How To Survive Losing a Big Client: Voiceover Crisis Management
I was completely freaking out.
Seven months into my full time voiceover career, I lost my biggest and best client, one of my gateway clients, one of the ones that helped me make the leap to full time voiceover. I had lost a huge client and I had never seen it coming.
We had done 50 videos together. They loved me. They loved my work. We had a great relationship. I loved them. They would send me scripts. I would knock them out in a couple of hours. They would pay me within a couple of hours. My contacts, the people that I actually worked with, loved me.
We had a phone call two weeks prior where they said, “We love you, Paul. We love your work. We love our relationship. We have four more lines of videos we'd like to do with you." And then they said this, and this is an actual quote: "The work is virtually endless."
Two weeks later, they said, "Yeah, you know what? The CEO wants a younger-sounding guy. Thanks for your time. Goodbye."
Click.
With that phone call, 50% of my income evaporated instantly. In most cases, if you're paying attention, you can see this stuff coming. I was paying attention and I didn't see it coming.
Hence, I was completely freaking out.
I was a single dad, a one-income house. I had risked everything for voiceover. Not only that, but I had fled a job that not only I hated, but I knew I would be fired from and could not go back to.
What in the hell was I going to do? Well, I'll tell you what I did, and I think it'll help you if the same situation or one similar ever happens to you.
This is your VO Crisis Management Plan
First, as a newer voice talent, as a newer business person, you're going to have fewer clients, and that will leave you vulnerable. And there's really no way around that in the beginning. Until you have enough eggs in your basket where losing a big egg doesn't throw things completely out of whack. That's just going to be the reality until your business matures.
So your biggest priority, especially in the beginning, is going to be to grow and diversify your client portfolio as quickly as possible. Do not, repeat, do not rest on your laurels with one or two big clients. You absolutely must continue to seek out new, recurring clients of all sizes.
Look, I'm not suggesting that you turn down large clients at this stage of the game. You take all the work you can possibly get.
But if you do get a big client early, by all means, do not come off the gas and stop or slow down your direct marketing. That's a surefire way to get caught with your pants down. Trust me, I got a little fat and happy in the beginning and it put me in a much more vulnerable position than had I kept the pedal to the metal on my direct marketing.
I got lazy. I got too focused on the paid work coming in the door and I thought, "Aaah, you know what? This voiceover thing, this is a breeze." I had slowed down on what made me successful early, and that was my direct marketing, daily habits and behaviors.
And it cost me. Don't let it cost you.
As I said in the beginning, when you have fewer clients losing a big client makes you more vulnerable.
So sock as much money away when business is good, especially early so that when, not if, adversity hits, you'll have as much padding and cushion built up as possible to soften the blow.
Author Simon Sinek says in An Infinite Game, the object of an infinite game is to stay in the game as long as possible. And for entrepreneurs and yes, voice actors, business is an infinite game. The more you can constantly assess and plan for existential threats to your business, the ones that could sink you, the better you can plan for that, the longer you will stay in the game. I cannot stress enough the importance of crisis management in business.
Third, have a plan B. For me, going back and getting another crappy corporate job was not an option.
That was the one thing I was not willing to do. That, for me, was complete and utter failure. It may not be for you, and I'm not judging you either way. I promise. But in my case, I started driving for Lyft. It was the one thing I could do nights, weekends, outside of normal business hours, which I wanted to and needed to keep devoted to voiceover so that I could grow my business.
I could work nights and weekends, use those dormant hours during the week to bring some money in the door so that I could continue to use the business hours to replace that big client. It was more flexible than working at Home Depot, which I had done years earlier while I was building my book of business as a sales rep for another company.
Maybe for you, it's a part-time job. Maybe it's another full-time job, and you have to make voice over a side hustle again. Whatever it is, the idea is to stay in the voiceover game.
And fourth, you've got to start getting money in the door quickly. Now, if you watch my videos, you know, by now I beat the drum of long-term recurring clients.
Those are almost always better than one-off jobs. But those relationships take much longer to build than one-off jobs. Getting money in the door through auditions can bring in short- and medium-term revenue while you're still working to build those relationships, which will ultimately bring in long-term, recurring, stable revenue, which will even out your business.
This is one of the few times I recommend using the online casting sites commonly known as the pay-to-plays.
Now, to make this strategy work, you have to use a pay-to-play that has a high number of opportunities, a high number of jobs. You need the maximum number of audition opportunities that are right for you every day while you're still working to build those long-term relationships that lead to stable clients.
Now, that said, many of the reputable pay-to-plays just don't have enough work, enough jobs to make this strategy worthwhile on their own.
The one reputable pay-to-play that does is Voice123. That said, if you're new to Voice123.com and you don't book well early, that can sort of spiral in the algorithm can then end up working against you. So if you have the means to use multiple sites like VO Planet, like CastVoices, like Bodalgo, you can use those together to get the kind of volume that you need as long as you can handle the fees that come along with multiple platforms.
Now I cannot in good conscience recommend Voices.com for reasons that I've pretty clearly laid out in some of my other videos. But your business is not my business. In total transparency, Voices was the platform I used years ago when I hit this crisis that we're talking about today. I wasn't completely aware of their practices then, and they've gotten worse since.
I also can't in good conscience recommend the freelancer sites like Fiverr and Upwork and so on, especially for this strategy, because you'll spend all your time chasing $25 gigs, making shit money with clients who will work you to the bone and demand everything possible, leaving you no time to continue to market to pro clients who will gladly pay pro rates.
And not to mention, you can damage your career professionally and your reputation by working on some of these sites. But in the end, you have to decide what's workable and palatable and ethical for your business. You will likely have to make decisions that you're not comfortable with. You may have to hold your nose and close one eye. I get it.
But there's a big difference between someone who does what they have to do to stay in the game, to keep chasing their own dreams, and to make shit work, and someone who just sits on the freelancer sites picking off cheap jobs and undercutting professional rates just because it's easy and they're lazy and unethical.
You have to stay in the game, but you also have to sleep at night.
While I am vehemently opposed to the freelancer sites and some of the less reputable, unethical pay-to-play sites, you have to make the decisions for your own business. You're the one who has to do what you have to do for yourself, for your family, for your business, and for your situation. But remember, this is about crisis mode and about staying in the game as long as you have to while you build your business back up and restabilize it.
And as you do that, more and more of your time and effort should be spent shifted back to those recurring long-term relationships and your own direct marketing. And as you do that, you will be less vulnerable and your business will mature and stabilize. And so when a big client does, and they will, fly the coop, you are much less vulnerable. And the negative impact to your business will be much less proportionately.
You can survive losing a big fish early. You can even go on and as I have, go on to a very successful career in voiceover.
Now, to learn how to build those relationships at scale over time directly with clients so that you can build a solid, loyal, stable clientele of VO pro clients, check out the link for the VO Freedom Masterplan, and to get my Move Touch Inspire Newsletter for voice actors which comes out every Thursday just for you, click this link as well.
If you found this video helpful, if you think it will help other people, then help us help YouTube and the algorithm find those other voice actors with a like, subscribe, and maybe even bang that notification bell so that you'll be the first to know when we publish a new video.
As always, I'm hugely grateful for your support.
Thanks so much. And we'll see you back here real soon.