Marc Scott: Wisdom From The VOPreneur

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  0:02  
The sound off podcast. The show about podcast and broadcast starts now.

Matt Cundill  0:12  
Mark Scott saw his end coming for radio and made a really nice pivot for himself into voiceover. Now, I think the first thing a lot of people do find themselves on the outside of radio looking in is turn to voiceover. Not everyone manages to make the transition successfully, but Mark has

Marc Scott  0:30  
why Delta vacations inspired by hundreds of destinations with 1000s of accommodations. Come on, workaholics, it's time to turn off the phone and take off your shoes, he

Matt Cundill  0:42  
figured out a way to make voiceover a full time business event by paying attention to where the money comes from, acting like a business and marketing Well, you see, it's that last part that I'm fascinated with the most, because marketing oneself is hard, so if you're thinking long and hard about Making that pivot into voice over. Get out of patent paper and get ready to take some notes. And now. Mark Scott joins me from Hamilton, Ontario. Mark, does your story start in radio? My

Marc Scott  1:13  
story starts when I was I'm guessing, around 10 years old. Bought my first stereo that I was able to keep in my bedroom, which was very exciting. And I would sit and I would listen to Casey's top 40 and Rick D's in the weekly top 40. And I listened to Tarzan Dan do an afternoon drive on 680 at the time, and Jesse and gene in the morning. I would listen to them, and Cliff Dumas on 820 Cham and Hamilton, I'd listen to I'd listen to him, and I just thought all these guys had the greatest job in the world, because as near as I could tell, the shift was four hours long. And if you were Casey Kasem or Rick Dees, it was only four hours a week. And I was like, that's even better. So that's really where it started for me was, was that growing up listening to those guys, some of the legends of radio, Canadian radio, and view, well, I mean, Casey, Casey and Rick, these are famous worldwide, right? But listening to those guys and thinking, man, maybe that's what I want to do for the rest of my life. And so that was that kind of set the course from that, from that point forward, everything I did, every decision I made in school, like education, everything was with the intent of, I'm going to be one of these guys, one of these days, and you went to Mohawk. I did not. So I did a high school Co Op at a radio station in welland, Ontario. It was 1470 see how. And I remember going in and meeting with Pete Marina. He was the program director when I did do my interview for my co op, and he said, What do you want to get out of this? And I said, I want to get on the air. And he said, Well, let me just temper your expectations right now, we've never put a co op student on the air, and we will never put a co op student on the air. And I think within about the first three or four weeks, I was doing commercials for them, and before the end of my co op, I was actually swing shifting on the weekends. And then right after my co op finished, they actually brought me in for a couple of weeks to fill in for the morning show. Well, the morning guy went on vacation, and so that would have been the summer of I started my co op there, September 95 I ended up doing two semesters there and then worked for them part time in the in the summer of 96 I got hired full time at a radio station in Simcoe, Ontario in the fall of 96 so my thought process was, I'm going to work here for a year, I'm going to make some money, then I'm going to go to school. I had been accepted to the British Columbia Institute of Technology, which at the time, was supposed to be one of the premier schools for radio. So I was all excited about that. I had an aunt and uncle that lived in BC who were going to take me in. And everything was set, everything was arranged. And when it came time to get ready to go to school, I remember sitting down with my program director and talking to him about it, and he basically said, Look, I'm not going to tell you what to do. Obviously, this is your decision to make. But he said, you're already doing the job. And when I sat and thought, I was like, okay, so I can either stay here, collect a salary and do the job, or I can give up my salary, go to school, rack up a whole bunch of debt so that then I can graduate and then try to get the job, and so I made the decision to just stay in the job, like, and so I ended up not going to school for

Matt Cundill  4:26  
it. That comes up a few times where some people are like, like, one semester short of graduation, but they've already been hired on somewhere. So it's just like, you don't need to graduate. You're already this is your graduation jump right in.

Marc Scott  4:36  
I mean, that's it, right? I mean, there were guys that were coming out of school who couldn't find work, and here I was with a job, a secure job, at that point, as much as there was such a thing in radio, a little bit more so in the late 90s, but yeah, it just didn't make sense at that point to walk away and rack up $30,000 worth of debt. And so I stayed, and I ended up being there for almost three years. Dollars.

Matt Cundill  5:00  
I find it interesting though, you were reading commercials before you were on the air doing doing shows. That's unusual. Well,

Marc Scott  5:07  
the station that I was at was a smaller station. They only had two live announcers in the building. At that point, there was a morning show and a drive show, and then they were using uh, Palmer X saddle, you know, to fill in all in between. And so I gave them a different voice. Really was, was what became a big part of it. I mean, I proved that I was responsible, and I proved that I could handle the job. And so then I gave them a different voice to put into the rotation. And so it started out with, you know, do this one spot or whatever. And then it turned into, I would have a daily production run. I would come in and I produced all my own commercials at that point. And back in the day, some people won't remember this, but when it was like reels and carts, and you produced on the fly, and there was no such thing as digital editing, and it was good times,

