Turning a Voice Over Hobby into a Voice Acting Career with Joe Zieja

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Hi there, and welcome to Vox Talk, your weekly review from the world of voice over. I'm your host, Stephanie Ciccarelli from Voices. Where can a career in voice over take you? Joining me today from his Burbank studio is author, voice actor, and consummate nerd, Joe Zieja, one of Voices' top talent. He's booked over 1,000 jobs on our platform, and during this conversation, you're going to learn how Joe got started, turned a hobby into a thriving business, and made the move from one coast to the other. Welcome to the podcast, Joe.

Joe Zieja:

Hey, thank you so much for having me. It's been a while.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

It has. It's been way too long.

Joe Zieja:

Agreed.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

And I'll tell you, oh my gosh, your story is one that I have loved, just like thinking of and talking to people about over the years, and today we're going to hear it on the show. So, very excited about that.

Joe Zieja:

Yeah, I'm very excited to tell it. It's a story that I actually don't believe most of the time, even if it's coming out of my mouth.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Yeah, because it's that good, so.

Joe Zieja:

It's just so strange.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Yeah. And it's wonderful. But Joe, I guess as we're here, I just want to ask you, how did you get started in voice over?

Joe Zieja:

So like most talent, I spent my adult life as a military intelligence officer in the United States Air Force and then got out and worked for the government. Pretty much basic career choice for all voice actors. But I had been on a reservist. I had left active duty and I was reservist, which means that sometimes you'll work weekends. And I was the only guy in the office on that particular Saturday morning and I was talking to a friend of mine who, I don't even remember how we got on the topic, but I was like, ‘man, I always wanted to try voice acting.’ I'm thinking more like, you know, cartoons, anime, whatever. I've always been a nerd and I play games and I thought it'd be cool to try it out. And he said, ‘well, I don't know about that stuff, but my company used to hire talent for their marketing videos from this website called voices.com. Why don't you check it out?’ So I went home that day and I had been a hobbyist musician for years. Music is like my first love. And so I had a basic idea. I didn't have a lot of great equipment. I had a basic idea of how to record something, cut it, edit it, and submit it to somebody and make it sound good, although I really didn't have any idea about like acoustic reflections or processing and it's just, you know, basic, basic stuff. And so I went on voices.com. I think I rolled out, you guys had different memberships at the time. I think I paid for like some kind of like trial membership and miraculously booked the first thing that I auditioned for, which again, like most talent was a cartoon panda speaking Arabic to children.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Of course.

Joe Zieja:

Of course. Again, very common first job. I had some Arabic experience from my professional military career as well as it's what I minored in college and it was very basic, you know, count to 10, but do it in a silly cartoon voice. I actually, because of stuff that's been going on in my life recently, I went back and listened to that. It's still on voices.com and what an audition that was. I could still hear my first audition. And so I got booked. I got hired. I don't even think there was a directed session and I got paid and I was like, ‘okay, can I do that again?’ And I just, I dove after it ravenously. Within the next eight months, I was out-earning my day job and had approached, but I was also working 16 hour days. So I approached my employer and said, ‘hey, you got two choices. I quit or I go part time. What do you want?’ I'm going part time and then about eight months later, quit it all. And then eight months later, that moved to LA to hunt the big gig so that's the short story, I guess.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Wow. And that is just amazing. You could even say miraculous. There's just so much going on that like, cause he said, oh, I booked my first audition. You know, it was a job that you were uniquely suited for, you know, having had the skills that you brought to the table and you just also just, you know, it became something that not only did you, you love doing this, and I know that storytelling is, is something that you absolutely love. But it was, it married the two kinds of worlds of your audio, music, voice, all of this kind of coming together. And that's just really, really cool. So obviously you walked us through kind of the timeline of how quickly this all happened because it was pretty quick. So when did you know that voice acting was going to be more than just something fun that you could do to make a little extra money?

