enough, Erikka people may laugh at how much email I get. But a lot of the ways that I learned how to market through email was by signing up for companies' lists. Erikka: Yes. Copy. Steal like an artist. Anne: Exactly. It's like my secret weapon. People are like, well, how'd you get so good at marketing? Oh my gosh, I sign up for company email lists. And then I, I observe and I say, okay, what kind of information are they sending out? Not only do I observe how to market myself, but I observe how I might be able to help that company 'cause I can see how they're marketing to their clients. And therefore it's like a double cool thing because, number one, I'm learning how to market, number two, I'm learning about this company and what their needs are. So then how can I serve those needs? So I can just bring it back to them and just say, hey, I really love what you're doing with this product, blah blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever it might be. Just wanted to reach out and say, hey. And even if you don't even say like I do voiceovers, it could just be like, hey, I signed up your mailing list. I love your product. I think it's super interesting. Just wanted to say thanks for the inspiration. And boom, you're done. Don't even mention that you're a voice artist, but in your signature file, guess what? Erikka: There you go, there you go. Anne: You're a voice artist. So you start to develop that relationship first. Erikka, like how do you find new leads and contacts? Erikka: You know, I am not one to do much of the email or direct marketing. It's just, this is not my jam at least not at the moment. It's sort of on my long range roadmap to probably outsource that moreso, the lead generation part. But I will say that when I was moreso doing music and I'm probably gonna date myself here, but I was using MailChimp So they still run, but I did it the grassroots way. So it was like people that I knew were already engaged with my brand, people that I knew were already buying from me, I started with that. And then I would just say, "hey, you know, I've got this thing, I have this newsletter that I'm starting. Do you wanna stay up to date?" And most of them said, yeah, sure. And then I just had them click, and it automated, and I built this database of about 500 people. So when I had a new release or I had a new piece of merch coming out, you know, I sent the one, and it went out to everybody, so I kind of did that. But yeah, as far as lead generation, now I'm more so -- I like the passive stuff. So I love the SEO. I use P-to-P's. I have my agents and my managers, but I really, really kind of leverage the SEO so that I have more walking into my website passively because I don't really love to email market. I do have a couple where it's like brands that I'm super engaged with. Just like you said, I'm like, I love this product. I love what you guys are doing. If I can ever help in any way, please let me know, and I just send it, and I have all my information in my signature. So I'm not really selling. It's just there for them. If they wanna see it. Anne: Well, exactly. Erikka: Yeah. Anne: Exactly. You're expressing an interest in them, and you're not trying to take anything back. Erikka: Yep. Yep. Anne: You're not trying to push yourself on them. And I think that that's really wonderful, and I do believe that email marketing, it is just one way. Obviously we always wanna know how to get work. And we have a whole episode that we did on SEO, which I love because that is also one of my favorite methods of getting work is just having people find me and then listening to the demos. And if they're strategic, target marketed demos, which is what I'm all about, they listen to it, they love what they hear. They then contact you and say, "hey, how much would it cost to do this?" So I love that. But I also think a combination of that along with your talent agents, along with maybe pay to plays, along with direct marketing through a list, can really provide you with the opportunities to really get out there and get work so that you can make it a successful endeavor, this career, as voiceover, because that's gotta be the number one question, right? How do I get work? How do I get work? And how do I email mark? it's something that people are, they're kind of terrified if they've never done it before. And the first thing you have to be aware of is when you go and mine the internet for those addresses is that you've gotta be careful of talking to people when they haven't given you permission. It's also like when somebody calls you up, how many -- like I actually have a phone at my home that is not my cell phone. And we get spam calls every single day. And so you don't wanna be like that. when you're sending out email, but if you can send out email marketing, the cool thing is, is to send it out to people who've already given you their permission to do that. And the other cool thing is if you do hire or outsource, let's say, do a BOSS Blast, what happens is we kind of represent you without being an agent. So we're like on behalf of VO BOSS, check out millennial voiceover talent, or check out Erikka J. She's got the smooth promo sounds of whatever it is that you, whatever genre that you want to talk about in your promo or in your email marketing, we can focus on that. And it's on behalf of another brand that is trusted, that has already been given permission. And so that's even cooler because it's not like I, I, I, I, I, here's what I've done. It's about VO BOSS presenting you as the talent that is established, that is credible. And that's the other thing too, is that VO BOSS doesn't do this marketing for everybody. I mean, we vet the people that we market for. And we have to make sure that you have a well-established brand, that you've got good demos that we can market and things that we can do. Because if I get labeled as a spammer, VO BOSS gets labeled as a spammer, guess what? My entire BOSS Blast business is out of business. So I have to be hyper aware of what's being sent out and coming back and make sure that it's not going to be considered spam. So you better believe that we've got many eyes looking at that email going out, making sure that it's good and that it's not spam. I'm gonna say, think about your own email and the emails that you get on a day to day basis. What do you consider spam? And then think about how you are marketing email wise to people. Erikka: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's what it's all about, talking about our balance theme is having a balanced approach to lead generation, whether that's P2Ps, agents, managers, email marketing, social media marketing, because that works too, using hashtags, or like you said, not, I, I, I; you know, talking about a recent job that you did, how you were happy to help this brand or this company, or promote this new product. All those sorts of things help you with lead generations. So having a balanced approach to that is super important. Anne: Yeah. Wow. Erikka: Wow. Yeah. Anne: Good discussion. Erikka: One more thing about email marketing I kind of wanted to touch on real quick. We, we kind of started to was the signature. I think it's important that you make sure that you have a good signature. You know, there are tons of tools out there for you to go build it. It doesn't necessarily have to be super fancy, but if you can get it branded, that's great. And there are tools that can help you do that, but you know, make it easy for them to find you and to find your work, to know what you do. If you choose to put a picture, but at minimum, at least like your website and some way to contact you maybe outside of that email. But yeah, I think that's important because if you are sending an email to market, that might be your only shot to make an impression. Anne: Yeah. Yeah, I agree. And actually I think that, remember, it was the first thing that I look at when somebody sends me an email, do they have a signature file? Is it coming from a valid domain, a valid company? Does it look legit? And so I think your signature is super important. And by the way, I use Wise Signature. I think I spend $39 a year. And it allows you to put all sorts of really cool, like your social media icons, you can put links to your demos, and it makes it look really nice too. I love a nice, a nice signature. Erikka: Yeah. I've used them. I use Signature IO, same type deal where I can put graphics and colors and all that stuff so that it's branded. So yeah, like you said, it does establish trust, but I kind of wanted to touch on like the aesthetics of it alone, just being eye-catching and being like, oh, makes me wanna go click and look at it. Anne: Absolutely, absolutely, great suggestion. All right. Well, hey, I know we can talk about email all day long but I think this was a great start. I'd like to give a great big shout-out to our sponsor, 100 Voices Who Care. You guys can have an opportunity to have your voice make a difference. You can find out more at 100voiceswhocare.org. And of course, to our sponsor, ipDTL. You too can connect and network like a BOSS and find out more at ipdtl.com. You guys, have an amazing week. Thanks so much for joining us this week, and we'll see you next week. Erikka: Bye! Anne: Bye! >> 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.com 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.