Matt Cundill  5:52  
how much more radio did you do before you

Marc Scott  5:55  
stopped? So when I left Simcoe would have been probably around 1998 and at that point I actually went to do television a friend of mine was working out of the Crossroads center in Burlington, doing a music video show on CTS, the TV station CTS at the time, and I had gone into work with him one night just to see what it looks like inside of a TV studio. I thought that would be cool. And I got to meet his boss the following morning at a meeting, and I pitched his boss, just out of the, you know, just for the fun of it. Literally, I was like, Hey, have you ever thought about doing a music video countdown show? And that turned into them offering me the opportunity to do a music video countdown show. And so I started doing that. I think I was doing both the same time. I was doing the radio and TV thing for a little bit. But the the TV thing was overnights, because that was when we could get access to the studio. And so I ended up leaving radio, going into television, and I worked, I worked on that show for two or three years. I started doing an evening show at a Christian radio station in Oakville. So my day was like I'd leave for work at three o'clock in the afternoon, drive into Oakville. I would do a show from it was seven till 11 or eight till 11 in Oakville. Then I would drive 11 o'clock at night. I would drive from Oakville back to Burlington, and then I would work in Burlington at the TV station from 11 o'clock at night until anywhere between eight and 10 The following morning, then I'd drive an hour home, sleep for about three or four hours, and get up and start the whole process all over again. So I did the radio and TV thing for a while, did a second TV show for a different company, then went to Peterborough, and I was doing morning radio in Peterborough for a while. Then I worked in Brantford, at the radio station Branford for a few years and wrapped up in Hamilton, at K

Matt Cundill  7:45  
light. Tell me about that moment when you go, okay, the radio thing's kind of

Marc Scott  7:51  
done here. For me. It was at K light. I had got hired to do the afternoon drive show I started, like, a couple of weeks before fall ratings. And so what they had told me was, look, it's, you know, two weeks before fall ratings or whatever. So this book, don't worry about it. We're not going to judge you on it. We want to get you settled in, and then we'll take a look at things when, when we come in and come around to the next book. Well, I ended up delivering number one across the board, like every possible category, number one across the board, and then a couple months after that, I got downsized. And so I was like, if I can be number one across the board and not have job security, this is not a career that I want to be in anymore. That really broke me, I think, and I realized that by that point, consultants ran the industry, guys who weren't even in the radio station, like even the program directors didn't have any authority anymore. Like it was all just consultants sitting in an office somewhere who just were going off of whatever. It's almost like politics. It's like, I don't know, somebody did a poll and we decided, or whatever. I mean, at that point, K light was owned by astral. They were getting ready to sell out to Bell. So there was that was a factor, right? We got to make the package look more attractive, or whatever. And so there was a bunch of us that got downsized. But yeah, that was it for me. It was okay. Be number one, dominate. Have no job security. This is not a career I want to go back to. And so I got offered a few different opportunities. That would have been the end of January 2011 actually, January 29 I have it marked on my calendar. I call it my independence day, because that was where everything changed for me, and I went out on my own. But yeah, so I finished up K light, sat around and felt sorry for myself for a few weeks and tried to figure out what I was going to do. Had a few different offers for for radio, and just kept saying, no, no, no, didn't I just didn't think I could do it. By that point, I had already been doing voiceover just as a side hustle. I mean, anybody that's in radio knows that you you often need a side hustle if you want to make a decent living and pay the bills or whatever. And so I. I would say, by the fall of 2011 I got thinking, you know, maybe I, maybe I give this voiceover thing a shot and see what happens. Like at that point, I had continued to be able to pay my rent, which was really my priority. That was my measuring stick of success. Is my rent still paid? And so I decided to go for it. So then 2012 became my first full year as a full time voice actor.

Matt Cundill  10:19  
So in that first year, I'm trying to think of 2012 and what really, you know, what's the sandbox and what's the space for in here? So when you made that jump, you need to buy a microphone, you need to sort of build a studio. You're now moving into business. And I think, I mean, the greatest thing, and the most liberating thing, is that what you just spoke about, I no longer have people in a boardroom or somewhere else making decisions about my life and where I'm going, so now you get to make the choice, and you get to make the decisions on what you can do. And I'm trying to remember what the landscape for voiceover was like back then. Are we before or in the moment of pay to play? Are things like voices.com I think that existed Yeah, around there, and was fiver in there. So like, what choices did you make when you first started out? I remember

