How I Booked $35K of Voice Over Work in 1 WEEK
Welcome back and welcome to how I booked $35,000 worth of voiceover work in one week.
People ask all the time, is there money in voiceovers? Can you make money in voiceovers? Well, if you want to get paid for voiceovers after you open your voiceover business, this is one example of what's possible. Stick around, because at the end, we're going to talk about the lessons that came from this little story.
Now, I hear you saying, "Well, Paul, surely you're Schmidting me. There's no way you made $35,000 in voiceover in one week." I absolutely did make that money in voiceover. And in this video, I'm going to lay out the systems processes, methods and the specific jobs that added up to $35,000 of voiceover work in one business week.
Alright. Let's get into it.
First, a little bit of backstory. When I decided to take my part-time voiceover business to a full time voiceover business, I had already been doing voiceover for over 15 years.
But to go full-time, I knew I needed a plan and I spent six full months developing that plan. That plan included better coaching, better demos, a better website. It included research and putting the tools and processes in place I knew I would need to scale my time and to reach out to the number of people that I would need to reach out to to make sufficient inroads quickly and efficiently. It also included developing and refining my messaging to reach out to those people.
That plan, that system, years later became the basis for what is now called The VO Freedom Master Plan.
If you want more information on that, click the link above. And once the plan, the tools, and the processes and messaging were in place, I was ready to go.
I started the day after Labor Day that fall, reaching out to a minimum of 100 targeted leads every damn day. I made it a priority. I got up at 4:00 in the morning, did my marketing outreach first thing in the morning, because that way, no matter how sideways the day went, no matter if the whole day went to hell in a handbasket by 8 a.m., I already had my marketing outreach done.
At lunch,I'd return any replies from prospects that I got back, and then I'd head home from work that evening. Do any auditions, any paid work that came in, and any communications that I had to return to clients, leads and prospects. And I try to get my butt in bed by 9:00…some nights I did, some nights I didn't…to get up at 4:00 in the morning the next day and do it all over again.
Now that Fall, I was able to generate between $700 and about $2250 each month from voiceover work. Now, far from a full time income, sure, but still a pretty good solid start. Honestly, I believed in my system so much I was a little disappointed in the results. I had to learn some patience. I'm the kind of guy that yells at the microwave (HURRY UP!!!) and I learned patience and things slowed down over the holidays as they often do.
SUNDAY
The New Year came and went and I'm sitting at my desk on the second Sunday of the New Year and I get an email. I got an email from a lead that my business lawyer had referred me to a month prior. Lovely woman rights holder to an audio book and I had given her a quote to voice and produce that audio book.
And while she was effusive about me and my delivery and my voice, my performance and all that, at the time she said simply that my quote was too high. In this email, though, here's what she said. "As we're new to the whole world of audio books, we had to take a moment to educate ourselves. However, we now understand everything involved in your quote is more than reasonable.
We would like to move forward with the project with you and would actually like to add a second book if that's possible." Yeah, I think it's possible.
Lesson number one: if you quote a professional rate for a professional product. Stick to your guns.
In the email, she included the signed quote for $1,845. And while we did do that second book months later, that's not included in this total.
So that was Sunday.
MONDAY
The next day, Monday morning, I woke up to a LinkedIn message from an author and marketing expert that I had gotten to know through the American Marketing Association. She reached out to find out if I knew anybody that could voice and produce her audiobook. Well, as a matter of fact, I did. And he looked and sounded a lot like me.
She booked that job for $2,750, and that job also included the preparation, execution and production of an interview with her that would accompany the audiobook. A little bit of an add on there.
So now if you're keeping score at home, we're up to $4,595, a long way from 35 grand, but we got a pretty good week going.
Wednesday
Wednesday comes, I get a call from a video production lead that I had just reached out to that morning, which almost never happens.
They reached out about a massive e-learning job. We talked about the quote, the scope of the project. And I quoted them $6,540. He got approval from his client and signed that day.
So now in about three days, I've booked $11,135. More than I did in the previous four months combined. I mean, I was stunned. I was thrilled. I didn't know what to do. Money was literally flying out of the speaker monitors in my desk here, and I didn't know it, but I wasn't done yet.
Also on Wednesday, I got a call from another video production client that I had actually done work with, and he asked me if he could refer a client to me. Well, sure you can. This job was a series of training videos that he would be producing with the client, but he recommended me for the job and said that it was perfectly fine for me to reach out to the client directly and to work with them directly.
I caught up with the client. We did an in-depth discovery call. Turns out they were looking to do a series of about 50 training videos around proprietary software that they had written for their brokers. They wanted the training video to walk the brokers through running the software, not all the scripts had been written yet, but we came up with a pretty good average length of script and a per word rate based on that.
The total quote for 51 videos was $22,950, which they approved verbally that day and signed the agreement soon after.
In three days I had booked $34,085 worth of work.
Thursday and Friday…
…of that week, I booked a training video for a brand new client in Texas, a corporate video for a Fortune 100 company through a production house here in Richmond, and an explainer video for a new and separate client in Texas.
Those three jobs totaled $1,150 for a grand, one week total of $35,235.
I was shocked, amazed, stunned, and petrified because I knew that to get all this work done on time and to give the clients a positive experience, I was going to have to quit my full-time day job and this was going to be the on-ramp to my full-time voiceover career.
So now why are you here? What's in it for you?
What do you notice about all the jobs above that I mentioned?
None of them came from pay to plays, online casting sites, or freelancer sites. They were all a direct result of my efforts, my system, my marketing, and my consistency.
Now, here's what you need to know:
Number one, as I said in the disclaimer, success like that in such a small window in one week is not typical for me, nor is a typical for most working professional voice actors. And it's not something I'm likely to recreate soon, but it still could happen again. I'm getting better opportunities. I'm getting more opportunities. I'm getting opportunities for national-scale work. And it's certainly not out of the realm of possibility that I can have another week with a big gig just like that again.
Number two, while I absolutely made all this happen through my own efforts and my system and such, the fact that this all happened in a very short amount of time is largely coincidence. That said, it's not entirely weird that this kind of success in a small window came in the month of January. January brings companies fresh fiscal years, oftentimes and oftentimes fresh budgets to spend.
Number three, remember how many people I reached out to? At least 100 a day. You don't create "luck" in air quotes like this when you're reaching out to two or five or ten or 20 people a day. You just don't. And you don't reach out to dozens and dozens of targeted leads each and every day without the tools and the processes to systematize that.
You need a plan and system and the right...Look, you don't build a five-bedroom house with a few nails and a staple gun and a putty knife. It just doesn't happen.
Alright, I'm off my soapbox.
Remember that client with the 51 training videos, that $23,000 and change job? We did end up doing all those training videos. And that August, after we finished the series, we had a beautiful phone call in which the client said, "Paulie, we love your work. We love working with you. We love our partnership. We love the product that we got. We've got three or four more lines of videos we want to do with you." And this is a quote. They actually said to me, "the work is virtually endless."
Two weeks later, they called and said, "The CEO wants a younger guy. Thanks for your time and take care."
50% of my income gone like that.
One of these days I'm going to do a video on how I survived that and how you can survive losing a large client.
Now, for more information on the VO Freedom Master Plan, click here and to get my Move Touch Inspire Newsletter for voice actors every week on Thursday, make sure you click here and subscribe to the newsletter.
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We'll see you again here soon. I am deeply grateful for your support. Thanks so much for reading and have a lovely, lovely week.