We Interrupt This Program…

There’s a lot of things I love about being a small business owner who works from home. I get to do a lot of the little things such as the meal planning, grocery shopping, and cooking for my family. I enjoy being able to have my wife come home to clean clothes that have been folded, clean floors, garbage out, and a hot meal that’s ready and waiting for her.

I get to be the person who puts our child on the school bus in the morning, and to take him off in the afternoon. I enjoy getting to give him his snack, playing outside with him, helping him with his homework, and having special 1-on-1 dad-and-son time, the kind that we’ll both remember fondly for years. That’s all very important to me and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

In addition to the above, my job is in the arts, which I love. I’m not an accountant or a dentist with offices in my basement or anything. I get to do many artistic and creative things regularly as part of my work and it’s quite fulfilling.

It’s also quite necessary. My primary job when I am not at the microphone is marketing myself and my studio business. The creativity is heavily relied upon in that facet of my work. Between making and editing image posts, video and audio files, and coming up with more and more unique tools to market myself, creativity has become the life-blood of my business. It goes hand in hand with my marketing campaigns on my various social media platforms (all a requirement these days, as any working professional voice-actor will tell you).

My son is young and very demanding of my time. I don’t ever complain about that because it truly warms my heart that he and I are well-bonded that way, especially since my own relationship with my father was not quite that same way. Therefore I never ever want to say “No” to him when he asks for my time. I’ve been forced to say no from time to time for various reasons, like auditions and bookings, conferences, classes and training, etc, and he’s rolled with it nicely.

For this reason, I make it a point to try to get done as much work as possible in a condensed time frame each day. I allocate myself a heavy workload from the time my son’s bus departs until he returns on it that afternoon. It works out to be a whopping 7 hours, which is not really a lot. It’s not the most ideal scenario but I do what I can to make it work.

I make efforts to get as much offline work done as possible in the evenings and wee hours (planning, prepping, making and editing content, making schedules and writing drafts) so that I can be on the marketing front-line during the business day when potential clients are also working. There’s no one single hard and fast rule about this, but generally speaking, it is much more effective to show up in their Inboxes and make these connections when they are also online and working themselves. The 11pm or 2am connections and messages do not have the same impact or results, by and large. So the daytime availability and contact efforts are big and important. The system I have in place and have been adhering to has been good for a while. Do I wish I had more business hours available? Yes. But I’ve been making it work.

Enter COVID 19.

Pretty Much.

Things have blown up recently, as we all know, and now many schools are closed for anywhere from a week to over a full month. Parents are being assigned home-schooling duties. Kids will not see their teachers or classmates for an indefinite amount of time. Campuses have sent the student body home to finish their work online through e-learning modules. Some survival jobs have made concessions for their employees to either work from home, work an adjusted schedule, or even take family medical leave for this time. Other businesses are slow to the party with these concessions, but likely coming around with the influence of the national state of emergency.

So, now what? My already-packed daily schedule just got thrown into a wood-chipper as my son will be home for this indefinite extended period. My wife’s job has not (yet) made a decision as to how they will handle this with staffing and remote work. Daddy-duty has just been called into full-time active status.

There will be a daily curriculum which he and I must follow to ensure he continues with progress and retention, which will be largely online as well. We will be able to have outdoor playtime, but with restrictions. No play-dates. No movie theaters or trips to the mall. No playgrounds. No visiting family and friends. It is not going to be easy on parents and young kids during this time.

But we of course step up because that’s our job as parents. They need us, so we’re there. It is what it is, right?

But as a small business owner and professional voice-actor, my schedule just became…hmmm, how shall I put this?- a very interesting challenge. My success depends heavily on my ability to network effectively, build relationships with people in many different jobs and industries, and work towards finding opportunities within those relationships. There is no selling , or asking for the close, or any of the old school sales/boiler-room tactics that apply to what I do. Those tactics barely work at all anymore for most products and/or services.

And I know I’m not alone. In fact, due to the aforementioned shift away from crowded classrooms to online course completion, my cohorts in the Learning & Development and Instructional Design fields just had their work loads increased exponentially and their deadlines bumped up too, perhaps. This is not exclusive to academic purposes either. Think about all the new training and compliance videos being requested now. And the medical explainer videos as well, all being updated to include new guidelines regarding the virus.

