Sometimes a friendly email or phone reminder is all it takes for a payment to be sent. Your clients are busy, and they may have simply forgotten to make the payment. In other instances, people may be on vacation, and the payment may be sitting on someone’s desk.
You can let a client know that you mean business without being invasive or argumentative. Reinforce the reasons why you expect to be compensated and be very clear that you fulfilled your end of the agreement. You’re a professional and deserve to be paid on time and at the rate you arranged with the client. Remember, this is your bread and butter, and if you need this payment to make essential living expenses, demand that your client follows through and compensates you accordingly.
Go to collections: If your client hasn’t taken the hint or refuses to budge, collections agencies can help you hound the client until the client pays for your services. These agencies charge a commission fee and subtract it from the money that they have acquired for you from your client. These fees vary depending on the agency, so contact at least three agencies to receive quotes for your predicament. You may wish to do this as a last resort for outstanding payments of a substantial amount that are more than 90 days late. Small claims court may be a better option, depending on your situation.
File a claim in small claims court. If you find that your efforts to secure payment are falling on deaf ears, consider taking the client to a small claims court. This option is best for individuals who are both working in the same municipality or region because you’re closer to each other, which improves your chances of receiving what you’re owed. Though going to small claims court may be time consuming, it’s worth your investment when you receive the payment for your services. You don’t need a lawyer to represent you, only your evidence and conviction. After a client receives notice that you’re suing him, the client usually immediately pays you to save face or to quickly end the affair. Note that small claims courts usually have limits. Having a written agreement with the client prior to working together pays off here because you can bring it to court as evidence.
Seeing your name on the Top 100
The Featured Voice Talent are the most active community members at Voices.com. The Top 10 are listed on our home page and the Top 100 are listed on a separate page dedicated to the Top 100. The categories include New Voices, Most Listens, Recently Hired, and Top Favorites.
New Voices: These are the newest Premium and Preferred voice actor members who have registered at the website or recently renewed their accounts. It’s a way for them to gain some immediate exposure as well as a way to make a quick return on investment.
Most Listens: Voice actors who receive the most plays or downloads of their audio files at Voices.com are recognized on this list. You can view three different Most Listens lists, including all time, this week, and this month.
Top Favorites: People in this list have been most favored by clients. You can view three different lists, including all time, this week, and this month. Clients who are logged in to their accounts can favorite voice actors by clicking the “Add to Favorites” link in the search results, audition submissions, or on a voice actor’s website at Voices.com.
Recently Hired: This category identifies voice actors who have been hired within the past several hours by clients using the SurePay escrow service. This list updates as audio files are accepted and approved by clients hiring voice actors. You can view three different lists, including all time, this week, and this month.
Chapter 16
Nurturing Your Business
In This Chapter
Getting organized for success
Hiring an agent
Being your own agent
Creating a winning team
Considering a union
You’ve made the decision that you want to become a voice actor. Now what? In order to be successful in this endeavor, you need to develop a plan to help nurture your business. Being prepared and organized can help you reach success. If you don’t know what you want, then you don’t know where to go.
Planning for this success makes sense. This chapter shows you how to nurture your business and prepare for success by sharing tips for how you can build your business by managing your customers and organizing contacts, using an agent or going on your own, and having a strong team.
Applying Joe’s advice
Voice-over industry announcer and icon, Joe Cipriano, shared some wonderful thoughts when commenting on a Voices.com blog post pertaining to achieving your goals. Encouraging and straightforward, Joe said, “Work on your goal at least one hour a day. Whenever I identify a new goal, I utilize this same strategy. It’s very difficult to keep to that relentless schedule of focusing on your dream or goal and doing something to move it forward each and every day. But I have found that if you have that commitment and attitude, you will succeed.”
So you can take Joe’s words of wisdom and apply them in your voice acting business in the following ways:
Identify a goal. Pinpoint what you want to achieve. Be very specific.
Commit to working toward your goal. Pledge to yourself that you will do whatever it takes to reach your goal.
Work toward your goal for at least one hour a day. Create time in your day for working toward achieving your goal, making incremental advances to get you closer to the mark.
Have a good attitude. See each step in the journey as something that will build you professionally and help you achieve your goal.
Be prepared for success. After you achieve your goal, you’ll start to see the results of doing so. Be ready for opportunities that may come your way.
Keeping Everything Organized
To run an efficient voice-over business, you need to have the tools of the trade to manage your customers.
