In this insightful episode of the Real BOSSES series, Anne Ganguzza and Tom Dheere delve into the unpredictable landscape of social media and its implications for entrepreneurs. As platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok face increasing political and operational challenges and changes, The BOSSES discuss the importance of adapting business strategies to ensure continued success. They share actionable insights on how to diversify marketing efforts and build resilient communities, emphasizing the significance of maintaining control over one’s audience through robust mailing lists and finding alternate platforms. 00:01 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Let's create your next demo together. As an award-winning demo producer, I'll work closely with you to craft a demo reel that showcases your unique talents and strengths. My personalized approach is going to ensure that your demo stands out from the crowd and gets you booked. Book a free 20-minute consult today and get started at anneganguzza.com. 

00:28 - Intro (Announcement) It's time to take your business to the next level, the boss level. These are the premier business owner strategies and successes being utilized by the industry's top talent today. Rock your business like a boss, a VO boss. Now let's welcome your host, Anne Ganguzza. Hey, hey, everyone. 

00:45 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Welcome to the VO Boss. Now let's welcome your host, Anne Ganguzza. Hey, hey everyone. Welcome to the VO Boss podcast and the Real Boss series. I'm here with my good friend, Tom Dheere. Hey, Tom, how are you? 

00:55 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) I am good, how are you? 

00:58 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I'm doing good, but I'll tell you what. Social media is kind of a mess lately, isn't it? 

01:04 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Oh my God, yeah it, oh my God, yeah. Oh my God, to say the least, it has been insane the past couple of weeks. 

01:10 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Oh, TikTok shutting down people fleeing off platforms. It's been insane and I think something that, as business owners, we've used for years right to promote our businesses is now somewhat becoming unstable and unpredictable, and I think we should chat about this. What can we do to kind of counteract? 

01:31 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) that that's a great question. Well, I will say that literally this morning on Facebook, I saw two friends of mine who run Facebook voiceover groups who basically posted the same exact post, which was we know a lot of you are leaving Facebook right now. It's gotten very politically charged, it's gotten very toxic. You've all mentioned that how your feeds are changing and it's just getting really, really weird. And they both did the same thing in that they said we will continue to be loving and supporting of all voice actors, regardless of your affiliation, regardless of what's going on in the outside world. And there was a chorus of support and concern at the same time. 

02:08 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Well, I think the community that we feel that we've established on these platforms is, and now the platforms are unstable or toxic. And so now our community because we work independently and our community has been online for all these years and now, all of a sudden, it's just become a place where maybe not everybody wants to hang out anymore. 

02:28 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Yeah, there's four platforms which everybody seems to be sharing the most concern about Facebook, instagram, because those are both owned by the same company Meta Twitter, now known as X, which has been a point of concern for a couple of years now, since it was purchased. As X, which has been a point of concern for a couple of years now since it was purchased, and, like you just said, tiktok, because of the concerns that have been expressed and the affiliation that it has and the fact that it went down for less than 24 hours and then it was rescued. 

02:57 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) It was like a mass hysteria. Well, you know what else? It wasn't just TikTok, it was anything owned by TikTok, which I was aware, but I kind of forgot. I use CapCut, which is the video editing program, and I spent a considerable amount of time like learning it and all of a sudden my CapCut was gone and I'm like, oh no, I guess I need a new video app. 

03:15 It was kind of good in a way, so that we all could step back and say, all right, let's not put the proverbial all our eggs in one basket, like we've always been saying about pay-to-plays. Right, you don't want to put all of your eggs in one basket with pay-to-plays. That can't be your only way to make income, and social media may not be the only way that we can have community. So let's talk, tom, about how we might be able to incorporate community and also incorporate. Let's say how are we going to market to our potential clients? What can we do to create a sense of community? And I mean my first idea that comes to mind is let's go back to old school, right? Let's create a mailing list, right? That's something that we own. We're not dependent upon a social media platform that we don't own. We own our own lists. 

03:59 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Yes, when it comes to that, both social media and curating lists of potential, current and past clients both fall in the bucket of self-marketing. Having a social media presence, creating a sense of community, trying to interact with clients potentially that's a form of indirect or passive marketing. And then curating lists of clients cold calls, cold emails, newsletters those are all forms of direct or active marketing strategies. So both of them have their merits. But to your point, if the four, at least the four social media platforms that we just talked about, are unstable on both a cultural view, political, socioeconomic, logistical and technological view, because one of them was taken down and then went back up and goodness knows how many millions of dollars was potentially lost by the TikTok users who monetize? Yeah, absolutely. 

04:54 So, this is creating uncertainty in the market, so looking for more stable practices is a very good idea. So, if you have been able to cultivate any relationships with any potential or current or past clients through social media platforms and I'm not just talking about Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok, which are the four that seem to be the most worrisome or in flux right now- Well, they're the largest. 

05:18 They are also, interestingly enough, the largest, and Facebook's been around since what? 2004? Tiktok's pretty new and Twitter's been around since around 2008,. 9, 10. And Instagram is a few years after that, so some of these have been around for quite some time. 

05:33 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Well, let's not forget about our old friend YouTube, which right now doesn't appear to be affected so much. 

05:37 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) YouTube seems to be relatively stable and actually YouTube has been growing quite steadily. 

05:49 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Youtube is the number one streaming platform. I think that that can be an option for people who are looking for community or trying to establish a community. I mean, really, what do you need to establish a community? There's community number one, just community for ourselves, right, because I need my colleagues. I need to be able to communicate with my colleagues and just kind of like just say hey, how's it going, or what are you doing, or just that kind of like at the water cooler sort of thing. And then we also need the community of where can we put ourselves out there, where can we promote and market our materials, if the online community is now threatened? 

06:17 I think, I mean, I know, for many years, you know, social media has always been quote unquote, free, right, always been free, and the Internet's been free. And now, all of a sudden, there's a potential to maybe it not being there or free, or we don't know really what's going to happen. So we need to come up with our plan B. I think it's always important that, as business owners, we have a plan B or we have an alternate plan, so that we're not throwing all our eggs in one basket, right? What can that be, tom? 

06:45 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) All right, so I have many answers. 

06:47 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I have many answers and ideas. 

06:48 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Me too. Okay. So because there's a difference between fostering or being part of a community of fellow voice actors on a social media platform and looking to network with potential clients. Yes, despite all the weird that's been going on, linkedin is still the number one social media platform to be connecting with and developing relationships with clients. 

07:10 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Except it's got spammy lately. 

07:12 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) It's gotten very spammy and I've seen a lot more politics on my LinkedIn feed. 

07:16 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yes, but still it's better. 

07:19 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) It's better. It may be a short-term consequence, it may re-stabilize I'm not sure, but LinkedIn is the number one source for that Twitter was a pretty good source for that too. 

07:29 Yes, because also everybody knows that LinkedIn is the professional social media platform, whereas Facebook is the social. It's literally called the social network. It's a social platform. You can be social on a professional platform and you can be professional on a social platform. But all of these different social media platforms were designed with a specific intent in mind. Instagram was all about photos, and now it turned into video as well to compete with everybody else, and then YouTube made shorts to compete with Instagram reels and they're all watered down and they can all do all of those things, but what the thrust of it is? 

08:00 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Before I forget, I do want to like throw in another social media platform that can generate community on a more professional level and that would be Substack. 

08:08 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Yes, that's definitely one. 

08:09 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) That's kind of like here. If you want to sign up and subscribe to my newsletter on a professional basis, there is Substack and I think that might be gaining popularity as well. 

08:17 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Slack is another one that is gaining popularity. I have not ventured into Substack or Slack, but the one that I have been exploring lately when it comes to community is Discord. 

08:29 Yep, absolutely what's interesting about Discord is what separates it from all of the other social media platforms is it doesn't have a feed. It doesn't have this torrential river of content that you can doom scroll through. For those of you who aren't familiar with Discord, discord has what are called servers. Think of them as like Facebook groups, except that they are generally invite only, though many of them have a public invite where they publicly promote a link or a QR code where you can scan and then you can potentially get admitted into that Discord server. There's usually a number of questions that you need to answer and a code of conduct that you need to adhere to before you'll be admitted into that individual server, and there are a ton of voiceover-related Discord servers. Many of the voiceover groups that you find on Facebook and all of the organizations that you're familiar with in voiceover groups that you find on Facebook and all of the organizations that you're familiar with in voiceover circles, have a Discord server, and within those servers are little threads or sub-servers. 

09:33 Sub-threads yeah, Sub-threads where you can talk about whatever subject matter. 