Joe Zieja:

You know, I can't really place it. This is, I'm thinking back to like 2013 is when I started. It was, it was progressive and it really came about, became about numbers, right? Like I know how much I made at the government and it was then it was like, ‘okay, I'm now earning four figures a month. Oh wow. Now we're really kind of approaching five figures a month, which is more than I was making at my day job.’ And what really happened is I ended up getting, making friends with this man named J. Michael Collins who has become a great friend and a great colleague of mine for many, many years. And I remember like basically writing him, he makes fun of me still for it. Like I would write him or call him like twice a month and be like, ‘is this real? Like is this, is this a real, is this a real career? Like people actually do this?’ Cause I didn't even know it was a career before I started. ‘So you do this, right? Like you, this is all you do. You can just do this.’ And I'd be like, ‘okay, well this is what I'm making. This is how I'm auditioning.’ This is where, and he'd be like, ‘dude, you can quit your job, dude. You can quit your job.’ And basically it was, I hung on for like way longer than I needed to in order to, cause I had just had my first kid. I was supporting a family. I was the only breadwinner. I brought the only income into the family. So it was important to me to make sure that I was stable. So really it was all about like, ‘okay, I've had X amount of months consistently out earning my day job. I'm now burnt out.’ I was extremely stressed working two jobs. My primary employment was extremely stressful. And so it just, that once the decision became easy, then it was easy to make.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Yeah. You're like, goodbye 16 hour days.

Joe Zieja:

Later.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Yeah. I could totally see that. I don't even know how you would have ate and slept and been with your family.

Joe Zieja:

It was really hard. That like year was really tough.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Oh wow. So that's wild. Thank you for sharing. And you know, obviously, I think I'm just relating back to experience I had in high school and university, but as a musician and a vocalist, you're constantly trying to practice to do better, to spend so much time, you know, perfecting your art and whatever you're doing. And you have to wonder, well, did all that time I spent like, would I have done just as well if I had not stressed myself out so much or it was because I pushed myself so hard that I did get to where I was. And sometimes you don't quite know, but what all that could be. So you know, just bearing in mind, obviously you went through quite a lot to get to the point where you were ready to solely focus on the art. And you knew what was making you successful at that point, because you kept doing it. Like it kept going up. So what would you say makes for a successful voice actor?

Joe Zieja:

Oh, wow. So I mean, like there are so many different paths. I'm the only person I know in my circle of colleagues who did it the way I did kind of like started from nothing and then made sort of like a business career and then transitioned to LA and made an LA career and now kind of like merging the two juggling between them. So there's lots of different ways to do it. I think and one of the principles that I teach a lot, I call it the principle of exponential experience is the idea that you don't need to wait for permission to go do something like I didn't, I didn't, you know, get on voices.com and go, Oh, I don't have a demo. I don't have an agent. I've never done this before. I guess I'd better go to like 800 different classes and I got to find coaches and I'm not ready. I'm not ready. I'm not ready. Forget that. Just go ahead and do it. You're gaining experience exponentially because you're, when you try an audition, you're now going to bring the experience from that first audition to the second one. And then the third one is going to have the experience of the first two. And it's just, I mean, I made a linear curve. Let's not get into math here, but you know, your experience compiles and you bring that exponential experience to it. So my advice to most voice actors is don't wait. Don't wait for somebody else's permission. You are always going to be the best and most passionate advocate for your own career, not an agent, not a manager, not a casting website, not, you know, an email marketing guru, nobody except you. And you have to take the onus in your own hands.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

That is amazing. And there's a lot of people who are working on being assertive, probably who are listening and they're like, I don't know Joe, I don't know. But it's you, you're right. I think only you actually know when you are personally ready to be taking the step to put yourself out there to go and audition to have that confidence in your own abilities. So I know we covered this a little earlier, so obviously you were working two different jobs at the same time, very tiring, taxing and all that. So how was it exactly that you managed your time, energy and resources with one foot in the military and the other in voiceover?