Marc Scott  11:06  
walking out of the radio station in my in a moment of complete poetry, I said to the guy that was walking me out, who also happened to be my now ex boss. From now on, the only idiot I answered to is me, and it seemed like a really good thing in the moment, later on, I realized what I had actually said, but, but that was, it was. It was a liberating moment, right? Like from now on, I get to decide, and that was pretty amazing. So the one thing that I had working in my favor was I had hosted a TV show in the early 2000s and that show, it was hosted by voiceover, and I was recording it from home. So I had a home studio going back to probably around 1999 I think maybe is when I got my first home studio set up. And it was really fun, because I remember going into it was central music in welland, Ontario, and telling the guy what I wanted to do. And I'd worked with them for other stuff before, but telling him how I wanted to set this home studio, and he's like, I don't even know. Like, they literally had no idea. So we had to do some research and figure out what kind of equipment to get and all that sort of stuff. And I, I built a room in my dad's basement and double insulated, and, you know, all this sort of stuff and and so I had had the home studio set up for a long time at that point, which made doing voiceover really easy. But yeah, 2012 was still, I refer to that period, kind of the glory days of online casting. So voices.com was there. Voice 123, was there? Smart cast existed, but it wasn't quite as brutal as it is today. That other site from London that shall remain nameless hadn't made some of the unethical business choices that they ultimately went on to make. And so, you know, there was a lot of voice actors who were doing really well on those platforms and making some decent money, and you could sustain yourself, I think, if you worked hard enough on those sites. And there wasn't near the level of competition at that point either, right? Like not nearly as many people sitting at home with a home studio trying to do all of this stuff. And so at that point, that was where the bulk of my work was coming from. Was from those online casting sites. But it was also around that same point, because I was now I had full time hours to put into it. That was when I started asking the question of if there are these people who are on these platforms who are hiring voice actors, it stands to reason that there's got to be at least a certain percentage of these people who haven't found online casting or aren't familiar with online casting, and they probably need voice actors too. So how do I go out and find them and build relationships with them directly. And so I do think that it was, you know, serendipitous maybe, that it happened to me at the time that it happened to me. Because, I mean, by that point, I was probably making 10 or $12,000 a year just as a side hustle in voiceover. And so to be able to add a little bit of extra income to be able to pay my rent. You got to keep in mind, this is 2012 and you could still, you know, affordably rent an apartment in Ontario without having to, you know, offer up a kidney or whatever, and so you didn't have to make quite as much money to sustain yourself. And I was a single guy, which was the other thing, right? No wife, no kids, no responsibilities, like, if I gotta eat craft and dinner and ramen noodles every night, like, who cares? And so I it was the perfect time for me to figure out that transition, because I didn't need a lot of money to get started, and I had a body of work from my time in broadcast that I was able to put together to make a series of demos as well, which I know you would never do that today, but back then, you know, you could, you could get away with that. And so I was, I was able to start up pretty cheap, too, because the home studio already existed. Body of Work of demos meant no $2,000 demo expenses and all that sort of stuff. Actually, I

Matt Cundill  14:55  
was thinking, 2012 Wow. That's a long time ago. And then I realized. Because, oh, I only got into the voiceover business about a year and a half or two years after you did, but one of the things that I found remarkable because I did go through and make some of the same mistakes that a lot of people do, and that's you get in touch with the online casting, but then you're stuck with it. And so, like you mentioned, you know, you're pulling in $15,000 a year. It's a side hustle, but that's not going to be a career. So tell me about that jump. When you go, I'm pulling in $15,000 a year on online casting, and now I'm going to jump and make it six figures. Tell me about that

Marc Scott  15:30  
trajectory. It was a four year trajectory, literally, I went from, I think in 2012 I think I made around 17, and I remember that like that was my first year full time, and my objective was pay the bills like I love my parents, but under no circumstances Am I moving back home with them like that was literally my motivation. And so by 2016 that was the first year that I crossed six figures, and that was the result of learning how to market. It was adding that into the mix with online casting. I knew I was only going to get so far with online casting, because there's, there's only so many jobs available. I'm not going to book them all. You know, there's, there's competition for all of those projects as well. So it was taking what I was learning from online casting, which was, Who are these people that are hiring on online casting. How do I go out and find 100 more of them, or 1000 more of them, or whatever, and then how do I get connected with them? And look, the first couple years, it was ugly, like it's a wonder that anybody ever hired me for anything. My my studio was okay, but it wasn't great for voiceover. My marketing was god awful, like I just didn't have a clue what I was doing, but I was hungry because I wasn't going home, and so I needed to learn it was that necessity became the driver. And so where some people will start out, and they'll invest a ton of money in voiceover programs and not there's anything wrong with that, but they're taking every class, going to every conference, working with every coach, etc. I was taking a bunch of my money, and I was doing entrepreneurship courses through Mohawk College, like online school, and I was attending marketing conferences in Nashville, and I was listening to marketing podcasts and reading books on sales and marketing and and I was really trying to research that side of it, because to me, that felt like that's where the growth opportunity comes from. And so it was that couple of years that I just deep dove into those things and really learning how to do those things that made the difference for me. And then I think, to a degree, it was year one, you have year one clients. Year two, you have new year two clients, plus your carryover from year one in year three, you've got your year two clients that carried over. You've got your year one clients that carried over. You've got your New Year three clients. And so as you work on that, it's like builds, like compound interest. And I think that's what really was the the biggest driver in setting my my income growth was that I didn't ever stop looking for new clients, even after I had an established base of clients that I was working with consistently.