Some people just received an unexpected vacation of sorts. Some received the perk of working from home in their pajamas, and all the added benefits that go along. Others received a forced fast. And others, still, received a whole new host of duties and responsibilities and some subsequent limitations along with them.

So how do we begin to solve the problem of doing even more with even less time? I’m not a lover of plopping the kid down in front of the TV or handing him the iPad for a couple hours so that daddy can do some direct marketing, but will there be many other choices? We can’t bring them to a daycare or a sitter. We can’t send them to grandma and grandpa’s for the day. We can’t hand them off to the neighbor or friend’s house for the day, even if we were willing to take turns and cover for each other day after day. None of that is recommended. The lock-down is far too serious and all of those options are against the whole purpose of the social distancing.

Wait, there’s more! As parents, we are also being urged to be as mindful and positive as possible while the young kids are home. We need to lessen the negative impact of the severity, the fear, the stress, and the uncertainty for their sake. Nobody wants their kids traumatized or having childhood anxiety over any of this. Nobody wants to break down in front of them and scare them even worse. No one wants their child to see them buckle. It’s now just about the tallest order I’ve ever been asked to fulfill (so far, …sigh), and I refuse to let people down. Especially my family.

My inner voice, for years and years now, has been telling me to do my best with whatever I have control over and to let go of the rest. Let those chips fall where they may. And now, even the things I did once have control over have changed. My control has been taken somewhat away in certain vital areas. Very vital areas.

My inner voice is struggling to receive that message and process it fully. It understands the logic and rationale, and it does not disagree. But it also knows what’s at stake with my family and my business. It knows the pickle I’m in now regarding the needs of my child, the needs of my business, and the needs of the many. It’s become such a challenging time across the board that even the mental process of sorting it all out has taken extra time. Each day the information we are trying to process and maneuver around becomes a little different, and usually worse than the day before. But eventually the inner voice establishes the cooler head and some progress can begin to get made.

It’s been a difficult end of one week and start of the next for many of us. Small businesses all across the board are going to take a hit, as are the bigger ones too. Restaurants. The service industry. Businesses in and around heavily populated cities. Food trucks and vendors. Event facilities. Even public transportation. The impact will be far-reaching and long-lasting to say the least.

I’m sure companies like my wife’s job will up their game and make some kind of announcement soon which will be considerate and beneficial for their people. Some places are just a bit slower at that type of thing, that’s all. But, oh yeah, it will definitely take the two of us to get this done the way it needs to be done. The needs of our family must come first. Those needs include doing what’s best for our son, but they also include keeping the train moving and the coals burning.

I am hopeful that she will be allowed to work from home, even intermittently. I will be a vigilant, positive, and present father while she is working. And when she is able to relieve me, whenever and for however long, I will be smart and work as much as humanly possible. This new endeavor will take equal parts planning, improvisation, sacrifice, flexibility and dedication.

Realistically, I will not be able to do the volume and hours of marketing needed in the way that I was previously and in the exact way I need to, but it’s going to have to be enough. I am not able to control anything beyond that, and that right there is the trusted collegial inner voice that I know and love. The one telling me to be brave and go forth.

I wish everyone out there reading this all the best, through these times and always. Good health. Good times. Good luck. May you find what you need to get yourself and your loved ones through this. And if you don’t find it, then may it find you.

“So, how did you get into voice-over?”

This is a question I get asked a lot. I’m sure many of my peers in the business hear it often as well. Some of these questions come from people who have an interest in VO, or in the arts in general perhaps. Some come from those who want to break in and are struggling to find that point of entry (as it is a narrow one).

There are others though who, in the midst of the discussion, reveal to me that their question was based on an assumption. Meaning that I either must have “known someone”, or got handed a unique opportunity and tried to run with it, or some other unearned short-cut which led me to an unintended career. It’s usually pretty clear that one of the next questions they want to ask is “can you do that for me, too?”

When I give them my answer though, and tell them the abbreviated story of how and why, many change their tune fairly quickly.

The truth is this is a fantastic job to be fortunate enough to be doing, but it in no way gets handed to anyone. No one gets bubbled up or fast-tracked. There are no short-cuts on which you can plot a reliable course. There’s no side-doors or secret passwords to the upper levels. There isn’t anyone for us “to talk to you for you” or anything like that.

Even in the extremely rare instances where unexpecting talent gets handed a large opportunity to voice something, it rarely goes anywhere after that unless/until said talent puts in the rest of the work required.