Before you start contacting potential clients, you need to develop a system that stores contact information, such as names, phone numbers, and email addresses. This practice, customer relationship management (CRM), is a software system that manages your potential and current customers. Look into a simple CRM system early on (many of them are free) that allows you to track the following:
Client names, addresses, and contact information
Tasks and events
Marketing activities
Sales opportunities and invoicing
Projects and other work-related documents
The following sections identify the different ways CRM can help you operate your voice-over business.
Managing your clients, day to day
Developing and maintaining your CRM database is essential in order to run your everyday business operations. A CRM system provides a way that you can manage all your contacts, your calendar, and your communications in one central location. For example, you can keep a file on each client that you have worked for or have been in contact with for future opportunities. Storing the client’s information not only makes it available to you when you need to contact clients, but it also keeps track of your business relationships and enables you to cater to each client on an individual basis.
Having a system to manage your business’s most valuable asset, your clients, can prove to be well worth the investment of your time. After you get one, you need to decide the best way to host your information. We discuss your hosting options in the following sections.
Installing it on your PC
You can choose to install your CRM software on your personal computer. Having it there does have some great benefits. You know that your clients’ contact information is readily available as long as you’re near your computer. Furthermore, software installed on a local machine is generally faster.
On the downside, you need to get in a routine of backing up your data to a CD-R or to another computer. In the event you get a virus or your computer crashes, you can rest assured tha
t all vital contact details, notes, and documentation have been saved to an external source. Software such as Act, Goldmine, and Daylight are all great CMS products.
Although contact management software, such as Microsoft Outlook for PC users or Apple Mail and Address Book for Mac users, aren’t full-blown CRM solutions, they’re good starting points if you’re new to the business. The bottom line is that you need something to keep yourself organized.
Accessing your database from anywhere
If you do a lot of traveling or you like the idea of logging into a system, you may want to consider a web-based, also called a web-hosted, CRM solution. The single most significant benefit of hosted software is that you can access your information anytime from anywhere in the world, no matter if you’re in San Francisco or Sydney, South Carolina or Saskatchewan. If you’re at a client appointment, in a studio, or at a coffee shop, you can quickly create a new customer contact, jot down the time of your next meeting, or send a quote for your services.
Hosted CRM providers back up your data on a daily basis and store your business information on bank-level secure web servers. Hosted software solutions, such as Salesforce.com, NetSuite, Sugar CRM, Zoho Office, or 37 Signals’ HighRise, are good investments to consider, allowing you to access your CRM database wherever an Internet connection can be made.
Going with a web-based, dedicated work calendar
Nothing irks a client more than a missed deadline or skipped meeting, so you want to make sure you keep a detailed calendar. Your calendar is the most important organizational tool that you have. It can save time and is a record of your successes for extended periods.
A web-based, dedicated work calendar can make sure you meet all deadlines and attend all client meetings. You can access the calendar from a smartphone or any other computer as long as you have Internet access. Several free web-based calendars are available, including Google, Apple Calendar, and 30 Boxes.
To avoid confusion, we suggest you keep separate calendars for home and work, and both electronic and hard copy if you need a physical reminder. Keeping separate calendars for work and home can help you to maintain a work-life balance, keeping all related things in one place. Some calendars do let you identify events as work or home related, such as with Apple’s Calendar. Be sure that you have set up alerts on your calendars so that you know when something is coming up. A hard copy is good for people who need to write things out so that they can more clearly remember their commitments.
Another benefit of a web-based calendar is that you can keep notes there so you have a firm grasp of the project, which can eliminate potential misunderstandings. If anyone makes any errors or the project exceeds its original specifications, you can easily refer to your notes and politely inform the client as to how you originally quoted. Manage your bill payments and ensure that the client pays pay on time (if not, you can charge interest). (Refer to Chapter 15 for other ways to manage your invoices.)
Keeping a task list
A task list allows you to prioritize your daily, weekly, and even monthly activities so you’re working most effectively and not feeling burned out after a day of business. A simple method to assign the three designations on your to-do list:
High priority: High priority tasks may include following up with a client who is interested in working with you, finalizing a script, booking a studio session, delivering finished work, or sending an invoice.
Medium priority: Medium priority tasks may include submitting auditions, sending out emails to prospective clients, working on your website or web page, or even following up with existing clients that you haven’t heard from in a while.
Low priority: Low priority tasks may be researching new equipment or looking into getting an agent. These tasks are often engaging, but also can distract you from earning a living because they take up precious time that you could be using to get work done or pursue revenue-generating opportunities. Never let something that should be a lower priority overtake items on your list that deserve to be higher priorities.