09:37 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Then it becomes like the old school Usenet. Oh my God, I'm showing my age. Do you know what I mean? Because people post about topics. It's like a forum yeah it becomes like a forum which Usenet? Do you know Usenet? 

09:50 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Or am I even showing my age with you? Yeah, that was way back when I am showing my age with you. 

09:53 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) It's Usenet back in the day, oh my goodness, yeah. Topic-based. 

09:56 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Discord definitely has a. It's also got a bunch of emojis and badges and avatars and all these things that you can do with it. 

10:19 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) So I would say for communities. If you're looking for a community, feel that the Facebook groups if you don't want to be on Facebook anymore at all or you're disliking things about Facebook, in particular, discord for community, I think is a really good way to go. And I think people are just kind of waiting it out a little bit at this moment in time, because Facebook really was for many, many, many years. It was a great community gatherer, and so I think that people are just kind of sitting back, waiting and seeing, or they're fleeing. Some people are going over to Blue Sky, but then again people will say that that is also politically motivated, and so really it just becomes like where are you going to go and where are you going to find the groups? And I think it's one of these things, tom, that we have to just kind of wait and see a little bit. But I would say, professionally, if you want to create that community, start gathering your own mailing list of your current clients and get something going on your website that invites people to subscribe to your email list, and that way you will always have a way to professionally market to that list or communicate with that list. And then, when it comes to community, like colleague and that type of group, I have a wait and see. 

11:12 I've kind of have my accounts on all different platforms and I'm just going to join them all and see where I feel that people are kind of migrating to. I know that for me, I've done a lot of work creating groups. I have a VOPs group that has thousands of members. I have business pages on Facebook that have thousands of members and followers. In reality, I have to look at that and say, well, it's possible that my groups have been disbanded and in a way, this is a time where I feel like I can kind of clean up in a way and so things that have grown, maybe possibly stagnant over time, where maybe people are members but maybe they're not engaged members. You know, maybe it's time to really just sit back, take a look, see where things go and really try to engage a quality community right, not necessarily a quantity, remember before it was all like, oh my God, well, I have 90,000 people on my Facebook group, but are they all engaged? 

12:03 - Intro (Announcement) Yeah. 

12:04 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) So I think now's the time to really start building that community that know, like and trust you, and I feel like that's not just for sales, that's also for people that you interact with on a day-to-day basis. Like Tom, you and I like you're my know, like and trust and I would be like Tom, I want to be where you are so that we can continue our relationship right. So I feel like that's an important criteria for any group that I migrate to or that I create, and then it becomes a build process again. 

12:30 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Yeah, I agree. So, bosses, if you've been listening to what Anne's been saying, she's making two extremely important points. One is do not be dependent on any one social media platform for community or for establishing and maintaining relationships with clients. Those are two different things that you can do on all of these social media platforms and the advice of going through all of your social media platforms and keeping track of where all your potential, current and past clients are on all these social media platforms. Make sure that you have all their contact information and get them into your CRM, which is a VO boss conversation that we had very, very recently. 

13:15 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) That was the acronym. Party the acronym party. So check out that episode. 

13:19 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Absolutely Use that CRM, because it's also a way to cultivate relationships with all of your clients. It's also a way to cultivate relationships with your fellow voice actors. There's nothing stopping you from sending out a newsletter to fellow voice actors, not to tell them about whatever voiceover you've done recently, which they may or may not be interested in, but just talk about concerns or topics of interest to you that may be of interest to them as well. You could also do that through blogging, because your blog posts can have different audiences. You can have blog posts where the audience is your voice seekers and you can have one where your audience is voice actors. To find another way to create a non-social media dependent community and culture. 

14:00 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I think the vlog might be making a comeback. I mean, I think it was always a thing right. But I think a blog I mean I do a Teachable Moment every week and I do shorts every week those are videos that I put out to the community and that can also be part of my blog. There's a lot of those that are part of my blog as well, so people can subscribe to that blog and you can talk about whatever topic floats your boat, floats your passion, and I think that more of the social communities like TikTok and again, you know TikTok is up for now, but again, if you're using it to monetize or using it to try to really sell, just be careful that you're not putting all the eggs in one basket. And so I just say, if you've got good video content right, you can now maybe put that on multiple platforms, right, or the platforms that you feel are right to gain the audience that you want. So just know that your video it turns out to be stuff that you own. 

14:51 Stuff that you create is stuff that you own. So if you create videos, put them in a place where you have control over them. Put them on your website, put them in a blog, put them on YouTube if you have a YouTube channel. But if YouTube were to blow up tomorrow, you've got your own server, you've got your own web server that you can put your videos on, and so creating that content that is distinctly something that is owned by you gives you more semblance of control in regards to promoting your services, promoting your voice, promoting your product out there and also fostering a sense of community, even though it may not be engaging, but you can have people like subscribe to your blog, create comments, have engaging comments back and forth. 

15:29 And again, there's lots of different places. There's Zoom workspace, there's Slack. There's lots of places where you can have video meetups and create that community there as well, and that's something to think about is to have a Q&A or have a water cooler, like, basically, there's that Zoom water cooler, that's out there, and so how are you going to promote that community water cooler? Well, that can be through a list, a mailing list that you own, or you can continue to put posts out on social media, and again, it just don't depend on that social media to be your one and only way to communicate with your potential clients or your colleagues. 

16:05 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) There's also, if you remember, clubhouse and how popular that was during COVID, that became a real great place where a great sense of community that may come back. 

16:14 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) This is exactly why. 

16:15 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) I'm bringing it up, anne is that Clubhouse may be a place to go back to, because there's no social media feed. There's really not much of a space for flaming trolling spamming. 

16:27 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Interesting thought there, because I've done a Thursday VIP room Voices in Podcasting room and we actually were thinking about going away from it, doing Zoom live streaming, zoom on Facebook, which is just another way of doing it. But you're right, clubhouse could be making a comeback. 

16:42 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Well, video, and I'm sure the reason was you know as well as I do is that video has more of a potential for engagement on a human level and on an algorithmic level than pure audio or just photos or just text. 

16:55 So yeah, it makes a lot of sense to be on Zoom, but, like for voice actors, sure On Clubhouse. That seems like a really natural fit. There's one other social media platform that I wanted to mention, and that's Reddit. I've had a Reddit account for a few years now, but I just recently decided to start getting in there and seeing what's going on, and it has its level of weirdness, like any other. 

17:20 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Again like a Usenet. Sorry, I'm showing my age again. It's like it's a forum. 

17:24 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) It's got a forum Usenet kind of feel to it but like any subject matter, personal or professional, that you can think of is there and there's a group of dedicated and a lot of them very social and often supportive people that are talking about any given subject. 

17:42 So I've been spending a lot of time on there and, just as a quick side note, just a couple of interesting things that have happened on. There is one there was a high school student who was required to interview a voice actor for a paper that they had to write. So I volunteered and they sent me the questions, answered the questions and they got an A. 

18:00 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I love that you helped someone get an A Tom. 

18:02 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) That's great, yeah Now is that going to help my voiceover career? No, no, but that's a good thing, but it's being a part of the community. The other quick example is and I can't say much is that a journalist went on a subreddit who needed to interview certain kind of people to write an article about a particular subject, and I was right for it. So I messaged them and, as a result and DA much. 

18:23 And as a result, we had it was a Zoom or a Google Meet meeting for about a half hour, asked me a bunch of questions and in the past week or so they followed up with a bunch of follow-up questions. They wanted to flesh out parts of the conversation and confirm some details and stuff like that, and I think the article comes out next week, so I'll be happy to talk about it then and promote it, because it's a very very, let's just say. 

18:50 it's a topic that's extremely relevant to the voiceover community and has been for a couple of years and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. But I wouldn't have gotten that without being on a social media platform and availing myself to what could just come my way, and it's going to turn into a nationally published article from a reputable news organization. 

19:08 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Excellent. Now the other thing is yes, we're talking about the social media chaos and what we can do about it. Now the other thing, too, is, if you're finding that social media has become to the point where, if you're doom scrolling and it is doom scrolling and it is becoming mentally difficult right to read things on it, then I would say, for your own mental health, step back, take a break. It's not a critical part of you know. You have your circle of friends. I have, like Tom, I can get in touch with you in lots of other ways other than social media if I have to. So, really, guys, when it comes to your health and the health of your business, if you need to step back absolutely. It's not the be all end all. 

19:49 Social media is not the be all end all to your business. It is a method that we have used for many years to promote ourselves. And I remember gosh, back in the day when social media was just becoming popular and there was Instagram and Facebook, and then it was like, oh my God, we can actually like, advertise our businesses on here. And that wasn't so long ago, or maybe it just seems like time has flown by, but I remember back in 2004 or five or six, and doing like a class on, like social media and how to advertise your business. And so 20 years has gone by, it's evolved, it's turned into a very different animal, and so I think, think again, very similar to how technologies evolve and things happen. We need to evolve with the time. So if you need to step back, absolutely for your health, absolutely step back. 