So, how did I actually get into it? Simple. I decided to.

I made the choice, did the homework, paid the dues, did the diligence, and started kicking doors open myself. That’s it. I’m sorry the answer wasn’t more romantic, or more Rocky-movie-esque or whatever. But that’s the deal. I just freakin’ went for it.

Where it really started, though? Acting.

I have been an actor since I was 18, and an acting-hopeful prior to that. In 1998 I took a bit of an unintended hiatus and started a corporate job at 22 years old. This turned into 9 years away from acting entirely, and a geographic change of 650 miles away from my New York home. That became too long, and too far for my taste. So I started up again. I’m sure many of ushave something we did in our youth that eventually phased out or fell by the wayside. But how many of us have the guts to go back to it and re-commit to it?

I began auditioning for local productions and got my chops back pretty quickly by doing several great plays with excellent people all over town. Even after my first audition in phase ‘Steve 2.0’, I knew I was back where I belonged. The feelings of elation and exuberance were familiar and undeniable. I had found home. I had found North again. And this time I had no intention of losing my way.

My inner voice was now shouting at me, desperately trying to get my attention to make sure I didn’t derail again. Even as I left that first audition in 9 years, I walked down the sidewalk on Second Street in Wilmington back towards my car with a literal spring in my step. At that moment, I was speaking out loud to myself with no one around, saying “Yes! YES!! That was awesome! You did it! You’re back now!” For the first time, my real voice and my inner voice were in perfect sync with each other. They were one voice. I’ll never forget that night.

After a few years of this I had racked up a solid resume, a couple nods for best actor, an agent, some commercials, and film work. Two primary goals emerged out of this. The first? Get back to New York somehow some way. The second? Find a way to unload the day job I had at the time.

As many people know, but maybe not everyone, having those pesky 40hr/wk scheduling issues makes it near impossible to get traction and make progress as a serious professional actor. The conflict is too great and the powers-that-be within the industry do not have the time nor the inclination to deal with whether or not you can get the time off work. It’s viewed as a metric of your seriousness. Yes, it sucks. But that’s how it is.

So how do you keep the lights on and food on the table without a survival job?

Answer: You make a new one for yourself.

People start businesses from home all the time. Etsy. Ebay. Making and selling products online. Apparel. Jewelry. Customs artwork, graphics, photography, etc. So many possibilities.

For me the answer was obvious. Voice-over was something I had always been interested in doing but didn’t know how. Yet. However, it was cut directly from the very same cloth of my acting training and experience. It did not require me to reinvent any wheels and start learning to make coffee mugs or anklets to sell online. It did not require me to embark on any new ventures in learning, equipment, or fabrication of any kind that was UNrelated to my career goals.

Don’t get me wrong. There was a huge learning curve and I most definitely had to embark on a research and development mission. There was training, yes. Equipment needed, most definitely. But all of this was under the acting umbrella, which made it easier for one thing, but more importantly it made it obvious. A no-brainer.

It wasn’t the same as starting something brand new and unfamiliar completely from scratch. It wasn’t the same as going all the way back to formula. It was more like “what can I do with what I already have, what I already know, and what I’m already pretty damn good at?”.

I worked long and hard to turn myself into a trained professional with knowledge of and respect for the many, many facets of this business. Through homework and humble questions, I started sponging up as much data as I could (and a future blog entry will explain how and where I mined much this data).

There were no favors done or hands-out given. I didn’t get bubbled-up or fast-tracked. I didn’t stumble into this blindly or accidentally. There was deliberate planning and action. Phases. First this, then that. Preparation. Budgeting. Spending. Patience.

Think of a rocket. Before they put any two pieces together, there’s countless months of drawing board work. Then, countless more months building inside the hangar where no one can see the progress.

The first items built are the tools. Then using those custom tools, they build machines. Then using those machines, they build the parts of the rocket and begin assembly. After that, the rocket gets rolled out to the pad. Not for launch, yet, but for more months of work. Tests. Adjustments. Improvements. It takes time. Lots and lots of time. Take it apart, change it, put it back together, test it again. Over and over.

“The more time at the drawing board and in the shop, the more powerful and perfect the launch will be.”

Like I said, I kicked the door in, but not on day one. Nobody came to me and said “Hey you, handsome man, wanna fly this rocket for us?” No. I built it myself with the help and guidance of others who built theirs as well. I came to the party with my own tools and machines, my own rocket, my own mission control, my own crew, and my own flight suit.