Organizing your contacts
A great way to organize your contacts is by how likely they are to do business with you in the future. Assign a customer status for each client so you focus your time on those clients who prove to be most profitable. The three most common categories are as follows:
Prospect: A new contact to whom you have yet to make a formal introduction in person, on the phone, or by email.
Lead: After you connect with a client, you can upgrade her status to that of a lead, sometimes referred to as a warm lead or a hot lead. At this stage, you may set up an appointment, send a proposal, submit your voice-over demo, and send your rate card.
Customer: When a client agrees to do business, she is now officially a customer. If a financial transaction has occurred, the party in question is a paying customer. You need to designate as such in your contacts.
No matter whether you’re dealing with a prospect, lead, or customer, make sure you treat them all with the highest respect. You never know when a prospect or lead can turn into a paying customer. These sections provide a few suggestions on how you can move your prospects and leads into the customer column.
Mining your database
Knowing your prospects and leads and giving them what they want are the fundamental principles of marketing. This principle is simple in theory, but increasingly challenging to put into practice. Discovering what your prospects and leads are thinking isn’t easy, but with some investigating and effort, you can see the fruits of your labor. Here are some suggestions:
Research the company’s website for information.
Keep in touch by email or telephone to make inquiries regarding their needs.
If they’re past customers, you can send them newsletters and occasional promotional materials, which may spark their interest and lead to work opportunities.
Staying in touch
Friendly follow-ups go a long way in ensuring that you continue to win the business of your customers. Be consistent and persistent in your follow-up campaigns. Try out these ideas:
Verify the customer received your product and that it was successfully implemented. Refer to Chapter 21 for additional information.
Ask for a testimonial. Doing so can help build your credibility for future employment opportunities. Refer to Chapter 9 for how to get and use a testimonial.
Try sending holiday cards, thank you cards, or cards that mark the anniversary of the day you first did business.
Make quick phone calls to let clients know you’re available for future projects. They can keep you in your clients’ awareness.
Tracking your work and being accountable
At the end of the year, you want to be able to look back and quickly reference the work that you’ve done. One great way to do keep reliable records of your work is to use digital filing cabinets. For each job you have booked, you can archive relevant information, such as communications with the client, the script, quotes and invoices, and the audio you produced for that client.
You also want to keep track of your work so that you can declare it as income at tax time. You can use accounting software, such as QuickBooks or Simply Accounting. QuickBooks even comes as an online version with a free mobile app, giving you anytime-anywhere access to your accounting information. Excel spreadsheets are also good options.
Furthermore, we recommend that you keep a daily journal so that you can chronicle and track your progress. You can then periodically refer back to the private journal to see how you’re doing.
If you want help from others on ways to be accountable, you can start a blog or post updates about your progress to family and friends via social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter.
Marketing your services
A good marketing system allows you to inform prospective clients and current
customers about your services and what you can do for them. This system tracks which marketing initiatives are working and which aren’t. Most marketing systems are tucked away in a CRM database, but you can also create a basic marketing system using an Excel spreadsheet. You can do so by having a section on each customer record called a lead source. A lead source is the original marketing initiative that caused the customer to do business with you.
Lead sources include
Your website
Your profile on a voice acting site, such as www.elance.com
Direct mail or postcard
Conference or event
Cold call
Referral or word of mouth
You can find out which lead source each of your clients used by simply asking “Do you recall where you first heard about my services?” When they reply, immediately add the information to your tracking system. Each customer ideally has a lead source, but some may not, which is okay. You can later look back at your best customers and see which marketing initiatives really paid off. Then, next month and next year, focus your efforts exclusively on those initiatives(Chapter 9 covers marketing in more detail).
Getting an Agent
Having an agent is one of the most attractive relationships in business for voice actors. An agent is another person, or even a team of people, who help you get work. An agent has his own connections and can send you for casting calls or promote your voice throughout his network.
This section walks you through some expectations an agent has of you, how you can find an agent right for you, and how to get the attention of those in a position to represent you and help you get work.
Knowing what an agent can do for you
Before you go looking for an agent, you need to know what an agent does and what an agent expects of his voice actors. An agent manages relationships between voice actors and the end client, including the auditioning process, casting to a degree, and the billing related to the job. An agent’s role is to qualify voice actors for opportunities to reach a successful end. Agents can have relationships with companies they directly work with as well as pursue opportunities through online marketplaces where they can promote their voice actors.
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