Matt Cundill  18:13  
So one of the things they say just about everywhere, now and now, more than ever, do not build your business on rented ground. And if you're gonna pile your money into a casting site that appears to make your life easier, that is rented ground, why do so many people have trouble understanding that it's

Marc Scott  18:34  
easy access and instant gratification. I can go on to an online casting site and I can submit 100 auditions in a week and feel like I've just given myself access to 100 jobs, and I get the instant gratification of knowing I submitted an actual audition to an actual booking, whereas if I send 100 emails in a week, 10 or 15 people might ultimately respond to me, and three to five of them might ultimately hire me, and that might happen in a week, or it might happen in a year, and so you don't get that same level of instant gratification. I think where the payoff comes is in a lot of cases and not not all, but in a lot of cases, online casting is giving you access to one off opportunities, whereas I was trying to build relationships with clients who are just going to keep coming back to me, and that's ultimately what I did. And so I tell people all the time, like, look, this whole marketing thing, it's not get rich quick. Like it's the slowest way to get rich that you could probably do in this industry. But at the same time, I can look back when the nameless site from London made a whole bunch of changes to their rules on their platform. And I don't it was probably around very right around that time, maybe like 1314, or somewhere in there, and they made a whole bunch of new rule changes on their platform. They increased a bunch of their commissions. They added a bunch of hidden commissions. Questions, and so there were voice actors who were six figure earners, or close to six figure earners on that platform, who overnight lost half or more of their income, and now they're scrambling because they didn't own the clients. The platform owned the clients. I mean, look at what's going on right now, the sheer panic that ensued when Tiktok shut down in the United States for 24 hours, because there are people who have built their entire career on Tiktok, and I'm not talking just about voice actors, although there are a lot of voice actors that use it as their primary means of marketing, but influencers who built their entire million dollar, multi million dollar business on Tiktok, and Tiktok gets shut down in the US, and, boom, the faucet just got turned off, and you don't have an income anymore. It's a scary proposition. And so one of the things that I have learned over the years, and take any marketing one on one course from just about anybody, and they'll tell you, you have to have the clients. You have to own the clients. Like couple years ago, I had somebody coming after my business anonymously, and so they kept reporting me on a bunch of the different platforms. And so I got my youtube channel shut down for a while, and I got locked out of YouTube. I had my Facebook account shut down multiple times in a year, and got locked out of access to my Facebook group. And I've got 1000s of people in my Facebook group, but I also had almost 4000 people on an email list that nobody could take away from me, and so even though I couldn't communicate on Facebook anymore, which was frustrating. And, you know, I couldn't access my YouTube anymore or post videos or live, do live streams on YouTube anymore, which was frustrating. At least, I still had those 4000 email addresses so I could still get in front of people in some capacity. And so I don't think there's anything wrong with using the tools that are available to you. I think it's smart to use the tools that are available to you. I just think that you can't allow yourself to be exclusively reliant on those tools, because if you do not have ultimate control over them, then you do not have ultimate control over your business. And so then do you even really have a business? If

Matt Cundill  22:16  
anybody's listening to this and saying to themselves, that Mark might be wrong. I'm going to present a little example. And that's an evil casting site. So when a client goes to, you know, through one of those sites and orders up a voiceover and Mark voices it, and then the client at the other end gets the voice back and is happy with it and loves the work you've done, and then somebody says, Hey, that's a great force. Where'd you get it? Oh, I got it at evil casting psych.com, they don't say, Mark Scott. It's the same thing when you go and order online restaurant. Hey, what'd you have for dinner last night? Hey, we had Uber Eats. I don't know why people say that, but they say, oh, yeah, we had to skip the dishes. We had to skip the dishes. We watched the hockey game. This is the the thing with the online world is that the person the.com gets the credit. It's not the talent, it's not the restaurant, it's the it's Uber

Marc Scott  23:11  
Eats. Take the evil casting metaphor one step further. That same casting platform that somebody says, Oh, I hired that casting site or whatever. When I'm communicating with the client and we're going back and forth over the voiceover, it's all relatively anonymous as well. They don't know my full name, they don't have access to my email address. I don't know their full name, I don't have full access to their email address, so I can't even reach out to them off platform, because it's a violation of the terms of service of the platform. So if they, if I do, try to reach out and they find out, I can get kicked off. And so they're literally, you do not own the client. I don't care if you booked the job. In some instances, you do not own the client. Now, are there ways that you can find out, sure, have voice actors done it before? Sure? But ultimately, like you said, it's well, I got that through evil casting site. It's not I got that through mark. Here's his name and number, because they don't have my name and number at that point.

Matt Cundill  24:09  
Whenever I get an email from just about any platform that I'm working on and they said we're making changes 100 times out of 100 those changes are never in my

Marc Scott  24:19  
favor, nope, never in your favor. And that's it, right? They get you hooked. They get you reliant. And what do you do at that point? And so that's why I think it is so important that you have to have alternatives in place. And I have been, I think, wrongly labeled as the anti casting site guy. And everybody thinks that I hate online casting, and I doesn't matter how many times I say that is not the case, it still that's the label that's attached to me. I have no problem with any voice actor choosing to use an online casting platform. I think they are a tool in the toolbox, but that is it. They are a tool in the toolbox. They are not the only tool in the toolbox. If you are exclusively using online casting, I think you're putting yourself in your business at risk. If you do not know how to properly use that casting site, I think you put yourself in your business at risk. Imagine paying $888 for a year's access to an online casting platform that you didn't fully understand, and within three weeks, you have tanked your rankings on that site so bad that you will literally not get a decent opportunity for the rest of the year. So you just took $1,000 and flushed it down the toilet. I just don't think it's a smart way to do business.

