3 HARD FACTS for Freelancers & Voice Actors - Straight Truth

If I asked a hundred voice actors, what do you do for a living? How many do you think out of that 100 would include the word freelance? Probably zero. And yet, if you're a voice actor, you're a freelancer.

Okay, what does that mean? Being a freelancer means you're not an employee. You're working for different companies at different times. You, my friend, are self-employed.

And with that, you are responsible for all of the functions of a typical company. Logistics and project management. Accounting, taxes and payroll. HR, creative. and most importantly, sales and marketing.

We get so down in the weeds with all things voice actory, and sometimes we forget that we are freelancers first, and that many of the issues and problems and challenges and obstacles that we face are not at all unique to voiceover.

Graphic designers, copywriters, illustrators, website designers, content writers, video producers, social media managers, animators, and user interface designers all deal with the same, pretty much, day-to-day stuff as we do.

In fact, voice actor is not even in the top ten most common creative freelance forms of work. We're a part of this massive freelance community.

And most of the time, we don't even know it. According to Upwork, last year, in 2023, the number of Americans that are freelancing sat at 64 million people. That's about 38% of the American workforce, and that's up 4 million from the year before, 2022. And Gen Z actually prefers freelance work. 53% of all Gen Zers are freelancing. And I don't mean just as a side hustle, I mean as a full-time, long-term method of working.

Freelancing is literally exploding in this country, and there's some evidence to show that it is around the world as well. And as voice actors, we are part of the freelance community.

Today, I'm going to break down three hard freelancing facts for you if you're a voice actor or, more importantly, a freelancer.

#3. The hardest adjustment in freelancing is getting used to the volatility of your income.

Being a freelancer means it's either feast or famine. One month you're killing it and the next month you can't even get arrested for impersonating yourself.

There are no guarantees in business or in freelancing and when you especially come in formally as a full-time employee that uncertainty and that volatility is scary as hell.

That's why I recommend you have at least nine to twelve months expenses, cushion, built up, saved up in the bank before you go full-time in any freelance pursuit. And it's that cushion that will allow you not to wake up at 3 a.m. sweating and rocking back and forth like a kid who just ruined his dad's best autographed piece of sports memorabilia. That's a story for another time.

Even once you're established in your field, you will lose clients. That's a certainty. The economy will shift. Clients will go out of business. Occasionally, you'll lose a big client.

Client churn is part of any business and freelancing is no exception.

So the question then becomes, how do you build a freelance business that minimizes, because you can't eliminate it, that minimizes the volatility of your income?

A. Learn to market your business

The single biggest factor in the success or failure of your freelance business is your ability to get revenue and income in the door. Because if you don't do that, you don't have a business. And if you don't know how to do that, you absolutely must learn.

B. Own the relationships

Yeah, you can get a lot of work through the freelance sites and in our case, the online casting sites, but you don't own those relationships. You're working through middle people. The sites are the ones that own the relationships.

When you're reliant on freelance sites for the bulk of your work, you're left looking for jobs. When you market your business directly and you own your relationships, now you're looking for clients. Jobs happen once.

Clients will give you work repeatedly because you've built a relationship with them.

And C. Diversify your platform

Look, big clients are great, right? They're fantastic. But if the bulk of your work is coming from one or two very large clients, then when those one or two very large clients go out the door, you, my friend...are screwed.

Story time. I was six months into my full-time voiceover career. I had just completed a series of 48 videos with one of my gateway clients and we had a call after that first series was over in July of that year and they said, “Paul, we love you. We love your work. We love the system that we've gotten down. We've got four more lines of videos we'd love to produce with you. The work is virtually endless.” And that's a direct quote from that call. Two weeks later, they called and said, “Yeah, the CEO wants a younger sounding guy. Thanks so much for your time.”

50% of my income at that point evaporated instantly and it damn near put me out of business.

So how do you mitigate that? Diversifying your portfolio with clients of all sizes so that when you do lose a big fish, it's proportionally not as big a chunk out of your entire client portfolio.

#2. your time is your own and no one is coming to hold your hand.

One of the hardest things for brand new full-time freelancers to get used to is there is no structure to your day. No one is handing you a schedule. No one is telling you how you should be spending your time. That means you, on your own, have to decide what your priorities are, how much time they will take, and how to spend your time effectively.

I have a few students in the VO Freedom Master Plan and in the VO Pro Community who are retired military. And this is an especially hard adjustment for them. Counter-intuitively, think about it. For their entire careers, the service handed them a schedule. Sometimes, down to the minute.

And now when they're responsible for their own time, for the first time in their careers, they understand that they have to develop that skill set because it was never taught to them.

I've said it a million times, time as a freelancer is your most valuable asset and how you spend it makes all the difference. Now in the VO Pro community, we have an entire module of mindset mastery audio training dedicated to time management. That's how important it is to understand and to be able to execute time management skills.

Understanding your long-term goals is absolutely key to determining your day-to-day habits and your behaviors that will have the most and largest impact to the success of your business.

And here's a hint. Sales and marketing is number one, because if that work doesn't get done, you have no sales, you have no clients, you have no business.

Here's a VO Pro Tip: make sure your sales and marketing work is the first thing that you do every damn day. If you can get it done before 8 or 9 a.m., especially if you're on the East Coast in the States, before the business day opens, you can work with much less distraction. And even if the day gets sideways, 9:15 in the morning, at least you've got that work done. And you know that you've done the important stuff for the long-term success of your business.

And by the way, this strategy also works for those working their freelance side hustle or their voice acting side hustle because you can get up early before your day job and get that sales and marketing work done for your freelance gig.

And the number one hard fact to know about freelancing is: freelancing will test you

Building a business, and yes freelancing is a business, building a business is one of the hardest things you will ever do, especially if this is your first time doing it. Entrepreneurship will test your patience, your persistence, your grit, your creativity, your problem solving, and your sheer will. It'll stretch you in ways you haven't even considered yet.

Bad luck will test you. Good luck will test you. The unknown will definitely test you. Mentally, emotionally, sometimes physically, socially

And to be quite honest, if you're someone who traditionally hasn't challenged yourself much, if you're someone who really lives the vast majority of their life within their comfort zone, then freelancing may not be for you. And that's okay, that's self-awareness, there's no shame in that at all.

But freelancers get comfortable with the uncomfortable. They don't always start out that way, at least I know that's true for me, but they develop the skill of discomfort tolerance.

I often say that there are no guarantees in business. There is one guarantee that I will make you 100%. There will undoubtedly come a time where you will want to quit. Don't quit. Remind yourself that this is the point where most other people quit. And if you can stick this one thing out, get through this one thing, then you can hang in there for a long time.

And you'll be better prepared for the next time because there will be a next time you'll want to quit.

But the point is all that stretching and discomfort leads to growth. There is nothing more gratifying and fulfilling than challenging yourself to do something truly objectively. difficult and hard, seeing it through, and then reaping the benefits.

I also know this about myself. I will not get to the end of my life and regret not taking a shot at the thing that I dreamed of doing. I am so grateful and proud to not only be a voice actor, but to be a freelancer and a self-employed business owner.

If you're a VO Pro who needs to learn to market their business to take it to the next level, book a free strategy call with me for the VO Freedom Master Plan.

And to learn more and enroll in our amazing VO Pro Community, click that link as well.

If this video helped you, if you found value in it, if you think more importantly that it would help other freelancers, possibly other voice actors, then please share it with them, whether it's through email, text, social media, however you prefer.

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As always, thanks so much for your support both in the VO Pro community and in the VO community at large and in the larger freelancing community.

Thanks so much and we'll see you back here again soon.