Surviving in VO – Growing Relationships & Income Streams
Alright, let's take voice over out of it for a minute, okay? One in four jobs in the next five years. This is not just voice over. This is globally. One in four jobs is set to change because of factors like artificial intelligence, global supply chain issues, green energy and digitization.
One in four. That's not just voice over. That's the world over.
Now, in the shorter term, AI is not the biggest threat, the biggest threats in the short term globally are slow economic growth, inflation and supply chain issues.
But it's clear in the next 5 to 10 years, maybe longer, that the ways that we go about finding work and generating personal income will change rapidly. But stick around because while there's a lot of not-so-great news, there's also a lot of great news for voice actors and freelancers who can learn to navigate this brave new world.
There's a lot to be made right now about the short, medium and long-term effects of AI in voiceover. But if we raise our heads above the water for a little bit, it's clear nobody is immune to this rapidly changing technology and the long tail effects of the pandemic and artificial intelligence and the ripples that those will have both within our industry and globally.
When I was a kid, back in the Pleistocene era, our parents' generation went to work for a company, usually worked there the lion's share of their career, and when they were done, when they retired, they were rewarded with a little pension, right? A little nest egg. That all began to shift in the 1980s.
I blame parachute pants and the mullet, but that's another video.
We now worship at the altar of the shareholder rather than the altar of the customer. And that has shifted risk from the corporation to the employee and has decimated loyalty on both sides of that aisle. Today, we lay off thousands of people, not because the company is struggling or fighting to survive or not, even because they're not profitable, but because they're not as profitable as people said they should be. They missed their projections. And so now we decimate thousands of families in one fell swoop like nothing ever happened.
We ruin family stability in the name of corporate greed and shareholder value.
We are more responsible now for generating our own income than we ever have been in the modern day. The worldwide freelance market is at $1.5 trillion and is expected to grow at 15% a year for the next several years.
In 2017, right here in the U.S., there were 57 million freelancers. By 2029, that number is expected to double, almost double, to 90 million freelancers in the U.S. and Gen Z they already choose freelancing over a steady paycheck at the rate of 53%.
How we work, how we generate personal income is changing quicker than ever before. It's more fragmented, it's more individual, and it's less stable than it ever has been.
So how, let s bring it back to the business for a minute, how do we, as voice actors, as freelancers, have any real hope and optimism in a world that is just changing like this?
First, we need to understand what hasn't changed, and that's change. Change has been the constant, literally forever. Yes, we deal with a higher pace of change than our parents did and our kids, they're going to be dealing with it even faster than we are.
But change itself is nothing new.
Second, we have to stop thinking about stable income, that a steady paycheck, as the norm. That ship has sailed, folks. And as more and more people shift to freelancing and side hustles and things like that, variable income is more and more becoming the norm.
In 2023, 44% of all Americans in the workforce are freelancing at some level. If you're a voice actor, you're one of them. The days of relying on one steady paycheck are wane.
Third, we need to come to grips with the fact that I absolutely will affect the scope and the kinds of work available to us as we move into the future. Some for the negative, some for the positive.
It's not just going to affect us voice actors. It's going to affect a lot of creatives.
Now, if you're truly looking to survive as a voice actor, you need to look at the genres that AI is likely to make quick inroads into and move away from those and move into genres that require a higher level of acting, of voice acting, and get really, really good at those genres.
Any work that takes a high level of performance and acting chops, things like in-show narration, documentary, promo, imaging, fictional audiobooks, certainly commercials. Those types of genres are going to be the last to fall to AI, if ever.
Genres that don't rely on heavy acting chops, things like audio description and IVR. Government training. Any compliance training really where somebody is just trying to check a box. Encyclopedic and data-driven sort of content. Bac nonfiction audiobook titles. Things like that where you don't need to really rely on your acting chops. That stuff is going to go to AI because it is more cost-effective.
Fourth, you're going to have to understand that what is now a gap or a divide between on one hand, new talent, less established talent, and on the other hand, more established talent, that gap or divide is going to widen to a chasm.
I saw this happen in my first career, in radio. When I came up, you started out doing weekends and overnights. Well, nobody does weekends and overnights anymore. They simply don't exist because of voice tracking. And as a result, radio has no farm system, no D-League, right? No talent development league. And so it's harder and harder for people to break into that industry.
And voiceover may go the same way.
It'll be harder and harder to get that low-level work starting out because that low-level work may not exist for human voice actors at some point anymore. And I think, I'm not sure, I'm not Nostradamus, but my impression is that the overall supply of work for human voice actors may start to shrink for the first time this century.