Matt Cundill  25:34  
Something else that you said that's very, very smart, and that's if you want to bang on these casting sites, kind of wasting your time like you run a business. They run a business. If the businesses don't align, then fine, so be

Marc Scott  25:47  
it. That's it. And so if you're going to use them, then it's one of those things where, okay, I'm going to spend X number of hours a day on online casting. Great. Spend at least an equal amount of time getting your own clients in your own way that have nothing to do with online casting, so that if that site shuts down tomorrow or gets sold to a competitor or whatever, you are not losing your entire business. Think about a couple years ago when what was the big site That all the agents used, where they posted all their jobs, and it got bought out by cast something, yeah, and it was like the database where all the agents went to find work, and all of a sudden it got bought out by one of the casting sites, and overnight, it completely and utterly disrupted the entire agent model because they were completely reliant on a tool that they didn't own.

Matt Cundill  26:37  
So voiceovers.com that bought them.

Marc Scott  26:39  
I thought it was voices.com that bought them. Yes, you're right, yeah. But again, it just goes back to the original point, which is, in some way, you have to hedge against those types of things by diversifying where your auditions, your work and your clients are coming from. It's no different than you know, you can take your entire retirement portfolio and throw it all in one stock and take that bet, but if that bet goes south, you're not retiring anymore. Like, that's why you spread it across multiple equities, or you balance your portfolio in some way, like, it's just, it's, it's hedging, and that's what I think that we don't do enough of, because online casting is easy. It's easy to wake up in the morning and log into a site and see a bunch of auditions. It's not easy to go find a lead, figure out who to contact, find their email address, send them an email or whatever. But it doesn't matter if it's easy, if it

Matt Cundill  27:39  
works, there are some good online casting sites too out there. But again, oh, sure, it's up for people to make their own decision on which one's going to work for them. Because you and I can sit here and talk about the ones we're on, the ones we like, the ones we don't like. We can go on all day about this stuff, but I assume that the the advice that you're going to give is to implore people to do their research into it and make sure it aligns with their business. Make

Marc Scott  28:00  
sure that you understand exactly how it works. That's that's it this, just know what you're signing up for.

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  28:06  
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Mary Anne Ivison (Voiceover)  28:24  
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Matt Cundill  28:39  
Here's the other one that I find interesting, and that's rates. So tell me about establishing rates, because when you have all these things that are going on, including, you know, online casting sites, and we can get it from here, and we can get it from there, and there's this new AI thing over here, tell me about your business and holding the line when it comes to

Marc Scott  28:57  
rates. I am a big fan of the GBA rate guide. I think that was one of the smartest things that the voice things that the voiceover industry ever, ever did. And I'm grateful to gvaa for that and to David toback for that. But, and I've talked to David toback about this. We've had him on my podcast, and we've talked about it somewhere along the line, we made this distinction that the GVA rate guide was the gbaa rate gospel. And I think we do ourselves more harm than good when we look at it that way. Because if you go and buy a hamburger in, I don't know, downtown in New York City, and you go buy a hamburger in some random backwards town, and you know, name the state, those hamburgers are not going to cost the same amount, because there are a lot of factors that go into why that hamburger costs the way that it costs what it does. And that's where I don't think as much as we want to have a guide, and I think as much as it's important that we have a guide that says commercial should be in this range, explainer should be in this range, whatever. I think there are a lot of other factors that can. Come into play. And so I also think I know, I won't name names, but I know some of the biggest proponents of the the rate guide, who are insistent that they have never, ever in their life, booked jobs off of the rate guide, like off of those prices. This is this is it. I only use gvaa. I never sway from gvaa. I've lost jobs to a couple of them because they swerved so far off of gvaa that I was like, What the heck. So, you know, keep that in mind too. But I think you have to look at, where is the job. Where am I booking it? You have to understand that gvaa is a US rate guide. Rates in Canada are not even remotely close to GVA rate guides. Rates in a lot of European countries are not even remotely close to the GVA rate guide, and that is because the dollar in Canada is not worth what the dollar is in the United States, the economy of Finland is not the same size as the economy of the United States. And so there are so many factors that come into this. So I think having guides that we can turn to gvaa grateful for the brain is another great one. Having guides that we can turn to and look at and give us a frame of reference, I think, are really, really important, but we have to understand that they're not necessarily the be all, end all. But I still come back to the most important question that you can ask is, what is the budget that you are trying to work with? Give them the opportunity to say it first, then you can compare that budget to gvaa, right? But what I don't want to I always know that I have lost when the client happily accepts the first number. If they happily and instantly accept the first number that I throw down, I know I've left money on the table. Now, as long as I got the number that I was asking for, I got nothing to be upset about. But imagine booking a video for 500 bucks and then finding out that the client was going to pay 1500 because you spoke first, you lost out on $1,000 right? And so as much as possible, that's my question is, what? What kind of budget are you trying to stick with? And I'll certainly do my best to quote within it, and I try to give them the opportunity to say, Now, it doesn't always work, but it's a question that I will always ask, try to get them to speak first.

