PS: Joining us live from his home studio in Los Angeles, California, the creator of maybe the central document in our entire business, at least on the nonunion side. Please welcome David Toback, creator of the GVAA Rate Guide. David, thanks so much for taking time to be with us this afternoon.

DT: Thanks, Paul. Glad to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

PS: I just said to you off mic, we've met, we've interacted a little bit, but essentially we're strangers and that'll change in the next 15, 20 minutes or so. But I wanted to talk to you a little bit about the GVAA rate guide, because one of the things that fascinate me about the rate guide is, you know, I know creative freelancers and entrepreneurs in other disciplines write coders, graphic designers, you know, you name it, and writers, social media strategists, right?

Nobody, to my knowledge, has a document in their business such as the GVAA, and obviously I'll throw in the SAG=AFTRA rate guide. But Union is a bit of a separate deal here. For nonunion talent, and in many of those disciplines, unions don't even exist, but where where they're out fending for themselves. They don't have anything left to give. How did the how did the sheer idea for the give rate guide come up by accident?

DT: So really kind of like a lot of great things in life just happen, sometimes they just fall into place. They just happen. This is one of those things. I call it my Post-it note moment. And for those that don't know, and maybe you may not know either, Paul, but Post-it notes were created because the company failed at making a super glue and they found that it kept sticking.

It kept resticking. And somebody thought the brilliant idea of putting that on to put little pieces of paper that they could stick on. And they made a lot more money with Post-it notes than they would have with super glue, you know, because like, Post-it notes are like Kleenex, right? It's like the brand name is the name of the product.

The same thing happened with the rate guide. Basically, in the first year of my career, I was being mentored. You know, I become fast friends with Cristina Milizia, who is the founder and owner. She's now off in animation world killing it as Poison Ivy and in The Casablancas and all these shows and stuff. And so, you know, she's not a fixture of the house.

A lot of people may not realize that name, but she she started it and she we became fast friends. She became a mentor. And I took like a class with GVAA and all of a sudden I booked a job through Craigslist. And so they're like, "What are your rates?" And I was like, "I don't know. You're supposed to tell me, right?"

Like, I had an agent at the time which the rates were told to you, right? You never had to figure it out. And I was so early into my career, I was just stumbling through it and like, Oh, let me go market. And I feel like this is this still happens to this day. Everybody puts the work before the learning and a lot of ways like trying to get the work and I just didn't know any better.

And so I was like, "Oh crap, what do I do? What do I charge? I don't know. What is this?" And it was like a two minute video or something like that. I charged them like $200 and I was an analyst in my previous life, marketing and a financial analyst. And I was like, "Oh, man, I got to figure out what my prices are... I'm going to be the only dumbass who doesn't know what to charge. So I got that information that she gave me. I went out and found some you know, I use some other rate sources that were alive at the time, and I just put together a guide for myself, you know, the available information I had. It was very small.

You know, I had I think I had commercial at radio and TV and was there wasn't really any digital then. Now I feel like I feel like I'm an old Aveo vet now. And there was no, there was no digital media here bfore 2000. So I wound up... I was like, let me just put this together. I think I had some e-learning, maybe, and some narration or something like that, and maybe four, four sections or something like that, kind of similar to what it looks like now. But and I sent it over to Cristina, like, "Hey, look what I made."

And she was like, lost her mind. She's like, "Oh my God. Like, we we need this in the industry." I'm like, "What do you mean?" She's like, "We don't have anything like this." So I was like, "What? You mean nobody knows how to charge?" And I was like, dumbfounded. I'm like, I thought I was the only idiot, but it wound up being that this was a problem within voice over because that was handled by the union and not nonunion.

I don't know how they've done it all these years. You know, I guess people just did what they did, what they got, and I think as the Internet took over is when that really started to make a big difference, where people could go out and get their own work very easily. I always say this, if you're if you're nonunion and you're going after business, you have to be your own agent.

So now you you have to understand the business from that perspective, not just being a creative talent. So kind of circling back, Cristina was like, you know, "Will you help me out? I think we need this." Like, "would you help me create this?" And I was like, "Yeah, absolutely." So I joined forces with her. We got a bunch of top coaches that are still top names in the industry now, production companies that had worked... agents, casting directors, kind of everyone got in the room, contributed rates, the top talent as well, you know, top grossing earning talent in the business and what were the rates that they were getting?