Joe Zieja:

I think the, I mean, the real answer is I didn't, right? I approached burnout at breakneck speeds. I remember getting sick all the time. Like I was very stressed and also with like a new kid in the mix. I don't recommend necessarily doing it at the speed and intensity that I did it. But it forced me to become highly efficient. I mean, I brought some efficiency from my military days and like how I can be productive and how I can systematize things, which is what I had to do with voice acting. When I was doing pay to play websites like voices.com, I had to figure out a way to make that system fluid, repeatable, adaptable and as much hands off as I possibly could. So what I didn't want to do is spend, you know, dozens of minutes on a particular audition and then go back and then cut it and then submit it. I had to do like everything all at once. So batching and nesting and weaving a couple of like my productivity principles. Doing that allowed me to systematize the voice acting part of it, you know, to the point where I wasn't like strangling the creativity out of it. But the parts that didn't require creativity, you know, naming your files properly, submitting things, putting a cover letter in there or a template, getting those out of my brain as quickly as I could. It forced me to be hyper efficient.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Hyper efficient. Absolutely. And I think that's something that people learn as they are in business. They're like, how can I streamline this process or how can I find another way to make life easier? You know, like you'd want to not be, what is it they say, work smarter, not harder, find ways to do that.

Joe Zieja:

Exactly.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Yeah. So, um, and obviously you set some goals, like you're like, I've got to make so much money that I can walk away from being in my day job. But what were some of the other goals that you set for yourself at first?

Joe Zieja:

I think it really was more like, it really was like, I hate to say it was all about the money, but it was all about the money in the sense that like I needed mentally, physically, emotionally, I needed freedom from that day job. And that dangling carrot, that's the fastest I think I've ever run in my life. You know, it's just there, it was, it was there. Once I realized that it was graspable, I was off and nothing was going to distract me from it. But for larger, broader career goals, I knew, um, although the things that I were working on were mostly commercial corporate e-learning at that time, because I wasn't in Los Angeles or New York where, you know, back in 2013, like you had to be to do some of these things. Um, I really wanted to be a part of, of interactive, creative storytelling experiences. Huge video game nerd, not just like in the, um, you know, like Pac-Man sense where like I enjoy playing video games, I enjoyed the stories they tell and I enjoyed how unique that medium is and can be for not just telling us stories, but immersing us in them in a way that no other medium can. You cannot do it in a book. You cannot do it in a movie, um, the way you can in a video game. So being involved in more creative storytelling projects, that was kind of like the lofty goal. It was, it was on the horizon. There was other things I needed to do first. I wasn't going to focus on them, but, um, that was something I always kind of wanted to shoot for, for sure.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Yeah. And the storytelling, just to segue into our next question, but, um, you know, something that you've said before is that stories are the currency of human emotion. So you're just talking a bit about the stories. Um, what can you tell us about, about that thought that you have?

Joe Zieja:

Stories being the currency of human emotion, it's like, it's like all the relationships we have with other people, and this is going to sound cold. So bear with me. All the relationships that we have with people are transactional, right? And I don't mean that in like an economic sense. I mean that we give things to each other stories being the currency of that transaction. The best way to relate to someone is to try as best you can to put yourself in their point of view, which is ironic because there's only one thing that you can never really communicate to someone completely effectively, which is your point of view. No one else has it except you. It is extremely difficult to do that via educational materials. I can explain things to you. I can write them out. I can make bullet points. I can make PowerPoints, or we can sit back for 10 minutes and I can tell you a story and you're going to come out of that experience having gained something. You don't know what it is. It's an intangible. You can't make a test about it. You can't monetize or quantify it, but there's a quality that comes with exchanging these stories that enriches us in ways that affect us on a deep subconscious level. But that you really can't tell what they do, but you know what happens when you don't have them. And we see it all around us all the time and people who don't have the experience of stories who cannot relate to other people and those stories and the stories we tell or the stories we help tell through our art are that extremely important way that we establish those relationships and bind us all together as humanity. Not to get too philosophical here, but Joseph Campbell was a great mythologist, talked a lot about his idea of the monomyth, the idea that we're all just sort of telling one story, right? Stories that popped up in sub-Saharan Africa are the same stories, sort of in a really strange, phenomenal way that popped up in Inuit cultures in Northern Canada and stuff like that. And they talk about the same thing. Sometimes they even have the same characters. So these stories are extremely important to tell because every time we do, we're picking away at a little bit of the mystery that is what it means to be human.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