Matt Cundill  32:22  
That's such great advice. And a couple times I've quoted prices. Maybe I'll look at the guide and go there, and then you realize that you're working for the Fort St John Co Op. And I don't mind mentioning the Fort St John, British Columbia Co Op. That's my voice on it. I did it. It's very good, but it's certainly not going to be worth what something very big and national in Toronto is going to be for a big company. I love working with my client in Green Bay, Wisconsin. It's a real estate company. He's only selling real estate to people in Wisconsin and north and Door County. That's it. So it's what I call, sort of like smaller rates, or flyover rates, or I think you need to really sort of understand, you know, what the business is, where it's going to run, and how many eyeballs or ears you're going to get on what you're creating in order to license it out.

Marc Scott  33:15  
The thing that is most interesting to me about it is, if you look at commercial rates, we've structured commercial rates so that they're based on reach, right? A local commercial is not nearly as much as a regional commercial because it doesn't have the reach. A regional commercial is not nearly as much as a national commercial because it doesn't have the reach. And so we actually break it down by target markets, right? This is going in the Chicago market. This is going in the New York market. This is going in the whatever. And we rank those markets from one to 500 or whatever, and rates get determined based on the size of those markets. So what we are acknowledging in

Matt Cundill  33:54  
that is that size matters.

Marc Scott  33:59  
The rate is going to be higher for a commercial that's gonna reach 5 million people than it's going to be for a commercial that reaches 50,000 people. So we accept that in commercial, and we've built it into our rate structure in commercial, but then we expect that corporate videos, or explainer videos should just be universal across the board. Tell

Matt Cundill  34:17  
me about demos, a good demo versus a bad demo. What should be in a demo? And I'm asking this from from the beginner point of view, because I saw somebody going to reach to I got to get a demo, but it costs this much money, and then I suggested maybe you should get some training first before you go and push out the boat on a big demo. And two things that do come up is the demo first, and then people think of coaching later, but it should be the other way around.

Marc Scott  34:41  
Any demo producer that is willing to produce a demo for you before you have coached is a demo producer that you should absolutely not be working with. Like I can't imagine a scenario where that ends well for the voice actor. And I think sometimes we think of it. As the other way around. We think that we're going to get caught in this coaching trap, and they're just going to keep saying, Well, you need one more session, you need one more session, you need one more session. And we think that's a bad thing, but I think it can actually be a good thing, because if you're working with a reputable demo producer, their name is on the line as much as your name is. If you take a reputable demo producer, and they put out a really bad demo that hurts them and their business. It is not in their best interest to put out a bad demo. So if they tell you that you are not ready, it's probably not because they're trying to keep you in coaching longer. It's probably because they're trying to protect you and them at the same time and protect their reputation. So I absolutely think that you coach first ever before you go and get a demo. Because the other thing is, I think if you're a newer talent, I think if you do your coaching first, and you're working with a reputable coach, they're going to tell you before you get to the demo, yes, you have the potential for a viable career in voiceover or no, you do not have what it takes to have a viable career in voiceover. Whereas, if you sign up for one of these programs, that's, you know, six sessions and a demo, in the end, they have zero interest in whether or not you are going to succeed, because once you've paid them their 2000 or 5000 or whatever, they don't care, they'll give you your six sessions, which will be completely generic, probably group, and then they will give you your demo, and say, away you go. You're a voice actor now, and then you will have nothing. And so you have to be very, very careful about that. Demos are expensive. I don't love it, but you also have to think, if you're making six figures in voiceover, and you're making that off of, say, three or four genres, which means you've got, what, eight to $10,000 worth of demos, where else can you spend eight or 10,000 and turn it into 100,000 I've done okay in the stock market on certain things, but I haven't done that well. And so it's, you know, we hear all of the same analogies, right? You can't, you know, the plumber is not going to show up at your house without the tools. They got to invest in the tools or whatever. And you can throw out 1000 analogies, but really it's you got to look at it from the business standpoint. These are the things that are necessary for you to run your business. Now, can you self produce a demo for free? Sure. Can you book some voiceover work off of it? Maybe, depending on your production skills and who you're reaching out to, are you gonna soar through to six figure income and voiceover? Doubtful. I mean, I suppose there's always unicorns out there, but I just look at there are certain things that are just the necessary expense investment. I don't even like using the word invest expense. It's a necessary investment to launch your business. And if you are serious about launching your business and succeeding in your business, then there are certain things that you have to spend money on and and a demo is one of them.

Matt Cundill  38:15  
Is another a voice coach or training. I think

Marc Scott  38:18  
that is the very first thing you spend money on. And I think sometimes we get it wrong. We go out and build logos and websites and business cards, and we buy our microphone and all of this other stuff, and then we go and spend money on coaching. And I think that's completely backwards. I think the coaching is the very first thing that you should ever spend a dime on, because going back to the point I made earlier, that coach might tell you you can't do this. Well, if I can't do this, I would rather find out before I've spent all the money on the other stuff than after, and I also don't want to go out and buy all the wrong stuff. Just because there's a microphone that plugs into your computer doesn't mean that it's a great microphone. It doesn't mean that it's the microphone that you should be using this Sure, SM, 7b that I'm using for this podcast. I'm not running a voiceover business on this thing, but it's the first mic that a lot of people will go out and buy, because it's the one that they see Joe Rogan use, or whatever. And so well, that's got to be a great microphone. So you, if you don't know what you're doing, you run the risk of being able to go out and spend a lot of money on a lot of the wrong things, and so I think the coach is the very first thing that you should spend money on. Once that coach tells you that you are demo ready and you're going to record that demo, then let's have a conversation with somebody about a home studio, and what is the space that you're going to record in, and what does that space look like, and what microphone would work best for that space, and what treatment should you or should you not put in that space? And so you have the conversations in the right order. But I definitely think that it all starts with working with a coach.