Most importantly, I arrived with my own mission. The same mission as it has been since inception.

This information is frequently off-putting to those who make the inquiry and/or seek entry into the business but don’t know how or where to find it. Of course it would be much easier if we all had Uncles who work in the business or people who vouch for us with their connections. It would be lovely to ask the question today and have the job tomorrow. But that isn’t reality. The people who ask the first question will sometimes ask a follow-up such as “but isn’t there a faster way for me to do it? I don’t have that kind of time or money to do it that way. I’m looking to earn money sooner than that.”

What else can I say except,, “if there were an easier, faster, cheaper, more effective way, I would have found it already and gone that way myself.” But in the end I know full-well, it can’t be achieved without the struggle, without the work.

How’d I get here?

About me.
…Okay, wow yeah, there’s actually a lot.
Allow me try to break it down into some chunks, that way it’ll be easier for us all in the long run.

I’m currently a full-time, work from home, professional voice-actor and studio operator.
I was not always this, though. It’s “new” compared to other facets of who and what I am.

As a child I always knew I was and wanted to continue to be an artist. I could draw fairly well and was taking advanced art classes before high school. Performance of all sorts held a lot of interest for me. Movies and TV shows. Theater. Grownup stuff as much as kid stuff.

Even back then I knew voiceover was something for me too. At that age I would watch cartoons but always be trying to imagine the person at the microphone. The illusion never tricked me, but rather it sparked my interest. I had strong desires to learn more, like playing an instrument, and even venturing into the acting world myself.

I had opportunities to do a lot of this back in the day, but I balked. I did. I lacked the level of support and understanding needed by artists. But more than that, I lacked internal ambition and confidence. I kind of always knew that I could rock anything I put my mind to. I just didn’t know how to put my mind to anything.

That was when I made some of my earliest ‘wrong turns’. I don’t assign blame to anyone else for this, but I know the reasons why I made those choices and took those turns. They were the wrong reasons, for sure. More on that later.

This wrong turn sent me into a high school athletic career of utter mediocrity. Football. Track & Field. Weightlifting. I worked very hard, yes, but not hard enough. My heart was never fully in it because I wasn’t doing these things with any purity of purpose. Like I said, I was doing it for the wrong reasons.

Don’t worry about those details now. They’ll make for a better individual blog post and podcast episode later. Like how I went to the first meeting of the Drama Club my 9th grade year but never went back because I got my chops busted for it at home.

And like the time my football coach looked to me to step up at a crucial moment….and I failed to do so out of fear. Now THAT was 2 seconds of eye contact I will never forget. We’ll cover that later too. Hahaha, yeah that’ll definitely get it’s own entry.

That wrong turn into sports was somewhat corrected in my senior year when I willfully returned to something creative that interested me. Video Club. This was the first real art I went after with any semblance of ambition since my freshman year. I had put it off long enough and decided that this was something I really wanted to do. And I loved it.

It sent me in a good direction in college where I was planning to major in Communications and Production. TV/Video. Graphics. Broadcasting. All that. It was the early 90s and an awesome time to enter that world.

As I was making my Fall schedule for my second year of college, I chose Acting 1 as an elective. This was like the Video Club decision in the sense that I had always had an unfulfilled curiosity, but it was even better. Better because I found out I was actually pretty damn good at it if i do say so my pretty damn self.

I took all the classes, played the lead in the Fall play, got the degree in performing arts, did more plays, impressed my teachers, classmates, and even myself a little. I was finally where I felt I belonged. More than that, I was finally where I really wanted to be. A very happy place. I began considering things like Julliard, AMDA, etc, and had an unfamiliar “sensation” that I could definitely pull it off. This sensation was the desire, confidence, and dormant ambition within me beginning to wake up.

Then my Dad died when I was 20. This rocked my world and threw me far of course. Don’t get me wrong. I made my next series of choices by myself. No one forced my hand. But this next handful of choices would become the ones that I am still unmaking today. Everything fell out of focus for me at that time and I struggled to bring it all back in for literally years and years.

I went the wrong way. That’s it. And now I’m fixing that.

I’m closer now than ever before, I really am. And there are those who say that I have already succeeded at unmaking these wrong turns. That I’ve made it through the woods and emerged back on the original main road. I thank them for that, sincerely, but I know what remains ahead of me still.

I have more to do. And more to tell you about.