ABOUT (PAUL) SCHMIDT

The first time I tried to get into voiceover, I crashed and burned. Hard. I failed outright.

It was 1998 and I was working in radio in Wilmington, Delaware.

Here’s what I learned (It wasn’t good)

• You were in NY or LA, you had an agent, you were union, and you worked, OR

• None of those things were true, and you didn’t work.

So for years I had side clients for whom I’d do their cable spots or their corporate work, but never really got any foothold in the business.

Eventually, I moved off-the-air, into the digital sales side of radio, and then into technology sales. In that period, I got a ton of invaluable training in sales and marketing, which allowed me to:

• Sell multi-million dollar web applications to global multi-hundred-million dollar corporations.

• Be the top seller in multiple companies and blow sales quotas out of the water by 200%+.

• Grow a sales department by 500% revenue in three+ years.

Then, the world changed

I started to see a couple friends make the leap into full-time voiceover. I thought, ”How can they do that? They’re not in major markets. They’re not union.”

What I learned is that the world had changed drastically.

• The internet became roughly what it is today (1998 was still web 1.0)

• Digital video and YouTube exploded

• Now, every company was a media company. There was (and still is) more work out there for voice actors than ever before IF YOU KNEW HOW TO GO GET. More and more of that was non-union.

One more thing had changed: Me. I had gotten a massive amount of training in sales.

Once I knew I could go get my own work, the gloves came off. I was going to be a full-time voice actor.

I spent 6 months building my plan.

And I killed it

Once I started executing, I went full-time in 9 months and built a 6-figure voiceover business in my third year.

I realized quickly that the overwhelming majority of voice actors have no sales or marketing background. The average voice actor (75%) reaches out to market their services less than 3 times a day. 75% also report making less than $40,000 a year.

Coincidence? Hardly.

The problem isn’t talent

There’s someone out there with less talent than you booking way more work because they know how to find it.

That’s why I developed the VO Freedom Master Plan - to teach voice actors with no sales or marketing exposure a proven system to start and grow relationships at scale that lead to consistent booking and revenue.

VO Pro is our community for education, support, and connection, both for Master Plan students and anyone who wants to level up their career.

I believe that voiceover should be a meritocracy - if you’re well trained and put in the work, you should be able to make a comfortable living in this business.

My mission is to change how we teach finding work in this business and to build a community of gritty, motivated, action-taking people all making the transformation from passive starving actor to active, successful business person.

Here’s to doing what we love and making a good living at it.

Best,

Paul