Fifth, unless you're a currently a well-established voice talent, you need to start thinking about how to stay in the game. Simon Sinek is an author, and he wrote a book called The Infinite Game, and he says that there are finite games and infinite games and business and life are both infinite games. The rules are constantly changing. The players are coming and going all the time.
And most importantly, there is no end of the game.
And the goal of an infinite game is not to win because there is no winning because the game is never over. The goal of an infinite game is to stay in the game as long as possible.
So when you're thinking about your voiceover career, your job is to stay in the game as long as possible, because ostensibly this line of work gives you joy and you want to get as much joy out of this as you possibly can.
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I'll put the link to the book The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek here.
Start thinking about additional income streams for you, for your family, and for your business, because that's going to be the way of the world moving forward. Less and less people will be relying on one stream of income.
Think about the problems that I will be more challenged to solve, the more human problems and how you can solve those for other people. You know, maybe it's your clients, your prospects, maybe it's something voice adjacent, maybe it's not. But start thinking about multiple income streams to help flesh out your personal income. What adjacent or ancillary services do you offer that maybe your clients could take advantage of? Do you proof? Do you write? Copy? Are you a photographer? Do you shoot or edit video?
Start thinking about yourself more like a freelance creative who does many things, even if primarily one of them is voiceover, rather than a voice talent who occasionally does other stuff. It's a subtle shift in perspective, but I think it's a big one, and I think it opens you up to find more and more kinds of work and be available for more kinds of work.
What products, what digital products, can you create and sell online? And I say digital products because you only have to create them once and you can sell them forever. The inventory is literally limitless.
If you're a full-time employee and you have side hustle, maybe it's voice acting, maybe it's something else. Start thinking about how you can use tools to scale your time because your time is your most valuable asset, especially if you're working two or more jobs.
Think about how you can use smart automation and other tools, like maybe even AI to help you scale your time. And if you can do that and properly structure and prioritize your time, it will have the maximum effect on growing your business.
How can you reduce your reliance on pay-to-play sites and on your agency representation? I'm not saying don't use either. I'm saying don't rely on them because the most stable way to grow your business is to grow your own relationships directly with your own clients. That way you're not subject to the whims of the algorithms and the pay-to-plays.
I know people personally who, with a change in the algorithm, have lost 40, 50, 60% of their income because they had too many eggs in the pay-to-play basket.
How can you maximize your profits so that you are working directly with clients and you don't forfeit 20% or more of the budget just because you're working with pay-to-plays? You can make that money yourself by working directly with your prospects.
How can you stop paying other people for the privilege of fighting over work with hundreds of other voice actors for the scraps that in a few years are going to go away anyway?
Moving forward, we're going to have to fend for ourselves more than we ever have before, which is fine for my liking. That puts my destiny in my control.
What we're going to have to recognize, though, is that's going to depend on building more relationships to feed those income streams than ever before. And if you don't have the skill to be able to reach out to strangers, to start conversations and grow relationships, you're going to need to develop that skill.
The days of a steady paycheck and a loyal employer and a pension nest egg have gone the way of the dodo bird. And the days of even setting up shop on the pay-to-plays and killing it - that ship has sailed. So, if you're going to survive, you're going to need to learn how to develop your own relationships. If you're going to really make it in this new world order.
Now, that's a lot of bad news, but the news is not all bad because if you're able to develop those skills and grow your own relationships, it will add not only a richness to your life through those relationships, but a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment that is just life-changing.
The freedom to do the kinds of work you want to do with people you like working with at the hours that you like to work in, the genres that you enjoy working in, and the flexibility that comes with that is just life-altering.
I tell people that I live like a millionaire. Now, I'm not one, but I truly believe that because I have flexibility that most of the millionaires I've ever met don't have. They spend 90 hours a week a slave to the golden goose, the flexibility I have and the freedom that I have as a freelancer is worth its weight in gold.
For more information on the VO Freedom Master Plan, on private one-on-one coaching with me, or on my brand new course, which comes out June 1st, VO Rates 101, click those links above.
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And once again, we are so thankful for your support. I am personally thankful for every one of you that watches this content, my videos, listens to us on the audio podcast, and most importantly, I'm grateful for you to continue this conversation and all the conversations that we have as a voiceover community in the freelance community.
I'm super, super grateful that we can exchange ideas and thoughts. Yes, we can disagree, but we can still be civil. And I appreciate you and I'm thankful for you. Thanks so much.
We'll see you next week and have a lovely one until then.