And we came together with rates that were suitable for that, you know, agents thought were good, you know, that there were current e-learning and narration rates that people were getting. And so we, we got all the kind of pros of those fields to chime in. And so that really gave us a good base of, you know, professional standard rates that we could rely on that pros were getting, and that the main industry, that's what rates that people were getting.

We released that at VO Atlanta 2016, I believe, if my memory serves right and the rest is history. It like blew up, shot up like a rocket ship, like people lost their minds. They thought it was amazing. And I was just like, "Oh." Like I didn't really understand the scale of it, you know, It just kind of was like, hey, let's just I like helping people. I like if I see a problem, I want to solve it. And so I was just like, Oh yeah, let's do this. This will be great. Like, I love helping, giving. And now we're here.

PS: Not to cut you off, but so now that we know the history and the sort of the origin story of the rate guide, what to me, one of the biggest failings we have is... that was 2016. It's now, as you and I talk, it's 2023. It's seven years later. Right. And to me, one of our biggest failings is seven years on, there are still like, it's staggering to me how many people getting into the business aren't immediately made aware of the GVAA rate guide.

So for those that are not aware, let's say you've been a voice actor and I've known some that you know in this business for a year to 2 to 3 that still don't know about the rate guide. Tell us, what is the GVAA rate guide and why should talent use it.

DT: Super. So that rate guide is a a resource of industry average rates that professional voice talent should aspire to get. It is a guide. It's a resource. We always say everyone's business is their business and this is not a union contract. This is not a standard rate that that we are calling a standard. These are rates that we find is average rates that are in the industry that can fluctuate.

And it's there to help people understand their value and what as a voice actor, what their value of the service that they're providing is. And because voiceover is so varied in the genres and how those are approached and what they are and what the value that they bring is, it gets very complicated and this is why we have agents so, you know, when you have commercial broadcast, you know, that rate is different because the company is getting value.

They're you're they're using your voice to sell and make money. Whereas if you're doing an internal narration for a company's training video that's 5 minutes long, they're not getting any benefit out of that outside of informing their clients, their, you know, their internal people, whatever it is. So you have e-learning, super long form, mostly very long form. Narration based.

What are the rates going to be for that? Like, you can't... not everything is a singular per minute, per hour type of thing that we're kind of accustomed to outside of the creative endeavor. So it's really used to help people educate people, to understand their business, understand rates, and help them understand the value that they do bring so they can have confidence when they're doing their business that they are the pro and that they that the rates that they're asking for, that they command them, that they understand why they command them, not just that some rate and that they can feel good about it, because a lot of people, especially artists, have trouble charging people.

And so those things are very normal, I think, especially in this endeavor where booking is very hard to come by. Validation is next to none. So you know that that kind of it can be hard for people to stand up to their value in command, like, No, no, I just can't do that, you know? And that's what the rate guide and what I teach and coach within rates is is all about.

Because at the end of the day, like there are so many other factors out there that are going to bring rates down the industry to different levels. You know, I've seen it, you've seen it recently. I've seen it change multiple times. There's always going to be something, but there's always us. And so if we're running our business, we get to choose who we work with, who we, who we accept to work with, and we can always say no.

And that's what the rate guide the purpose is. One of the purpose is to help people to understand their value and be able to walk away from jobs that don't serve them and serve the community. Because as we quote people and do jobs for them, that teaches those people what rates are exactly.

PS: So many times we we get what we tolerate, right? Exactly. And and the two things that I think the GVAA has or possesses and I'm not even sure how to articulate it, but the two things that stand out to me and did immediately was it's objective, in other words, every voice actor is not fending for themselves and having to pull rates out of, you know, somewhere where the sun doesn't shine.

And number two, you can bank on the fact that they're reasonable, right? Because there's a research component to this. There's a consortium component to this. A lot of people get together from across the industry and not just voice talent to be able to put these guides together. Let's talk about from this point moving forward, David, how often and I've noticed, for example, even in in the last couple of years, there have been some additions and some changes to the guide over time.

How often are rates revisited? I know last year was last year, the year before you added automotive rates for the first time and they're still in the guide. So what is that process like where you sort of reevaluate what the guide is now and how it needs to evolve?

DT: Cool. That's a good question. It's timely as we're going to be doing a large scale review of the rate guide as we're working on some other exciting things. There's no timetable, there's no structure structure to it. We did we did it like a big kind of broadcast revisit when we added digital broadcast. So there's no there's no real it's not updated often.