And it is kind of a mystery, isn't it, of being human and so on is stories I can't remember. Like obviously, there's the greatest story ever told. I think the Bible has the best track record for what is it? I think it's the most copies sold of any book ever over any time. But when you think about how many storylines there could possibly be, we study this in English class in high school, but man versus God, man versus self, man versus other— Yeah, exactly, there's only so many that you can actually tell, right? And so it's kind of like, yeah, that's why you feel like you've seen that movie before, right?

Joe Zieja:

Because you have.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Yeah, because you have. It's only kind of the new—old situations, new complications, that kind of thing from Broadway where you've got that song there. And I think that absolutely, we all have this intrinsic need to tell stories and to be told stories, to have that sense of, I understand, that's why a parable would be so effective or a fable or anything else like that that you come across. Just like it's really interesting that people, because we're human, all made exactly the same, just look a little different, some of us, right? That it's—we will have so many similarities and so many things that we share in common and it's another tool that voice over and storytelling gives us, is that you can use your voice and the stories you're telling to reach directly into the heart of one person, but the story you're telling could affect an entire nation, it could affect generations of people to come. So I was just thinking about the great responsibility that we all have and I know you're into video games and that, and I would expect comic books too if you're in video games, but you know the quote in Spider-Man that “with great power comes great responsibility,” right?

Joe Zieja:

Exactly.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Right? And so I think that that's—I don't know if anyone's got that, you know, up in their studio as a sign to remind themselves—

Joe Zieja:

I'm sure it's around there somewhere, yeah.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

But just the thought of it, but yeah, telling stories, it's as old as time, really, right? Like the tradition, so I appreciate that and that, yeah, relationships, there's always a give and take and you need to, I guess, as you're saying, that stories help you to just basically connect with other people in a way that you wouldn't otherwise be able to. So we've talked about your military experience and how the regimentedness of that, the kind of like dedicated, I'm going to be focused, like that sort of thing, absolutely helpful being an entrepreneur. Is there anything else? Like you have some random skills. Like you can do parkour, you can do, like I just remember reading years and years and years ago, I think you'd call yourself a renaissance man, and there's all the variety of things that you could do, Joe. And I was just like, oh my gosh, like does he ride a horse? Can he do this? Can he like, you know, it just seemed like you could do so much. Did you just like to pick up skills, like as a child?

Joe Zieja:

Yeah, you've answered your own question, like I just—I enjoy learning different things and some things resonate with me and some things don't. I'm not that much of a dancer. I don't think I really am interested in taking dancing classes or like drawing classes. I'm not a great artist. But like if something piques its interest to me, it's like, ooh, I want to do it, and I want to learn how to do it correctly, and I want to learn how to do it right, whether it's, you know, like archery or flying a plane or, you know, whatever, filmmaking, photography, like I'll go take classes and just—just for my own edification, not with the intent of like monetizing it, as I think we always, you know, in our modern society, it's like every one of my hobbies needs to be monetized, and I just do it for fun, you know, like I want to learn how to play jazz piano or, you know, work on this or work on that. I love learning new stuff. I love producing interesting things with it. And yeah, it's just fun. It's just—it's all fun, right?

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Right, and you have to have hobbies, things that you like to do that you don't get paid for because otherwise you'll just be like working all the time.