Matt Cundill  39:50  
We have a lot of radio people who listen to this show, so I think we need to address that being a radio announcer and voice. Some commercials at the radio station does not qualify you to do this.

Marc Scott  40:04  
I had the demo Dream Team on my podcast recently. It's Steven, Michelle Sun home, Melissa Disney and Ryan, Paul James, and they're one of the top demo producers for voice actors. And Ryan comes from a radio background as well. And we we talked on the show, and I said, you know, it would have been easier for me to come to voiceover having spent a career in farming than it would have coming to voice over having spent a career in radio, because I have not been on the air since 2011 and I still sometimes struggle to shake the announcer voice. Whereas if I had been a farmer, I would not have an announcer voice that I was I was trying to shake and so I'm not saying you can't come from radio and do voiceover. Obviously you can have done it. I'm saying it's probably going to be a lot harder than you think, because what sells in voiceover is not generally what sells in radio, although, when you listen to radio now, and I don't listen to terrestrial radio a lot because I'm still bitter, but when you listen to terrestrial radio now, you do hear a difference in the commercials. So the industry started to figure it out, right? It's not all the same as it was back in the RIP and read days of the late 90s when I was first getting started. But yeah, you're going to have to work on that, because it's a totally different approach to how you use your voice.

Matt Cundill  41:28  
So same advice, by the way, if you're going to go from radio to podcast, you actually have to unlearn a whole bunch of things. Podcasting is more like magazines and blogs than radio, but this I dying to ask you, and that's because you're into marketing, marketing your voiceover business, and you've got a podcast. So tell me about the impact that the podcast has had on marketing your business.

Marc Scott  41:50  
I would say the podcast has successfully resulted in $0 worth of voiceover work at this point. But my podcast is also I'm doing it for a different reason, and so on the coaching side, my podcast has been a huge driver. It really has, because before you are going to spend money with someone, you need to know like and trust that person. And I think the podcast has been one of the best tools that I've ever had at giving people the opportunity to know, like and trust me, because, I mean, I guess you can technically hide on a podcast, but if you're doing a podcast that is authentic to you, and you're speaking in a way that is authentic to you, and I don't mean your voice, I mean in what you're saying and in what you're sharing and in how you're saying it and sharing it, I think it gives people an opportunity to decide whether or not they know like and trust you, and I see consistently when people are booking sessions with me that they're referencing back to the podcast is where they first found out about me. And I think part of that is also just the rise in popularity of the podcast. They're so like, you can take a podcast with you anywhere, which is so great, and so you can listen and learn. And one of the things that I've been studying Gen Z a lot, because the older Gen Z's are now starting to move into the workforce more and starting to become buyers more. And so I've been reading a lot of books and starting to understand them a lot more. And this is a generation that is not really known life without YouTube, Tiktok or podcasts. And so whereas my generation, the very first thing that we would tend to do, and we want to learn something is we go to Google and we search it. They're going to their podcast app, or they're going to YouTube, or they're going to Tiktok, and they're searching it, and that's how they find information. That's how they discern between good and bad information, like that's how they learn how to do things. Is, you know, they're not reading blogs at the same level that my generation did. They're not reading books at the same level that my generation did. They're looking for videos and podcasts, and that's how they learn. And so I think if you've got a good podcast that offers good information, I think that makes a big difference, and so that has been a huge driver for me on the coaching side. How do you take care of your voice? Try not to use it too much. Honestly, I will be the first person to admit that when it comes to vocal health and vocal care, I am probably one of the worst that there is. I don't really do anything that I should. But I'm also not doing a lot of really strenuous and labor intensive like, I don't have marathon sessions in the booth. I'm not doing characters and screaming and making animal sounds and all of that sort of stuff. Like, when I'm in the booth, if I'm in the booth if I'm in the booth for an extended period of time, it's probably because I'm recording e learning. So it's not the it's not the most strenuous thing that I have to do, and I can just take breaks in between and stuff like that. But I I will say I had Shauna Pennington Baird on my show last year, and we talked about vocal health. She's She knows a lot. Thought about that subject, and she had taught me this little trick with straws, and you put a straw in your mouth and blow your straw or whatever. And I took the straw with me. I did that at VO Atlanta last year, and I was trying to decide it's like, okay, I came on the air sick once before, when I was working in radio, and this sweet lady calls into the radio station and says, Look, Mark, you've been sick for a while. I want you to get feeling get feeling better. So here's what you got to do. You got to take this vix Vapor Rub. You got to put it on your feet. Then you got to sleep with your socks on. And that's what's going to make you feel better. And I'm listening to this lady and thinking, like I'm totally getting punked live on the air right now, right like I brought her on the air. And so I'm thinking she's just doing this to see if I'm dumb enough to actually do it. When I had Shauna on my show and she started showing me all these straw things, I was like, Okay, I'm totally getting punked right now, like she's just doing this to see if I'm dumb enough to actually fall for it and do it. I did it at VO Atlanta. I would not have survived that conference without it. I've never talked so much in my life as I talk at VO Atlanta, because it's just like 16 hours a day of non stop communication with people, right? So I would go back to the room or on lunch break, or if I went out for dinner or whatever, and I'd be sitting there with the straw, doing the straw thing. And I was like, Holy crap. This really works. This is not just some crazy old wives tale. I am not being punked right now. And so that is one of the things that I have. I did this monster e learning job late last year, one of the biggest e learning jobs that I've ever done, and I had some marathon days in the booth because it was a tight deadline, and I did the straw thing. And I was like, Holy crap, this. This actually really does work. So I don't do it as often as I should. I certainly don't care for my voice every day like I probably should drink a lot of water. I'll drink a lot of Dr Pepper, which is not doing it any favors. But yeah, the straw thing. There's something to that.