And there's also that's also good because we don't want rates to be volatile. You know, we don't want them to be going up and down like, oh, we're going to update these every year and then we go to do it. And it's like, well, we don't we don't want to lower commercial rates or...

PS: What if you had done that in the middle of the pandemic for advertising rates when advertising cratered for six months? Right. That would have made no sense. So I totally get where you come in because...

DT: It can't be market based. It needs to be value based. And there is a there is an argument that sometimes the market will change and rates may come down to that, you know, And so that could be something where there's a big shift in where things are being done.

PS: So one of the complaints about our business, David, and I think this is fairly universal, you know, and especially from new clients that maybe haven't worked with professional voiceover people in the past, certainly for new talent and heck, even for experienced talent, it can be really confusing. We've got a multitude of different genres. We've got pricing tiers, we've got local, regional, national and broadcast, right? There's all this stuff to learn....

DT: Don't forget, in perpetuity, right?

PS: In perpetuity versus not in perpetuity. So the question becomes, as an industry, should we explore how we can simplify this like crazy, complex rate structure that we have, which seems to be pretty unique to each genre? Does that make sense? Does that not make sense? And if so, my God, how do we proceed with that?

DT: I understand it, but I don't think it makes sense because it leaves too much on the table. And this is what a lot of people want outside of voiceover. They want, "Oh, what's your per minute rate?" I think you could simplify it by non broadcast. You could do pretty much anything in non broadcast using corporate narration rates outside of e-learning.

PS: I've often said David, that being new, simply being new is not an excuse to charge really subpar rates, that if you're trained and you can deliver the goods, then you should be charging pro rates. In other words, GVAA rates. Do you agree? And if you disagree, why?

DT: I absolutely 1,000% agree. I was like, "You must have heard me say that." Maybe you have. Yeah, I know. I say that all the time, "If you're if you're good enough to book the job, you're good enough for the professional rate." If Coca-Cola thinks you're good enough to market to sell their products, you're good enough to get paid for selling their product.

There's no resume involved. They're not like, "Oh yeah, send over his credentials and his experience level so we can determine the rate," you know?

PS: Yes. "Who has he trained with?"

DT: "Yeah, we need to verify that." You know, that's just not how it works in our business, right? You know, there's no resume. There's no there's no looking at your qualifications. Your qualifications are how you performed on the audition.

PS: You don't get a discount on your Southwest Airlines flight because you had a first year pilot, right? Yeah. David, I want to thank you for your time today. Before you go, though, I want to ask you if you can share what might be on the roadmap for the GVAA. As we... and you started to get into this with the international expansion of the guide, is there anything else you can tell us about where the DVD guide may be headed?

DT: We're going to be adding some more things. We're going to be looking at different podcast rates as podcasts have, you know, blown up. Podcasts aren't just for talking heads anymore. There's a lot of different mediums. People are... people are narrating: full stop. They're doing company shows like they are doing the podcast for them as a voice actor. We're going to address some more areas like that.

There's some some other, like we said, the international. I think we're going to revisit everything. We want to look into digital a little bit more. Now it's difficult because digital doesn't the way we have a set up is the same way terrestrial is done, which nothing's terrestrial anymore. It's all digital, but so TV, radio and then digital broadcast, But it's all 3, 6 (months), 1-year term.

And digital doesn't... can operate that way, but it doesn't. Right now digital is treated like like TV. Like, you don't care what channel it's going on. It's just that it's that it's in broadcast. And so that's the way the digital was. But there's a lot of pushback on like social media boosted posts, you know, where the rates just aren't there.

So it's a potential that that just doesn't command as much because of the type of ad buy, you know, that is so and then ourselves, you know, we just have like I said, you know, we're working on a bunch of stuff. We're going to have some cool things for our recorded content coming out. Industry firsts, I think. And so we're excited to at some point get that out or we don't we're not I don't work full time for kind of like 25-30 (hours) a week, but we're you know, we're a very, very small team, so we're working on getting those things that things take a lot longer for us to get get done.

But we're working on it and it's a lot of big, big changes for the year. So there's a lot of things coming in store this year.

PS: From nonunion voice actors everywhere. David, thank you for the work that you and the GVAA do on behalf of us. I think we owe a lot a huge debt of gratitude to an idea that came up mostly by accident. And just because you you needed a rate guide and it turned out that is a beautiful, beautiful thing for the industry.

David Toback, the creator of the GVAA Rate Guide. David, thanks so much for spending some time with us today.

DT: Thanks, Paul. I appreciate it. It's been fun and look forward to seeing you again.