Joe Zieja:

Yeah, drives me insane.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

So it does, and I know that obviously now in the stage of life that you're not a beginner voice actor anymore, it's been a decade since you started because now we're in 2023, hard to believe. So much happens in the span of 10 years, right? Like so many skills, you become more proficient at something, you get bigger and bigger clients and more and more work. So obviously the kind of goals that you set for yourself now, they've got to be different too. So what does it look like now for you? What are you striving toward?

Joe Zieja:

You know, a couple of things, like now that I'm in Los Angeles and I have access to some of your AAA games stuff, my goals are kind of like two-fold. One is I want to be part of bigger creative experiences. And I've had this incredible opportunity since I've been in LA for like the last seven years or so, six years or so, to be involved in some awesome, awesome projects and meet some incredible people. And it's like, I just kind of want to keep doing more of that. I don't have any like real particular goals other than, yeah, I'll do that. Yeah, that sounds great. You know, like the universe has been really good about just throwing stuff at me and seeing what I catch and see what I bobble. The other half of that is now I'm really excited to having started teaching, looking at like, I've gotten questions my whole career of like, well, how did you get into this? How did you do this? How did you do this with no experience? Like, wait, you've never taken an acting class, what is wrong with you? All the like, how did you do this, this and that? And so late last year, I started Joe Zieja’s Voice Acting Academy, which is now very quickly growing to be like the preeminent source of voice acting education on the internet. Like it grew really, really fast to something of the tune of like 130 lessons and dozens of hours of content and like a thousand students, some of whom were like book, like booking within a couple of weeks of finishing the course and it's just like, it's really cool to see. So once again, it's just the universe kind of pivots on the head of a pin and I have this, this new thing that I'm really, really excited about and like my students are really excited about. At the same time, I'm still pursuing all the creative endeavors and I'm still working every day as a voice actor and now it's just one more, one more ball to juggle. So yeah, those are, those are kind of the goals I have right now, which is like support and maintain my student base, be part of incredible creative projects.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Right on. And you're such a busy guy. Like I know how busy you are.

Joe Zieja:

Yeah. I think that's an understatement. At some day, I'm either going to slow down or, or fall over.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

I hope you don't. Yeah. I hope you just slow a little down or something. You don't fall over because we know that the burnout way is not, not fun.

Joe Zieja:

It’s real.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

So and it is real, absolutely. So you had mentioned your program and I happened to see you advertising it one day and it was like, or maybe you've told me in an email, you're like, yeah, there's like over a thousand people signing up for this webinar. Like, what? Like, are you kidding me? Was there a webinar?

Joe Zieja:

There was something where there wasn't a webinar that just straight up sign up for the, for the course.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Oh, okay.

Joe Zieja:

There's voice acting education, the state of voice acting education right now is there's there's lots and lots of great sources, but there's nothing that's comprehensive. If you want to learn the entire industry of voiceover, you essentially are limited to coaches and seminars, webinars or workshops, all kind of lumped together and like, here's this thing that you do for a couple of hours, then it goes away. There's no classes. There's no program. There's, I think there's one, there's one class at UCLA that you can take, but it's not a program. It's one class. And most of the time when you sit down with a coach, your goal is here's a piece of copy. Let's figure out how to make this piece of copy the best. You can learn great that way. That's not telling you how to find an agent. That's not how I'm telling you how to find work, build a studio, make your room acoustically solid. It's not telling you what a commercial is, what a promo is, what kind of work is out there. It's not telling you how to build your workflow. It's not telling you how to work in a DAW. It's great, but it's not an efficient way to learn the industry. And if you were to do it that way, with, I mean, I've seen coaches charge anywhere between like $300 to like $2,000 an hour, you can't do that for 30 hours. You go broke and you still haven't gotten a good sense of the whole industry. So that's why I made what I made because there was nothing out there. It's like, okay, I understand, you don't even understand what voice acting is as a career. Let me lay it out for me from start to finish and I'll tell you how I built mine and how other people have built theirs. And now here's some continuing education here are coaches that I love that will help you with your promo reads, your commercial reads. Here's somebody that's great with accents, but there's that the foundation wasn't there and it's been really exciting to like build the foundation. And it was, the need was immediate, right? There were so many people that were like, ‘ah, finally, I can figure out how to do this’ without like, you know, researching random people on YouTube and saying like, well, well, this person says I should use a USB mic and this person says to light all their USB mics on fire. I don't know what to do. So like, yeah, it became so apparent very quickly how big of a need that course was filling and it's just been a phenomenal surprise and I'm excited to see where it goes from here.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Wow. I'm excited for you. This is really big and especially you've, you've like scaled yourself because these aren't private lessons with you, but it's material you've created that feels like it's a private lesson, but it's all like videos, people can watch, so

Joe Zieja:

Right. We do have a live, it comes to the live of private Facebook group and we have a live training once a month. Basically then we can take that course content and distill down specific topics and kind of get into the weeds, whereas the point of the course is to not get down in the weeds because you don't need to evidence by like, you know, people like, ‘oh, I got to take, I got to take three years of acting classes before I audition for my first character.’ Stop. Just go.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

No. Yeah. You don't need to wait that long.

Joe Zieja:

Right.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Absolutely. Wow. Well, I'm sure the next time we talk or hear from you, Joe, you'll have had like thousands upon thousands of students through that course and very excited for you. So the last question before we go for you, Joe, if there's one thing that someone could do today, like every voice actor they're listening, if they could do one thing today to become more successful, what would it be?

Joe Zieja:

Oh, those, those like one thing like asking for the silver bullet is always the most difficult question. I would say every actor could improve their careers and every, you know, aspiring actor could improve their chances at making a career by applying a principle I call proportional attention. Show me your calendar and I'll show you what's important to you. You cannot learn a job one hour a week. You cannot learn a new skill one hour a week. And the applying proportional attention like, okay, this is going to give me this much of a return on my investment, but this is the opportunity cost associated with it. Making those analyses on a daily level is going to change the way that you approach your career, invest your time, and therefore the results you get from applying your time. So this has nothing to do with the voice over has to do with your life. Like where are you putting your energy and what is it bringing back to you? There's the Pareto principle that says that 80% of X usually yields 20% of Y or vice versa. That is like 80% of your clients may only produce 20% of your income, 20% of your clients probably produce 80% of your income. What are you doing with that other 80% that's not that's only producing a fraction of what the 20% is and how can you kind of like pare that down so that you're working efficiently. So that was probably not like one simple piece of advice, but that's what I would tell pretty much everyone in the world if you want to succeed more in whatever it is you're doing.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Yeah, that's so fantastic because it really is like, you know, you can say the same thing about your pocket book. Like, you know, if you're looking at your bank account, it's like, where are you spending your money? Clearly that's where your heart is, like where your heart is, you know, you're, it's just, it's obvious because it's where you spend your time. All of that. It's very clear. Like I said, take an inventory of that calendar, see what you're doing, where can you make some time and make this a real like investment because if you don't, like you are not going to be able to be any measure of successful so far as voiceover is concerned because it is a new craft and you have to learn these things and I'm so glad that people can learn along with you, Joe, at their own pace and then get connected on Facebook and have the group time once a month. That's wonderful. So thanks again for coming on, Joe. It's always a treat to see you.

Joe Zieja:

Yeah. It's always a pleasure talking to you.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

And that's the way we saw the world through the lens of voiceover this week. Thank you to Joe Zieja for showing us all the cool things that he did and for sharing the story of how we got started in voiceover and how you can be successful too. You know, mind that calendar makes some time. So to learn more about Joe, you can visit his website, jozieja.com. That's J-O-E-Z-I-E-J-A.com or Zee in America. You can also learn more about his Voice Acting Academy by going to J-Z-V-A-A.com. For Voices, I'm your host, Stephanie Ciccarelli. Vox Talk is produced by Geoff Bremner. Thank you again for listening and we'll see you next week.