Matt Cundill  46:41  
If you want to look it up on YouTube, by the way, you can just Google straw phonation. We've had an appearance on the show. Tara sands talked a little bit about that. We went into a little bit of detail on that, but it was also one of the things that she did to keep herself sharp. And she does crazy.

Marc Scott  46:56  
How good it works. Like you could, you could feel the results almost instantly. It changes

Matt Cundill  47:00  
my read when I do it, like I'll actually jump in to do it, and then all of a sudden, I feel it's almost like tuning your voice the way you tuned a guitar or piano, for anyone who wants to jump into voiceover. And I've had a few requests for this. So you know, what are the first two or three things? Just to consider that are top line so nobody rushes in and does something Looney.

Marc Scott  47:20  
I think that if you are going to get into voiceover in the right way, I think that you should probably expect to invest anywhere from 10 to $20,000 at minimum. And when people come to me and say, My grandma's sister's friend's brother told me I have a really nice voice, and I should do voiceover that is actually one of the first things that I tell them. I said, you are going to spend at minimum 10 to $20,000 to get started if you're going to get started the right way. The people who are still with me after that Revelation are the ones that I will continue the conversation with, which is, you know about this, many of the people, and I don't say that in jest. I say that in you are going to spend, I mean, a good demo, a good, reputable producer doing your demo. Now is 2000 to 2500 bucks us, and you're going to need a couple of those, and you're easily going to spend a couple $1,000 starting up your home studio, buying a microphone, all that sort of stuff. You're easily going to spend $1,000 getting your website up and running. You're easily going to spend a few $1,000 again, I'm talking us, because all the people that I know and work with their us coaches and whatnot, but you're easily going to spend at least a couple $1,000 in US dollars coaching like it does not take long for those things to pile up. So if you are aware of that and prepared for that, and you are still ready to go, I think, and hopefully you don't mind the plug, I think that a site like gravy for the brain is one of the smartest initial investments that you can make, because for a very low monthly fee, you can sign up for a site like that for a couple of months and just fully immerse yourself in almost every topic of voiceover imaginable, from performance to setting up your studio, to every genre that you could possibly think of, to what goes into producing a demo, to how to market yourself, how to use social media, how to network, all like literally name the subject. And I'm pretty sure that gravy for the brain has covered it. And so you can spend, I don't even know what it is, 50, $60 a month, or something like that, maybe. And you could literally pour through countless hours of content as you are going through that content, and really starting to get a clearer picture of what the voiceover industry is, what is involved in voiceover. The other. Thing that you are accomplishing is, in my opinion, anybody that has been affiliated with something like gravy for the brain, they're very particular about who gets to come and present and who gets to speak. One of the hardest parts of this industry is figuring out who the right people are to get connected with, because there are a lot of people out there who have really fancy internet platforms, or appear to have really fancy internet platforms, but they're not actually going to do anything good for you and your business. They're just going to take your money and leave you screwed in the end. And so trying to discern who the right people are can be a challenge. And so if you go through something like a gravy for the brain, you watch the webinars, you participate in all the training, you're also going to get a sense of, okay, you know what? I really like that coach, or I really like the way that producer does things. I think that's the kind of person I wanna get connected with. And I'm not affiliated with gravy for the brain, to be clear. So I don't get anything by telling you this, but I really just think it's one of the smartest places to start if you're coming from nowhere, like I don't know where to go, I don't know what my first step is. I think something like that can be a really low cost way of exploring voiceover, much more so than, you know, dropping 234, $5,000 on one of these ads that you see online that says, you know, six sessions and a demo, and you can start your own career in voiceover, or whatever mark.

Matt Cundill  51:19  
I've been dying to do this for, oh, nearly five years, but I'm glad we finally got together, better late than never, I know. Thank you very much. Yeah, man, I appreciate it. Thank you for having me on the

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  51:30  
sound off podcast is written and hosted by Matt Cundill, produced by Evan serminsky, edited by Taylor MacLean, social media by Aiden glassy, another great creation from the sound off media company. There's always more at sound off podcast.com you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai