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Panel: Business Management
Tommy Griffiths: Hi, and welcome to the voices.com Voices of the Industry panel. Today we’re talking about Business Management, and I’m your moderator Tommy Griffiths. This is all part of an initiative to contribute market insights and an open discussion with the public on how easy or difficult it might be to ramp up a voice-over business. You’ll hear various perspectives from many professionals in the industry, people you’ve heard of, people you may not have heard of but they all have unique insights and they all are definitely professionals and know their stuff.
For this panel our topic of discussion will be How to Best Manage a Voice Over Business, discussed by five successful business owners. We’ll talk about how to generate business, customer service philosophies, marketing tips, tech and studio advice and just about everything that goes into starting up a voice over businesses. There’s a lot to it so let’s get to right it now.
The intention, of course, is to share as much as we can in this one hour.
Again, I’m Tommy Griffiths. I am your moderator. I’ve been a voice over artist for … since 1981. Since I was 17 years old I started, and been in it ever since. Every pay cheque I’ve ever brought in my entire life was from doing voice over. I’m still in that, I’m still coaching, producing demos. I’m also a voice tracker for various radio stations across the country here in the Washington, DC area, and also home recording home studio consultant. Home studio consultant. I’m partnering with AMS, American Musical Supply. I’ll tell you a little bit about that later.
But let’s get into talking to our panel and meeting our guests.
Debi Derryberry.
Debi Derryberry: Hi.
Tommy Griffiths: I know a lot of people have heard Debbi’s voice. Debbi, let’s see if p-people can figure it out. Go ahead and just tell us a little bit about yourself and we’ll see if our listeners and viewers can tell who you are. You can tell by the – there’s a hint in the background. There’s a poster.
Debi Derryberry: Well, first I’m going to come in on my hovercraft and talk to my dog, Goddard.
Tommy Griffiths: Debi is a voice talent coach and author, and tell us more about the work you’ve done including Jimmy Neutron.
Debi Derryberry: I’ve been in voice over for the last 30 years, and I’ve always been an actress but most of my work has been in the voice over field and mostly talking like a baby, a kid, a dog, a cat, and I don’t know how I got into coaching, but it sort of happened, and now I coach all the time and I help people with their demos, commercial and animation, and I’m in Los Angeles so I’m running all over to studios all the time. I live right where the studios are. And I just finished my first book, Voice Over 101: How to Succeed as a Voice Actor.
And that’s me. I’ve been on – I’m on F is for Family, the new Netflix show with Bill Burr and Laura Dern, I am the voice of the first G-rated game that comes with Oculus Rift, like Mario came with whatever platform that was on. Lucky’s Tale is the one that comes with the new virtual reality Oculus Rift game so I’m lucky. Another one of those jobs where I never say a word, I just jump and play like a kid. I’ve looped hundreds of movies, including Toy Story and Monsters Inc., Racquet Ralph, and those are what I do.
Tommy Griffiths: You know your stuff for sure.
Debi Derryberry: Yeah.
Tommy Griffiths: Well, we’ll talk more with Debi.
Bryant Falk, welcome Bryant, he’s owner and producer at Abacus Entertainment. Tell us a little bit about your background, Bryant.
Bryant Falk: Hello everybody. This is Bryant. How are you? I’m a little different, I guess, than the usual gang we’ve got here. I’m coming in from a marketing business perspective. I’ve owned a recording studio in Manhattan since, gosh, 1992. And sold my first studio to Madacy Entertainment, which they then got bought by SFX Entertainment, and have been doing voice over recording and production work, both on the corporate side and commercial side since day one.
I got into the business as a lead singer in a band, because I was so disappointed in the engineers at the studios. I was, like, oh my gosh, I’ve got to do better than this. So that’s how it kind of started. That’s kind of how it rolled up. And then I’ve been here ever since. I’m right in 45th Street, 9th Avenue, Manhattan, you know, Hell’s Kitchen. I love it.
Tommy Griffiths: Executive. We look forward to talking to you, Bryant.
Mindy Williamson: Hi.
Tommy Griffiths: – a voice talent teacher. Mindy, welcome and thanks for being part of the panel here. Tell us a little bit about yourself as a voice talent and teacher.
Mindy Williamson: As a – I’m also a little bit different in that I started out as a radio announcer and a reporter, and I’ve been doing voice over for about 20 years, but as a business only for about two years now. On – and I love it. I started it because it was a great supplementation to my teaching. I teach announcing and broadcast journalism, news casting, a voice development course at Fanshawe, here in London, Ontario, Canada. And it just fit well. And I like to travel, so doing this sort of allows me to be a little bit more portable. So it’s a great life.
Tommy Griffiths: Excellent. The portable Mindy Williamson.
Jordan Wiberg has been a voice artist for over six years now, also in Canada, near Vancouver, is that right, Jordan?
Jordan Wiberg: That’s right, yeah.
Tommy Griffiths: Tell us a little bit about your background.
Jordan Wiberg: Well, my background, my education is in studio engineering, so I got to hang out on a daily basis for about four years with some world class voice over artists and when I went freelance as an engineer I kind of fell into doing voice over stuff and I’ve really been enjoying it for the past six years. And I also do demos and I still do a little bit of post-production work and – yeah, I’m just about four and a half hours east of Vancouver up here in Canada.
Tommy Griffiths: Beautiful area.
Jordan Wiberg: Yeah.
Tommy Griffiths: And last but not lease, Kim Handysides, also a voice talent and coach. Kim, you started in theatre and then it just sort of took over from there into the voice over world. Tell us about that.
Kim Handysides: From the time I was about 11 years old I wanted to be a Shakespearian actress, and then I found out how much they make and I decided I’d go into radio or television instead. But I kept the theatre training and worked for some pretty – cable and national and had a lot of fun as a DJ, a club DJ actually. But what I really kept coming back to through film, through theatre, through television was voice. I just loved the … the purity, really, of acting with your voice. And I still do a whole bunch of other things, I just most recently started doing stand-up comedy. Which is a lot of –
Tommy Griffiths: Awesome.
Kim Handysides: Yeah, but … for the last 30 years it’s been primarily voice and I have started coaching, and I’m really, really pleased to about a year and a half ago have put in my own home studio and started recording and working remotely, and I just love it. It’s just opened the whole world up and – yeah. Having fun.
Tommy Griffiths: Executive. One more thing I can tell you about each member of the panel, none of us are wearing pants, so if you look – from the waist up, that’s all you’re going to see.
So let’s begin, we’ve welcomed everybody. The way this will work is I’m just going to ask questions, very simply, to kick off the conversation, and we will move through the conversation together. Speak up if you’d like to say something. I’ll call you by name specifically.
And if you’re sharing or commenting online feel free to use the hashtag: #voicesoftheindustry. And make any comment you like. Are we ready? Let’s get started.
Let’s do this very quickly. One by one and we sort of just did this now, but in just a few words – and we can start with, we’ll start with Debi and work our way through – tell us how you got into the business.
Debi Derryberry: I started as a jingle singer in Nashville after not going to med school and ended up getting hired to talk like a baby, and move back to Los Angeles and signed with a voice agent, always having been an on-camera and theatre actor. And then, that was, you know, 30 years ago and I’ve been doing voice over ever since, starting in animation, but I do do commercial and some on-camera as well. It’s an amazing business. I’m fortunate.
Tommy Griffiths: And Bryant Falk, you started to tell us a little bit about your musical career. You started with a band, and then went off into voice over.
Bryant Falk: Yeah, well the way it all starts is, well I had finished by bachelor’s at Hofstra. And – bachelor’s in business and marketing. Had a band right after that and used to play in the whole tristate area. Went from there into – because of the recording, when it’s a studio recording – partnered with someone at the studio and then from there it just kept moving. The nice thing I love about a studio is there’s so many different things that can happen here. So I’ve got voice over recording for commercials, or voice over recording for animation work and ADR comes in for film projects, and I think that’s one of the funnest parts of this business is you get something different every – almost every day, every week. I mean, even now I’m working on a newsreel for someone, and it’s just so refreshing that way.
I’ve been in other more tedious kind of jobs and it can be a little repetitive so I really enjoy – definitely enjoy the studio world.
Tommy Griffiths: I don’t think people realize how many different types of voice over formats there are. We think, typically, of TV and radio, of course. Cartoons.
Bryant Falk: That’s funny because –
Tommy Griffiths: But people don’t think of things like museum exhibits and –
Bryant Falk: Exactly.
Tommy Griffiths: – other things that are out there.
Bryant Falk: Exactly. Yeah, there’s so much. I mean I even did a project for Walmart, and it was a non-broadcast. They had just gone organic on all their cotton, and they wanted in-store promotion for all their organic materials. None of it was broadcast, it just stayed within the Walmart chain. And people don’t think that way.
One of the big things I push with my students, because I do teach voice over as well, in the business side is really opening your mind to all the different possibilities of voice over and where it sits, because it really sits everywhere, if you really look just a little closer.
Tommy Griffiths: Exactly. And Jordan Wiberg, before you got into voice over you were a studio engineer. What was the tipping point for you that pushed you into voice over fulltime?
Jordan Wiberg: The tipping point for me was the four years I was recording all these voice talents I thought, you know what? I think I could probably do all right at this. And so I was able to pick up on, you know, how they would read a certain script, if it’s dramatic or if it’s natural, if it’s conational, if it’s promo, all that kind of stuff.
So when I went freelance as an engineer I was mixing in sound, designing some commercials for West Jet airlines up here in Canada, and we had to find a new voice talent, so I was going to call a few people that I knew and someone at West Jet just said, well why don’t you voice them while you’re mixing and sound designing them? And, you know, knowing what voice talents make compared to what studio engineers make, I thought this is a pretty good opportunity. So I jumped at the chance, and I replaced the old VO in the three past commercials with my own voice, and West Jet kind of hummed and hawed about it for about a month and they decided to make me their brand voice. So I thought, if West Jet’s willing to make me their brand voice, a big company up here in Canada, maybe a few other people would.
So after that I joined voices.com and have been building my own little studios wherever I’ve been living in my house so I can work remotely and yeah. That’s kind of where I’m at now.
Tommy Griffiths: Very good. And Kim Handysides, going from Shakespeare to voice over, I’m sure you probably didn’t find a whole lot of Shakespearian things to do in voice over and commercial work especially. But what was the first job that you got that made you think, this is what I’m doing?
Kim Handysides: It was actually – when I was working in radio and TV we did, you know, for liner notes we did – part of the job of being a DJ at the local radio station, and I was in a major market in Montreal, was reading the commercials. And I just loved it. I just loved it. And I got my first gig, I think it was a yoghurt commercial. Yeah, it was a yoghurt commercial. And I went outside of the radio station, I was at a studio, and I just – the thrill of being able to nail something and feel good and – you know, I’ve always thought of when we do – like people kind of go, oh, a retail commercial. No, it’s not. You’re doing something wonderful for someone. You’re introducing them to something that will become a part of their life. So there’s a – there’s an importance to it.
Different from Shakespeare, but there’s an importance to it too.
Tommy Griffiths: Absolutely.
Our focus today, again, is voice over as a business. And we all do this as our business, as our main source of income. But I would imagine that most of us that actually do the voice over work probably don’t spend the majority of our time in front of the microphone. There’s a lot of other stuff that goes into this, including marketing, customer service, being an accountant, being an engineer. All of those things are involved in making this one entity as a voice over business.
Debi, what do you find that you’re doing most of the time in your business. Are you in front of the – I know you do a lot of work, are you in front of the microphone most of the time, or are you talking with agents? What occupies your day?
Debi Derryberry: Well I try to get my auditions out of the way as soon as they come in because they weigh heavy on my shoulders. And I get voice artists in Los Angeles, and actually all over the United States calling me and emailing me all day because they want to work with me to set up their either animation or commercial demos. And so I will spend time scheduling, you know, when I’m booked at Disney or Netflix or I’m home here, Skyping with a student or – and then because, you know, as the voice over business, you all know, it books immediately. And so people who have auditions will call me and I’ll be like, yes, I can make an hour for you.
And so I’m here at my studio and they’re in front of the mic. When I schedule my night classes, I only take, like, five people and they fill up fairly quickly, but it’s three hours of very concentrated time with new people or established people. And from there I use those people that want to come back to me to create their demos. So my beginning classes are sort of these stepping stones for people to enter the business and they become clients and it just sort of snowballs from there.
So my day is spent scheduling, coaching, and that – like I said, I live in north Hollywood where all the animation studios are because I don’t like to spend a lot of time on the road, so I just – like I’ll leave here and it will take me five minutes to get to Disney to record a gig there. So my time I try not to spend on the road. But the iPhone helps a lot.
Tommy Griffiths: For sure.
Debi Derryberry: That’s pretty much my day and then I come home and I audition on my – in my home studio until it’s time to go to sleep.
Tommy Griffiths: And thank the lord for these things like Skype and Google Hangout and all that. Coaches especially. It’s a great way to reach out to – if you’re looking for a good coach, any of these people are executive. If you want to reach out, you don’t necessarily have to be in the same city or area. You can be across the world – I have a client in New Zealand, as a matter of fact that does this stuff. So don’t be shy to reach out to some of these folks.
Bryant, Bryant Falk, as your job description, owner, producer at Abacus Entertainment, what is the crux of your job. What is the thing that … the majority of your time.
Bryant Falk: To keep it in the frame of where we are in this discussion, I want to kind of address, when I’m dealing with new students and we make demos for people here, my studio basically has a full kind of training addendum to the studio. One of the reasons I did this is because I would make demos, VO demos for clients in the studio, and then they didn’t know what to do. They loved the business, they wanted to get into it. They had their demo and then they had no other knowledge. And so that was one of the reasons I actually have other coaches and stuff in this studio as well, to bring that kind of ability to learn more things than just the demo.
But for people who are watching, and I think their first question is, hey, my demo’s done. What do I do? What do I do? Because I get that a lot. The irony of being in business, being a business major and all this … got them advertising all my clients – awareness. Ironically, voice over talent has to accept the fact that in the beginning when their demo’s completed, nobody knows that they do voice over. Especially the newbies. And phase one, just like any product or service, is awareness. People have to become aware that that’s what you’re doing.
And the other thing I’ve – I’m kind of doing here a lot too is getting people’s mind set who want to do voice over to shift into that kind of thought as they move forward. So when they’re online talking to their friends, or they’re – I always use Thanksgiving as the best first newbie experience. You go to Thanksgiving, everyone always says, how are you doing? What are you doing? You say, you know what? I’ve been doing voice over lately. That’s the first step you have to take as a talent to move forward and put your brain interest he right place.
So we do a lot of that kind of stuff here too. I call it the on ramping. Getting people on ramp, onto the beginning of this kind of fun adventure. I tell everyone, you can’t do this if you think it’s work. Because everyone in it loves it. So you can’t beat somebody who loves this.
Tommy Griffiths: Absolutely.
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