20:38 I honestly don't think that it's going to be the destruction of your business unless you have monetized on a platform that is closing down or is one of those platforms that is now you, you know, in chaos, and so really try to diversify. 

20:50 Think about how you can keep in contact with your current clients, how you can reach out to other clients, and again, I'm going to just say the good old school, like create a list for yourself. There's not one website software out there that doesn't have a way where you can invite people to become part of your list and you just have a checkbox that says I agree to allow you to send emails and people give you permission, and that becomes, I think, one of the best tools that you have, right for, let's say, maybe a professional way of marketing yourself and also a way of becoming closer to your community of professionals so that your business can stay afloat and with colleagues right. Gather those colleagues close to you. Already now there's multiple. I mean, we all do have phones, we all do have homes, we might live near each other, we all have ways to text and stay in communities together and, I think, don't rely on anyone. Get yourself prepared to not depend on any one method of acquiring clients or communicating with your colleagues at large. 

21:58 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) That makes so much sense. I'll leave everybody with one thing Think about why you're on social media. Because it just kind of showed up and everybody just started using it. And nobody took a class or read a manual, they just started messing around on there. So if you're on social media for community and the communities are failing you in one social media platform, go to a different one. If you're going there to look for clients and develop relationships with them, if the social media platforms that you've been on aren't conducive for that they never were or they aren't anymore go to a different social media platform. If you are on social media for purely non-voiceover reasons you're just there to be entertained, amused or inspired or educated, and those aren't working anymore go to different ones. If you're doing it, you just find yourself going like this on your phone and none of those motivations are there. That means the really awful psychology, algorithmic things have got their clutches in you. Yeah, get off. Read a book, take a walk, go have coffee with a friend. 

22:58 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yeah, I love that. That's a great way to end that, tom. Thank you so much. Yeah, bosses, be safe and be healthy with social media. All right, great conversation, tom. I'm going to give a great big shout out to our sponsor, ipdtl. Find out more at IPDTLcom. You guys have a great week and connect up with us in multiple ways. Tom and I are available and we have email addresses. You can even email us and you can, for sure, just keep listening to our podcast. So you guys have an amazing week and we will see you next week. Bye. 

23:31 - Intro (Announcement) Join us next week for another edition of VO Boss with your host, Anne Ganguzza, and take your business to the next level. Sign up for our mailing list at voboss.com and receive exclusive content, industry revolutionizing tips and strategies and new ways to rock your business like a boss. Redistribution with permission. Coast-to-coast connectivity via IPDTL. 

00:01 - Joe (Ad) Hi, this is Joe and I just wanted to say that, in addition to being a marketing guru in her own right, Anne Ganguzza goes deep and she has a vast knowledge and a huge breadth of experience in all and everything VO voice, acting, online communication and she offers a plethora of valuable information and golden nuggets, a fountain of first-hand knowledge, which is VOBoss. I myself had the privilege of participating in a super fun bilingual contest and one of the treats I won, alongside my colleagues, was to be interviewed by Anne and Pilar Uribe A chance to share, learn and get inspired on so many different fronts. I promise you Y, si quieres, te lo cuento en español, pero mientras tanto, búscate un episodio en VO Boss. You might easily find an amazing podcast to get instantly inspired in your work. Whatever that is. 

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01:36 - Intro (Announcement) It's time to take your business to the next level, the boss level. These are the premier business owner strategies and successes being utilized by the industry's top talent today. Rock your business like a boss a VO boss. Now let's welcome your host, Anne Ganguzza. 

01:55 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Hey, hey everyone. Welcome to the VO Boss Podcast. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzza, and today I am so very excited to have special guest Jessica Blue with us this morning. Yay, hello. 

02:06 - Jessica Blue (Guest) Thank you for having me. 

02:08 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Hi, jessica, hi For those bosses who don't know Jessica. Jessica has been a voice actress for 20 years and is an English dubbing voice and casting director on oh, some small projects like Netflix, disney+, hbo, hulu, amazon and more and of course, that was sarcastic. I want you to be able to read that acting Jessica. You can give me some tips if I have to dub over it. Okay, but as a VO talent, some of her clients include small names like Google, microsoft, macy's, wells Fargo, and the list goes on and on and on. She's also provided voices for several dubbed films and series, and some of her dubbing projects that she's directed include no Gain, no Love on Amazon, crooks from Netflix, moving, hulu and Burning Betrayal Netflix. Jessica, it is a pleasure to have you here this morning. Thanks for having me. 

02:58 - Jessica Blue (Guest) I'm super excited to talk with you. 

03:00 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yay, yeah. So I want to say it's just been so wonderful like knowing you for the past few years and I wish I had known you like 10, 20 years ago. Same yeah, absolutely. I mean, I've had you as a guest director for our VO Peeps a couple of times and I'm going to have you coming up this year as well for dubbing. And I guess I want to start with the bosses that are not necessarily familiar with who you are. Let's talk about your voice acting career first and how it all got started. Cool. 

03:28 - Jessica Blue (Guest) Well, I'm originally from the San Francisco Bay Area and I grew up watching cartoons like a lot of kids. Bugs Bunny was my favorite and I just loved being in that world of imagination and where anything could happen. And I thought wouldn't it be cool to be a cartoon someday, Not knowing that that was voiceover. And it wasn't until many, many years later. When my ex-husband, of all things, heard this woman talking on the radio about voiceover, I'm like what is that? And he thought I would like that. 

03:56 And so I went, took a intro class and I completely fell in love, dove headfirst and took all the classes, learned as much as I could and then eventually got an agent up there and started working in video games and commercials a little bit of animation for games and stuff, a lot of narration as well and then slowly migrated down to LA, because there was a collective of us in that group that really wanted to do animation and so we created our own show and pitched it around and down here in LA and I'd come back and everybody had kind of already migrated and moved down here, and I was the last one because I still had a whole life up there. I had a full time job. Up there I was taking care of my parents and one day my dad just said sounds like you need to be down there. Why don't you just go? I'm like I have to take care of you. I have to do all this stuff. 

04:43 There's no way Best day of my life because he basically gave me the permission. It's like you need to live your life. Stop doing this for us. Do what you need to do, follow your passion. I'm like I love you, dad. So it took me a couple more years to get my ducks in a row and finally leave the corporate life which was the best decision of my life ever and made the move down to Los Angeles in 2013 and didn't have a plan B, didn't have a job, didn't have an agent down here, nothing, but I was all focused on voiceover and I had already come down here, like the year prior, to sort of get the lay of the land network, take classes with directors here, just to sort of get the lay of the land network, take classes with directors here, just to sort of immerse myself in the LA culture, in the LA VO community. 

05:30 And then it just kind of took off and got an agent, started working, getting more jobs and met awesome people like you and Jeff Howell and all these other amazing folks, and just been doing it ever since. And then Jeff Howell is actually the one who got me into dubbing because he had a project come up and he says I need your help, I need you to help me organize all this stuff. 

05:50 I'm like, okay, and we kind of started doing dubbing together and did about six movies together. I want to say and he says, okay, you should be directing, you need to be directing. And I had expressed an interest in directing and so it just kind of shifted into I was still doing acting. I love that, but I love directing so much and it was so great. And so. 

06:15 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I've sort of shifted. 

06:15 - Jessica Blue (Guest) Now I still do a little bit of acting here and there, Super picky and choosy about what auditions I do, who I read for all that good stuff, because I really have a focus more on directing and stuff. So that's where my passion now lies and that's kind of it. 

06:30 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I love that. I love that because you kind of follow your passion and it all just followed you Do, you know what. I mean, you've manifested it for yourself, which is something that I absolutely love, and I love directing myself, but not necessarily dubbing, but in terms of demos and that whole creative process of being able to take it from the ground up to something beautiful. And so let me ask you. So 20 years has passed or so, and so how has the industry evolved and changed since you first? 

07:02 - Jessica Blue (Guest) were in it. Oh my God, night and day Back in the day when I was first started and first of all, I felt like I was coming into this super late because I was already in my 30s, I want to say when I started getting into this. And most people you know get in their 20s. They're doing this or even earlier, so I felt like a super late bird, but that's been the story of my life. I'm a late bloomer and everything. 

07:25 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) That's funny. I was actually in my thirties too. Well, I was in corporate. I was actually in education. I came from corporate to education and before you go on, I did want to say what did you do in corporate, Because that's always interesting to me You're going to laugh. 

07:37 - Jessica Blue (Guest) I was a paralegal manager for the electric company in their law department. 

07:41 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Oh, my gosh Okay. 

07:42 - Jessica Blue (Guest) Yeah. 

07:43 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Well, no, nothing surprises me actually. 

07:46 - Jessica Blue (Guest) So, like legal jargon, medical jargon, I've got that locked, unlocked yeah. 

07:53 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) It's crazy. 

07:54 - Jessica Blue (Guest) It's always interesting to find out what corporate places people come from you know it's such a different world, but it's definitely helped my business as far as you know. Knowing how to communicate, being responsive and just general email etiquette, that kind of thing. It goes a long way. But back when I first started you needed to be where your agent was. You had to go in person to audition and it started to slowly switch to where you could record at home and then send it in an MP3. 

08:26 But for the most part, like it was super hard to get an LA agent if you were not in LA or even in New York or wherever you had to be there, locally, physically, because they had so many other talent that was right there, hop, skip and a jump that they could grab. So that has completely changed, especially since COVID, because now everything's remote or phoned in or whatever. That's probably the biggest thing. Also, because of that, it's exploded the amount of voiceovers, because there's been such a spotlight on it, especially with all the new animated movies. I mean, back in the day, you know, I had Cinderella and Bambi, you know those movies which were classics, snow White. But now we have a new one coming out, several coming out every year, and they've got these celebrities attached to it. 

09:13 So people, the general audience, are seeing these celebs do these voices and they're like, oh, I want to do that voice or I could do that voice, and they think it's like, oh, it's super easy, that'd be fun. 

09:22 And they think it's like, oh, it's super easy, that'd be fun, let me go do some voiceover, not realizing it's a process you have to learn, you have to know how to act first of all. It's not just about your voice and take the training, learn the craft. So I think that has sort of opened the door for way more people. So it's super competitive now, and you're not just competing with people in your local area or in your state or now even in your country, right In other countries now, because everybody can now just kind of send stuff in electronically. So technology has definitely improved, as well as having a booth Again, it used to be like I just have a crappy little setup in my closet and now people have these amazing beautiful booths with lighting and all this stuff, and I mean, technology has come so far, so that's a whole nother thing too. So a lot has changed. 

10:12 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) A lot has changed, but you have evolved along with that. And now you mentioned something about acting. 

10:17 I always like to talk about acting, when you kind of made the shift, kind of also in parallel working with dubbing. You're talking about acting on the fly, I mean. I think that that becomes like front and center in terms of what are the qualifications that you need as an actor or as a voice actor to really get into this industry. And maybe I can just have you explain dubbing kind of from the beginning for the bosses who are not necessarily as familiar with the dubbing industry. 

10:45 - Jessica Blue (Guest) So basically for if you don't know what dubbing is, it's essentially taking a movie or a TV show from another language and putting it into English so you don't have to watch with subtitles. You can actually hear the English spoken while you're watching the video, and our goal is to make sure that the lip flaps match as close as possible so that it doesn't take you out of that and you forget that you're watching a dub. It's a long process, a lot goes into it, it's very detailed, which I'm not going to go into all the gory details of it. But the main thing that I'm looking for when I'm hiring and casting someone to do a dub is that they can act, that I believe that their voice is coming out of the face that I'm seeing on screen and that they're able to give all the nuances of that performance. And it's actually really cool, in my opinion, because it's so much closer to being on stage or being on set and diving into a character and get all that juicy goodness, versus reading a three second tag or a 30 second copy for medical whatever. So there's a lot more that goes into it and it's definitely a skill that has to be learned by doing it. 

11:54 It rinse and repeat kind of thing. It does take practice because it can be very challenging and overwhelming at first because there's a lot going on. Because not only are you walking in blind, you have no idea when are you walking in blind, you have no idea when you book a job. You have no idea if you're the lead, if you're an incidental, how many characters you're doing, what the show's about, how long you know all this stuff. You have no clue. So it's the director's job to fill that in for you explain the show who your character is, what they're about, what's going on in the scene, and then you watch the scene and you're seeing this rhythm of band go by with the dialogues screaming by like karaoke and you're trying to read, you're trying to watch the video, you're kind of your eyes are sort of doing this back and forth to try and understand everything and you're seeing it for the first time. 

12:38 I've seen it maybe two or three times at this point, right but you're seeing it for the first time, so I'll give you a freebie of but you're seeing it for the first time, so I'll give you a freebie of like you're watching it for the first time just to know what the heck is going on and who are these people and what's happening. And then we'll watch it a second time. So now you understand the scene, you understand what's going on, and now you can start maybe looking closer at the faces on screen and see what their reaction is, the projection of how loud they are soft and then we'll do a take, and then we'll do another take and put it all together and review it. And I'm looking at the dialogue to make sure that you're saying all the right words and you're not mispronouncing anything. 

13:15 And all of that good stuff and it's a lot and it takes about, I'd say, for a newbie about 15 to 20 minutes to get into the groove of it, if it's like their first time. But even experienced debbers you know they'll come in and they'll watch it and takes them a little bit of time to get warmed up too, and that's just the nature of it. But it's like everything's firing all at once. It can be very overwhelming, but it's so much fun once you get the hang of it and you get in the groove and you're just. Then you're just like, oh, all right, we're going, and it's so much fun. 

13:43 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) So, in terms of directing, let's say, if you were directing just a script that was not on the screen and you're just directing a commercial for someone, versus directing a dub scene, it seems like you have to know, I don't know, the directing is different. I mean, I feel like you have to know so much more quicker when you're doing the dubbing, because, because you have to also impart, like the actual scene, what's happening to the actor, and if the actor's not getting it or just not embodying the character in the right way, then you've got to figure out, well, how am I going to get them so that it makes a believable scene? And then, if not, what do you do? I mean, have you had actors that just didn't work out and then you had to essentially say I'm sorry and then recast I can't imagine so explain some of the differences because, like my, directing for a demo is completely different, because we're taking the words and we're creating the scene. 

14:34 We're making it up, this. You have the scene already and you've got to try to communicate that to the actor. 

14:39 - Jessica Blue (Guest) More, I would imagine yeah, I mean, on the one side it's kind of nice because you already have this template of what you need to do. You basically have to try to match that, match their energy, match their tone, match it. So it looks like what you're doing out of here is coming out of what you see. So in that sense it's a little bit simpler, because you can see what's happening with a commercial or even when you're auditioning for a dub. 

15:07 You don't have the luxury of the video to see what's going on or see what's happening in the scene. So you have to make that up in your mind and you have to find those nuggets in the script, in the dialogue, that might clue you into where are they, what's happening, why did they say this line? What does that mean? What is the intention behind that, what might be happening? And you have to somehow create that in your head, make a choice and go with it. Very much like when you're doing a commercial script. It's a lot of script analysis when you're looking at that stuff and so it's kind of cool. 

15:37 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Actually, you don't ever get the scene, you don't ever get the video, do you Very, very rarely? 

15:42 - Jessica Blue (Guest) You might if we are doing in-person auditions, do you when you're auditioning? Very, very rarely you might. If we are doing in-person auditions, we do VTKs, which is a video test kit and that will have the actor come in. They'll do an audition in person, to the video, to the scene, so they'll see what's happening, they'll see the actors and everything and they'll get directed. So it's a directed audition. That's about the only time Very rarely will we send out a clip. 

16:06 It'll just be the sides and they'll just have that to go on and wing it a prayer and figure it out and make a strong choice. Read through that analysis, look through everything, pick out whatever you can. Make a strong choice, go with it, because again, I'm listening for your acting chops as well as, if I believe, the voice coming out of the face. But even if I'm hearing someone do a commercial, I'm still in that visual sense of who are you talking to? Are you connected? Are you just phoning this in? Are you just reading this? It's very similar because there's a lot of times, too, where I'll have clients like they sound like they're reading. It's like, well, they kind of are because they're reading this girl going by, but you have to make it sound like you're not reading, just like you would a commercial or a video game or anything. You have to make it conversational. That's the name of the game in dubbing is conversational. We want real, grounded, authentic voices, authentic acting. Not, hi, how are you? I am Jessica Mm-hmm. 

17:05 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Mm-hmm. 

17:05 - Jessica Blue (Guest) Yeah absolutely. 

17:07 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) So what tips would you say then? Could you give a voice actor that wants to get into dubbing, like, what can they do to prepare themselves? Maybe, and maybe practice or coach with you? Yeah, absolutely, I do do coaching, yeah, besides coaching with you, but I'm just so, yeah, what can they do if they're interested in dubbing? What's your best tips? Watch some dubs. 

17:27 - Jessica Blue (Guest) Go on Netflix, go on Hulu, Disney, Amazon, whatever. Watch some dubs that are good and watch how their acting is, or listen to how their acting is in relation to what's happening in the scene. A way to practice is kind of cool, Not exact, but it will help you with that sight reading of looking up to the video and looking down to the dialogue is put on subtitles. Grab your favorite show or movie, put on the subtitles, watch it with the sound on with the subtitles. 

17:57 read the subtitles and get used to switching back your eyesight from the video to the subtitles, switching back your eyesight from the video to the subtitles and then rewind it, mute it and then say it with the subtitles and see how close you can match to their mouths, or whatever. I mean. It's not going to be exact, but that will help you with that skill of sight reading, of going back and forth from the video to the dialogue. 

18:18 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Well then, I should be amazing Jessica, because I'm old and I have the subtitles on all the time because I can't hear, so I've got the eyesight going and I don't necessarily practice along with that. But yeah, no, that's a great tip. And to actually watch dubs, I think is great, and I myself have watched dubs and I've watched people do it because I've watched you direct people. Do you think it's something that all voice actors would love to do? Or do you feel like it's a niche where I feel, like people that do audiobooks, they love their audiobooks, people that dub love dubbing, like? Or do you think it's just something like oh, it's another genre, it's just oh, I can. What's your experience with talent? I think it's a little of both. 

18:57 - Jessica Blue (Guest) I think it is sort of a niche. I have my core group of actors that you know. It's like the standard dubbers or whatever, but I'm always finding new talent, always bringing new people into the fold. And so and I've never really had someone go, oh, I don't like this or this isn't for me Maybe they did and I didn't know about it. 

19:18 But usually, even though they might be scared and nervous getting into it because they're not sure about anything new, any change, once they do it they're like oh my God, this is kind of fun, I really like this. So then they like tell me more, how do I get into it? How do I do what? How do I need to get more of this type of work? And so it kind of fuels their fire to do it or be more interested in it. So I think it's definitely grown a lot in the last couple of years, for sure, and I don't think it's going away anytime soon because there's so much content. There's so much content out there from other countries that are being brought into the United States and getting dubbed into English. So I don't think the work is going anywhere anytime soon. So I think we're okay. 

19:58 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) So here's the elephant in the room right Synthetic voices AI. How does that work into dubbing, or does it not? Or what are your thoughts? Is it a threat? 

20:07 - Jessica Blue (Guest) I don't think it's a threat now, and if it is, it's going to be minor. I don't think it's going to take over lead voices because, it cannot reproduce these performances, the nuances that humans can, and I think we've got that covered and okay. And also I've heard stories about companies trying to use AI to dub a lead character and the audience isn't buying it. 

20:31 They're like that looks weird, that sounds weird, it doesn't match or whatever, and so I think for the main characters, lead characters and everything, we're good, we're okay. It's not going to go the AI route. It might change to where they might end up using some type of AI situation that is ethically sourced. Ai. 

20:50 voices for Walla for the background noise, like you know, in airports and restaurants and things like that, because that's just this murmur, this hum bed of voices that you hear in the background, and not necessarily actual dialogue that you can make out and hear what they're saying, but they already have a lot of those like sound beds. You know that we've recorded over many years and they can just plop that in. So it's kind of already done, so I don't know why they would actually need an AI for that. 

21:16 So I don't necessarily see I mean, if anything, I think AI might come in on more of the production side, the backside of it, not the performance side, you know, more of the organization of files and management and things like that, or QCing stuff like that I don't know that it's going to really impact the performance side of things for dubbing yet, and I mean who knows Anything's possible but also to get all of these companies on the same page. You know, if somehow this fantastic software came out that you know is able to match the voice to the original actor or change whatever to get everybody on board with that, I mean that's a huge feat in and of itself and I don't see that happening anytime soon. So I think we're okay. 

21:58 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) So if you talk about when we dub, we're dubbing from one language to another. Typically for us we would be the English, and so how much of a disconnect is there because of the language differences, you know, in terms of like lip flap and believability is there from certain languages, and are some languages easier to dub than others? Oh yeah, two things. 

22:17 - Jessica Blue (Guest) Some languages their lips barely move, so they're talking like this and it's like what do you say? There's no labial movements, oh my God. And then there's some like Spanish and French, where they are motor mouths and they're like and what takes in Spanish? It takes them 10 words to say what we can say in five in English. But there's like all these, like you know, like happy birthday hon. You know, it's like so different, but yet we would then have to add on extra words stretch it out, add on words, because there's still all that mouth flap that we have to cover, so we would have to add on words. 

22:57 Or, in the opposite of French, they can say something very short, like two words, and it takes us seven words to say. So how do we? Ah, like they say nothing? 

23:07 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) So who does that editing? That's interesting. Who does that editing? Is that you, or it sometimes is me. It's the adapter. 

23:13 - Jessica Blue (Guest) So, which I also do Adaptation is probably the most important and critical step in the whole dubbing process. That's basically where the studio will send it to a translator. They'll translate the Spanish into English. Then that goes to the adapter. The adapter then takes that English translation, rewrites it to make it sound conversational, make it match the lip flaps, adding words, subtracting words, making jokes work that might not make sense to us it does in their language but it doesn't jive with us and then also syncing it all up. 

23:46 So the lines are matched up to start, of the mouth opening to the mouth closing, as well as adding in all of the vocal efforts. So laughs, sneezes, coughing, crying, breathing, fight scenes, getting punched, coughing, throat clearing, anything like that is always going to be in brackets so that we have those vocal efforts, because it's going to look funny if you're just talking and all of a sudden you do this and like you don't hear anything. Yeah, yeah, what was that? Right, right, it was a sigh. Ok, got it. So we had to put sighs in brackets so that the actor knows that they have to sigh when they see that chest movement. 

24:22 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) So it's a lot OK. So business wise it seems like a lot of work right. So I have a film right. And where does the money come from? The distribution, the licensing of the film in different languages? 

24:33 - Jessica Blue (Guest) I think so, yeah, because it'll be like a Netflix will go out and they'll buy the property, the distribution rights for a show from the original person, which is probably yeah, where the money comes from and then that pays for it, because it seems like an awful lot of work, sometimes right, it is a huge 

24:49 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) amount of work If you want a huge amount of work to get to a product that you don't know if it's going to. I mean it's like any movie that comes out right. I mean you put a lot of investment into it, so I imagine that, yeah, it's just got to be the purchase of the rights to the movie. That is where the money is, because is is because is the money. Does the voice actor get money? I mean, I'm sure they get paid. Do you know what I mean? But I mean, let's talk about how well does the voice actor get paid or the dubber get paid for this. Is this an industry that is lucrative? It can be. 

25:19 - Jessica Blue (Guest) If you book a lead role, it can be very lucrative because that means multiple sessions, especially if it's a TV show, because that's multiple episodes. So you could be a six episode show, a 12 episode show, a 20 episode show. So if you're a lead character, you're in all those episodes. You're getting paid for every single time. You go into the booth for a session and we cover as much as we possibly can in a session until we exhaust all of the lines for that character. 

25:46 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) But you get paid per session right. 

25:48 - Jessica Blue (Guest) Per session. 

25:48 - Intro (Announcement) You don't get paid per airing of you know like a nice national commercial. 

25:52 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) There's no royalties, there's no kickbacks. 

25:55 - Jessica Blue (Guest) There's no nothing it would be so nice. 

25:57 Especially if it like took off or whatever, oh my God. But no, it's per session. If it's a union project, it's under the union contract, the dubbing union contract, which I think now it's like $190 something per hour with a two-hour minimum, and so if you're hired for a four-hour session, that's $195 times four, and if we finish with you in three hours, you still get paid for the four hours. If we have a pickup, you still get paid for that two-hour minimum. Even if you're in there for 15 minutes, you still get paid. So pickups are kind of nice too. 

26:32 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Now, do you now negotiate in contracts like the AI writer, because, let's say, you need a pickup and the actor isn't available? Right, can they utilize the voice to create an AI voice to then maybe do a pickup? 

26:45 - Jessica Blue (Guest) I've not had that come up yet, and I think myself I don't deal with the contracts with the actors. That's the studio that handles all of that. So I think some of them might have an AI writer, some of them might not. So if you're an actor into dubbing and you want to check that out, make sure you read your contracts and see if it's in there and if it's not ask them and see if they'll do it, because a lot of them will, but at this point I don't think we've had that issue. 

27:09 We always find workarounds honestly like even if we missed a line, maybe we have a backup or we can frankenstein something together, or if we missed a breath or a laugh here, I'll just steal it from somewhere else and plug it in there so I don't have to have anything to save that money for the client, so that we don't have to worry about that pickup. And even for incidental. Sometimes I'll jump in the booth and if I just need a line or something to cover whatever, I'll just jump in there. I'm like, let me just do it, it'll be really fast, it's fine, I'll just do it. 

27:37 So, but yeah, it can be lucrative if you're a lead, because that means multiple sessions. If you're an incidental, it's just fun practice and maybe it's one session, one and done and you're in and out and that's still fun. But also, I think, when actors do get on the radar of these studios and directors then and they do it one time, two times, and they do well, we like working with cool people, good people, good actors, so we're gonna have you back and you'll get in that roster, in that pool of people, and you just kind of start working, working, work and it's kind of cool that way. 

28:09 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yeah, yeah. Well, that's nice. So then, the first thing, if voice actors want to get into dubbing is, I would say bump up your acting skills, yeah absolutely. Do you have good recommendations for acting classes, like in-person acting classes, online acting classes or working with a coach? Perhaps All of it? 

28:30 - Jessica Blue (Guest) Honestly, I feel like if you can do in-person, that's great because obviously you're feeding off the energy of everybody. I prefer being in person with people versus Zoom, but Zoom is obviously much more efficient and effective, especially if you aren't able to travel to do in-person. One-on-ones are also great if you're working with a coach or a teacher, because all the focus is on you and you can really hone in on what needs you need to work on and improve on. 

28:59 But also the group session is great because you can learn from others and what I like to say, steal with love and take a little bit of that and that and put it in my pocket I'm going to use that, yeah, I mean it's life, isn't it? 

29:11 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I think that's how we do it. I think all of us, when we teach voice acting, we want to get to the same end result. We want authentic, believable performances, and so, however we say it to get the actor to get there, we're all trying to get to the same end result. So, yeah, absolutely, and that, I believe, also is going to translate well to they can do dubbing and they can do voice acting, because acting is just going to help you all the way around, and acting will even help you in medical and corporate. And I say that just because you know that's me, and that's my geeky that's my geeky place. 

29:41 I think it can help you even more because that stuff is typically very dry and boring and you've got to make that. You've got to make that come alive in some way to make it interesting to people so that they want to listen to it. I mean, right now I'm going through some online courses and I'm telling you like it is tough. I know I need to know this information and I am just like, oh God, I got to do four more hours of this, and so it really helps when you've got the skills to be engaging and to like connect with the listener on the other end. Yeah, absolutely so, if I am hearing you correctly. Of course, acting would be number one. Acting would be number one to help get you into dubbing, and then, of course, watching dubbed TV shows and really getting in on that. And then what about networking? How can they network with the places that might hire them? 

30:23 - Jessica Blue (Guest) Absolutely Research. Google is your best friend. Look up and search dubbing houses, dubbing recording studios in your neck of the woods, See who's out there. And also I will say another trick is when you're watching these shows and movies online that are dubs, at the very end sometimes they'll have the credits for the dubs of who the actors are, who the studio is, who the director and the casting, the producer are, so you can actually see what studios are doing the dubs that way. 

30:54 And then you can look those up and see. If you can't find an, email. And a lot of those studios have their own rosters that they're actively looking for talent. So you could reach out to one of them and like, hey, are you open for taking on new talent? I'm interested in dubbing, or I have. I've done a dub here and there. I'd love to be considered for a future dub and just throw whatever you can at the wall and see what sticks. 

31:15 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Would you say that the majority of it is done in LA and in the big cities where, yeah, a chunk of it is. 

31:20 - Jessica Blue (Guest) But I know Dallas I want to say Dallas, but one of the big cities in Texas they do a lot of anime with Crunchyroll I think. But there's other dub houses. There's one in Florida called the Kitchen in Miami. There's obviously several overseas, in Europe and elsewhere. So again, it's just you know Google, google is your best friend. Find where they are and search them out and do some research on that to figure out who's doing what and where, and you'll find it. And yeah, I would say networking is to find those people and seek them out and hit them up. But be human and personal about it. Don't just be like needy, like hi, I'm so, and so here's my demo. Listen to me. 

31:59 No, make it make a connection yeah, make a connection to be memorable. So that because I, I get. Sometimes I'll get those emails that just say here, here's my demo. I'd love to work with you sometime Like great. I don't know you. From who are you next? You? 

32:13 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) know, yeah, so I've been dying to ask you this because, of course, this goes along with. I feel like we're networking and there's a lot of talk about when you're running your business, because you can be the best actor in the world, but if nobody knows about it, it's hard for you, kind of. Over the years, have established a brand for myself, and a lot of people that know me for the VO Boss brand know that I have the red headphones, or I have the red lipstick because I talk about it all the time, and my Anne Ganguzza brand is blue and guess what? Jessica Blue. If anybody doesn't know Jessica or has never met Jessica, you can find her easily because she's got very signature branding. 

32:50 - Jessica Blue (Guest) So let's talk about that for a little bit, if you don't mind, of course you can't really see it well in this lighting, but I do have blue hair and I have really blue eyes. You do, yes, you do Pops when the blue starts to fade and get lighter, and my logo is blue. I always have blue nails. 

33:09 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I'm wearing blue nails. My car is my favorite color. 

33:12 - Jessica Blue (Guest) I've loved it since I was a kid when I actually, when I was a kid and I was sharing a room with my sister, we had bunk beds and everything, and then my mom cleaned out this other room and we got to switch and I got my own room, finally, and I got to decorate it however I wanted I had it was blue carpet. Blue paint on one wall, blue wallpaper everywhere. 

33:30 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I had blue stripes. I mean, blue is one of my absolute favorites. I had blue stripes, I painted on one. I had an accent wall in my bedroom. I'm an 80s girl, right 70s, 80s. It was literally like two different shades of blue and it was like a big, like V. It was hysterical. That's awesome and I loved it, but I will say that your branding works so well for you. Did you do that because not only your favorite color is blue, but because you wanted to become memorable in your business? Is that another angle? 

33:54 - Jessica Blue (Guest) that that part never even hit. I'll tell you how so. Loose flash blue is not my real name, it's my stage name. What? Um? Yeah, I know secrets galore. No, it actually came up. So I've been rocking the blue hair since 2001. Okay, and I think it was around 2000. 

34:17 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Before it was a thing, right, I mean really. I mean I would say, when I grew up it was only if you were a punk. And then you had you know, what I mean. I feel like I started, like yeah, I feel like I sort of started this trend like it was acceptable, because also working in a law firm corporate with blue hair. 

34:32 - Jessica Blue (Guest) Yes, exactly, and acceptable because also working in a law firm corporate with blue hair yes, exactly, and I'm like, if they don't like it, they can go pound sand because I know how to do my job. 

34:37 I'm doing my job and this has nothing to do with what I can do. So but I was in a workout group with some fellow actors and one of my friends, I think I had come in with a blue stripe in my hair. I was testing the waters out to see if I liked it or not and I had just one little blue strand. And she says, oh, you should change your name to Jessica Blue. And I'm like, oh, I like that. I think I'm going to do that. From that point on, I became Jessica Blue in all things voiceover and acting and I've never looked back. 

35:06 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) It is so attached to you and I think it's brilliant. 

35:12 I mean, whether you intended that to be or not, like I will always know how to spot you in a crowd number one, but I also remember your name and so I'm always telling my students that until people know who you are, I mean you have to establish a brand. I mean, and so I'm like, well, make yourself a great actor and associate yourself with maybe another brand in your demo that people can say oh, I love that Ford spot that you did, or I love that movie you did, or whatever. If you can make yourself memorable in that kind of a way where you're attaching yourself to a brand or a show, right, then I think that that starts to get the ball rolling, because I think success begets success. Ball rolling because I think success begets success. And, like you said, once you start and you get into kind of the circles where you're dubbing and people like you, then it's nice because you get that kind of repeat work and I think that's important in terms of if you want to build your business. 

36:04 So thank you for the explanation of your brand. I love it Absolutely. 

36:08 - Jessica Blue (Guest) But it also it's not. It's not who you know, it's who knows you, because that's how you're going to become memorable and hired over and over again. So it is very important. I agree with you, but thank you. 

36:21 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Thank you, I appreciate that. So if you make it easy, if you make it easy to stand out and be unique and you've done it brilliantly. So, Jessica, this is so much fun yes, it has. Thank you so much for joining me today. Yeah, my pleasure, and so I do know that you did say that a random listener is going to receive something special with you. Did you say a one-hour coaching? 

36:42 - Jessica Blue (Guest) session One-hour free coaching session for dubbing, yes. 

36:47 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) So what I'm going to do is I'm going to randomly choose one listener, and so, in order for me to randomly choose a listener, you guys have to submit a testimonial, maybe on this episode, saying that you like this episode, and so I absolutely. On the VO Boss website, at vobosscom, you can submit your testimonial. If you do that for this episode with Jessica and you mention Jessica, we will then randomly select a winner within a week of the episode release to get a free one-hour dubbing coaching session. Yay, that's awesome. Thank you, jessica. 

37:17 - Intro (Announcement) Of course that's so generous. 

37:19 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) My pleasure, all right. Well, again, thanks so much. This has been wonderful and bosses, keep a lookout for the VO Peeps workout. Which gosh, is it May, june? I'm trying to think. 

37:28 - Intro (Announcement) I think it's February. When do we have? When do we have? Oh my gosh February. 

37:32 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Oh my gosh, next month. Oh, that's right, it is next month. Next month we have you for VOP. So guys go get that ticket, because Jessica sells out very, very quickly. Thanks again, thank you, I really, really appreciate it. I'm going to give a great big shout out to our sponsor, ipdtl. You too, find out more at IPDTLcom Bosses, have an amazing week and we'll see you next week. 

37:56 - Intro (Announcement) Bye. Join us next week for another edition of VO Boss with your host, Anne Ganguzza, and take your business to the next level. Sign up for our mailing list at VOBosscom and receive exclusive content, industry revolutionizing tips and strategies and new ways to rock your business like a boss. Redistribution with permission. Coast to coast connectivity via IPDTL. 

Join Anne Ganguzza and Danielle Famble for the next BOSS Money Talks episode, as they share tips on how to manage both business and personal finances. From choosing the ideal business credit card to managing your everyday spending, The BOSSES provide the tools you need to enhance your financial efficiency. Anne and Danielle delve into the practical aspects of leveraging credit cards for business gains, highlighting the potential to earn cashback and travel points while simplifying your bookkeeping tasks. They discuss the art of planning large expenses and paying off balances to avoid interest traps, alongside sharing personal stories of their credit journeys. 00:04 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) At Anne Ganguzza productions. I focus on personal growth and artistic expression and can help you unlock the full potential of your voice. It's a journey of discovery and strategy and I'm here to help guide you every step of the way. Your story deserves to be heard. Find out more at anneganguzza.com. 

00:35 - Intro (Announcement) It's time to take your business to the next level, the boss level. These are the premier business owner strategies and successes being utilized by the industry's top talent today. Rock your business like a boss a VO boss. Now let's welcome your host, Anne Ganguzza. 

00:48 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Hey everyone, welcome to the VO Boss Podcast and the Boss Money Talk Series. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzza, and I am so ecstatic to be back again with Danielle Famble. Hey. 

01:01 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) Anne, I am glad to be back, happy to talk money and finances and being a boss with you. 

01:07 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I love it. I love it, except Danielle. I just had to pay my American Express bill. Yeah, and I will tell you and the bosses I have a business credit card, which I think is the best thing since sliced bread and the reason why I love my business credit card maybe not so much for all the money that I have to pay on it this month, but mostly because I get money back. I mean, I try to strategically use that credit card to my advantage, for my business. 

01:34 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) Yeah. 

01:34 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) So I know I have a credit card and a couple of other tricks up my sleeve, but I have a feeling you have a couple of tricks up your sleeve that I would love to know about. 

01:44 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) Oh, man, If you want to get me to nerd out on anything ever, you chose the right topic Credit cards. Credit card points and miles is my jam. I'm wearing my nerdy glasses today, Just so excited to talk about credit card points. 

02:01 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) So fill us in on how we can take advantage, Because I mean, why not? Right? I'm excited, I'm excited. So I'll just tell you, my American Express gives me money back and I picked it specifically because of that. It gives me money back every month the more I spend with it and I thought, well, that's great. That just encourages me to always use that card to spend. And for me, I only have the one for my. Actually, I have a couple for my business, because I do have a bank account which then gives me a credit card by default. Okay, I've got a debit card, I've got a business debit card, but I also have a credit card with them which I don't use right now. But they are always touting oh, you can save 3% if you buy gas, that kind of thing. But I end up using the one card only because for me, my brain, it makes things simple right now to deal with, but I'm sure that I could be taking more advantage of other things. 

02:53 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) Oh, yeah, you talk about your credit card. I actually just opened up a new credit card for my business and when I open that credit card you get a certain number of bonus points if you spend a certain amount of money in the first couple of months of opening the card. 

03:08 Mostly, really to— yes, yes, similar to my bank. Yeah, to incentivize you to use this card. Well, this particular card would give me I think it was 250,000 points to travel, and I was so excited about it because I have travel coming up to go to conferences and things like that and instead of using cash to spend the money to travel, I can use these points as another currency as a way to get to a conference or two or three, or travel or stay at hotels. So it's a way of utilizing the money that I'm spending anyway and having a different currency to be able to use it. And that's a way of utilizing the money that I'm spending anyway and having a different currency to be able to use it. And that's just sort of the beginning. You're talking about money back into your business, but I just I love talking about like points and miles because you're spending the money anyway for your business, right, and so you're getting this currency back to be able to do other things with it. 

04:02 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) So then let me ask you a question Are you looking always for deals, current deals with new credit cards, or is it just if it happens to come up when you make a purchase, sometimes like well, let's say, I go clothing shopping, sorry, and they'll be like well, you can save 20% on your order today if you open up a credit card with us. And there'll be a lot of times that I'll do that just because I want to save the 20%, and then I really don't have any intention of using it again. If it's a store I don't shop frequently, but I will absolutely do that. But now I also know that that does affect my credit score. It's not always a negative impact on the credit score, because I happen to have I'm very proud of the fact that I have a really good, almost perfect, credit score. 

04:39 - Intro (Announcement) Oh, great yeah. 

04:40 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) After many, many years. 

04:41 - Intro (Announcement) And. 

04:41 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I'm like. Well, I don't know, is that going to affect if I open up a credit card? How do you handle the credit cards? 

04:46 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) So again, we've talked about this. For me I'm dealing with personal, totally separate than business. So, for example, with my business credit card that I just opened, I knew that I was going to have a lot of really big expenses coming up for the business and because I was planning that, I was looking for a credit card to be able to capitalize on the amount of money I was already planning on spending and had already planned and put that money aside to pay this. 

05:14 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Okay, so let me ask you so, for example, not that I'm going to delve that deeply, but I'm thinking was this for travel for a voiceover conference, or maybe new equipment or something new for your studio, or maybe demos right, things that you would invest in, right for your voiceover business? 

05:28 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) So, big ticket items like a demo or a voiceover conference would be a good opportunity to maybe look into this Potentially yes, I always give a caveat first with using credit cards at all, and you're talking about your great credit score and I'm proud to have really worked to build my credit score as well. To have a great credit score is making sure that you can pay the credit card off in full at the end of the month. 

05:52 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Oh, thank you for saying that. Yes, I absolutely make it a point to do that every single month, exactly. 

05:56 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) Because if you don't, then you're actually kind of not really getting all the perks and having the benefits of having this credit card, because then you're paying this huge fee for interest and things like that. So for me, when I'm looking at credit cards be it for personal or for the business I want to make sure that I have the ability to pay it off. It's almost like using the cash that I already had on hand to pay off this bill and I'm getting this huge point value, or I'm getting points along the way. 

06:26 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I love that you said that, because I will always, when we talked about our business accounts, our bank accounts, I am so thankful and grateful for that business savings account. Because that business savings account says to me I've got a big ticket item coming, I have the money that I can pay it all off at the end of the month, which I think absolutely is so important. And I'll be the first to admit I mean I have let my credit cards go. 

06:48 I mean when I was younger and foolish, I let my credit cards go and have a balance and at one point there was a big balance on it and you end up spending so much money on interest that it's not necessarily an ideal situation, that's for sure, and especially if this is your business and I'm not saying that you have to wait to buy everything until you can pay it off at the end of the month. However, it certainly makes things a whole lot easier. 

07:12 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) Yeah, it makes things a lot easier and also you're able to plan for what's coming up. So you're being proactive about what you're doing for your business. Talk about, like big-ticket items buying a new booth or a microphone or demos Lord knows, they're not inexpensive and so these are things that you need to plan for, and by planning for it and having the financial resources able to pay for it, then really you're able to utilize other tools to get you a little bit more for the money that you are already planning on spending. You are already planning on spending. This is actually something I learned from a personal finance situation when I was trying to really understand like money and finances and learn about, like, how money works. 

07:52 I learned in my own personal life that if I didn't have the cash to spend on something, I was putting myself deeper in a hole by spending additional money on interest because I really didn't have the money to buy that thing in the first place. Now I understand. You know, not everyone has the money to like pay everything off in full. I was at my grocery store and, ann, I will tell you they have pay over time at my grocery store. Oh man. 

08:18 It's unreal and I get it. Times are tough and money can be really, really tight. Get it, times are tough and money can be really really tight. But I do think this is an opportunity for planning for certain big expenses that you can utilize, opening up a credit card or using your credit card to be able to get you things like protections for that device. You know, if you use a certain credit card, they may cover it instead of needing to get the extra insurance. 

08:43 That's actually a really good point. Yeah, there are so many different things that you can utilize by using a credit card for let's talk about business for the business purchases that you're doing. 

08:52 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) So warranty like additional warranty or protection, so I wouldn't have even thought that actually, if you buy it with your credit card, does it give you additional protection? 

09:00 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) Yeah, yeah, and also my boyfriend was telling me that his debit card, his number, got like taken or hacked or something like that, and so they were trying to take money out of his account. But if that happens with a credit card, you're dealing with the bank's money, not your own personal money, so it's a little bit easier to get that money recovered if something would happen with it. 

09:20 So there are so many different protections that can happen. And even you said you have one credit card for your business for bookkeeping we talked about bookkeepers and things like that. 

09:30 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) It's one ledger to be able to cross-reference and say, okay, this is what I spent over the course of time, and I mean I'm getting so excited right when I went to a conference. 

09:42 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) I went to J Michael's Euro Retreat. Actually, when you and I met in person to Amsterdam, you know I flew there on points. My flight was totally covered by points and it was accumulation of points that I had spent by utilizing my credit card for all of the business expenses that I pay monthly. My Source Connect, my Zoom accounts, my all of this stuff. It's paid through a credit card. And then I had accumulated enough points to be able to fly for free Business class. 

10:11 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) It was nice. I love using my credit card to pay for all my monthly subscriptions because, again, my one subscription that I have for personal right, which is I have a subscription, peloton which is like $44 a month, which is some crazy amount, but I use it. So for me it's worth it and it's funny because the amount that I'm getting paid back on that credit card pretty much pays for about half of that. So it's kind of cool. I broke my monthly price down from $44 to like $24. And so it really works out. It's $24 a month. So for me that works. And so, if you can look for those creative ways. But like, how much time do you spend looking for deals or checking on the deals? Because a lot of times I think credit cards will have a deal and then it only lasts for a certain amount of time, right, and then maybe interest rate will go back up or maybe it won't get 3% or 4% on gas purchases. You won't get it anymore. So how on top of it do you have to be? 

11:08 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) I think you would need to be on top of it. If that's something On a monthly, probably on a monthly basis. If that's something that you are planning on, for example, opening up a new card, for example, for me, I was ready to open a new card, and so I spent a couple of hours on Google YouTube like just checking around to see what was out there. 

11:28 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) So what do you Google? So, if you're searching for a new credit card, what do you Google? What's a smart thing to search for? 

11:34 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) For this one, I was looking for business credit cards because again, personal and business. So there are some business credit cards you can get. You can just Google best business credit card in the year. And then, for the most part in Google, it'll tell you, like what options are available and it'll even give you potentially some hints if you were to go into incognito mode. When you're looking for new credit cards, the bonus points may be higher than when you just search for it normally. 

12:04 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Oh, that's so interesting because you're right, because your information is in Google anyways. There's the tip of the day, Guys, we can go home now Because I think that's a great tip. Like you would I never would have thought of that to go in incognito mode, because then they're not necessarily going on information that they already have on you for that credit card and you might get better deals. 

12:22 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) Yeah, exactly. 

12:23 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Because more than likely, they know that I have an American Express credit card that I've used online 100 billion times before. 

12:29 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) So they're not trying to bring you in as a new customer because they don't know that you are or are not a current customer. 

12:35 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) So do your searching in incognito mode. 

12:38 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) I love that, yeah, and that's actually exactly what happened to me. I was looking for this particular credit card and my first Google search said okay, great, 150,000 points. Wonderful when incognito mode, 250,000 points, same card, same everything. And I was like oh, what can I do with 250,000? 

13:02 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) points. I would just say, personally, this doesn't matter. I mean, you could be shopping for studio equipment, right, which I always say. Vioboss has a great studio equipment list that you can certainly click on and buy. But when you are searching for equipment online, I mean you can even like do that in incognito mode, or if you're signing up on a website for the first time, a lot of times they'll give you an offer for, say, 15% on your first order, right, or whatever it might be, and so I might be going back to the same company that I already purchased something and I'll sign up with a different email address so that. 

13:35 I can get that discount and that will actually help me to make that decision. Well, all right, I can save 15%. So, yeah, that's good, that's good for me, I'll buy it. So same thing with a credit card, right. So when you're shopping, pretend like you are a new person shopping for that, and I think you'll get a really good deal, yeah, and just look around and shop around Again. 

13:54 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) When you're ready to make these big purchases is a good time to start looking to see I'm going to spend the money anyway, what can I get for the amount of money that I'm planning on spending? So that's a really great opportunity. But also there are ways to get deals or to get stuff for the points that you're already accumulating. In some ways it can be just cash back. In other ways it could be travel, which I absolutely love that because I like to travel anyway, and I'm going to be traveling for some of these conferences or staying at hotels. 

14:27 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) And hotels too, like, if you are, we're a Marriott vacation owner and so we try to stay at Marriott's whenever possible because we can get points with Marriott's, and so then when I go to a voiceover conference, I can use those points theoretically to either have a room if I'm not provided a room already, but if I'm provided a room, I can use the membership that I have to upgrade that room, yeah, and then get maybe a free breakfast or get access, get free water. Gosh knows that we need water all the time. 

14:55 So, I'm always looking for that free water deal. I'm like, okay, I am a gold card member or I'm a Marriott club member and so I need my free water today. Right, yeah, so every time I go to VO Atlanta, they don't put water in the rooms anymore. And now they're doing a thing. Well, they do. I'm sorry, Excuse me. 

15:15 There was one place that I went where they don't put water in the rooms they now have, like a place where you can fill like a refillable sort of thing, which I think is a great idea so that you don't have to waste the plastic bottles anymore. But at Vio Atlanta, at that hotel I had credit at the store so I would go down and get like the big because I drink a lot of water. I get one of the big bottles of water every day for my coffee machine. I don't love Starbucks coffee, so I'd make my own coffee. But yeah, there's so many cool things you can do with hotels and airfare. 

15:40 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) And even having access to like, for example, you said, american Express. You have an American Express card. There is the American Express card that has access to what's called fine hotels and resorts. So you can book through that relationship and I was actually looking at that for a trip that I was taking and you get like free breakfast and early check-in and check-out and you get like an experience credit at that hotel. So you get more just by having the virtue of having this relationship, which then can possibly make your stay a little bit more comfortable. 

16:15 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) So you're saying the relationship with money can help you get more things? 

16:22 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) Yes, and have a different quality of life. 

16:24 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yes, you can have a good relationship with your credit card, and I think that's a good thing. Have good relationships with your credit card, not bad ones. 

16:32 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) Exactly, and that actually is a really, really good point, because I grew up and I'll just have a little bit of a transparency moment I grew up hearing credit is bad, credit cards are bad, do not use it, and I actually didn't even get my first credit card until I was in my mid-20s because I was told that I didn't need it because it was bad and nothing good could come from it. But really it's a tool that can be used to enhance your quality of life, to give you more protections, if used properly. 

17:03 If used properly, that's the caveat and understanding how it works and what the tool is to be used. That interest, if you're carrying interest, is a tool that can work against you so quickly because that interest rate for credit cards specifically, is so high. And you'll know what it is because you can actually log into your account and see what the interest rate is. This is not secret stuff and see what the interest rate is. It's not, this is not secret stuff. So if you go and you take a look at it and you see, okay, I'm spending 20, 25% interest Every single month, it's working against you. But then we talked about the savings accounts, right, and how much you can make in having interest when you have your money with some of these accounts. 

17:48 So it can work for you but also interest, can work against you. If not, this tool is not being used and utilized responsibly and properly for what is needed for. 

17:58 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yeah, and it's so hard sometimes when you lose that control. I think it has to do with well, I don't know, maybe we talk about like we're talking about, you know credit cards and all that, and so I think, with all due respect, we do have to say we have to have a respect for it, for the credit card, a respect for the money so that it is being used responsibly, Because when it does get out of control and I will tell you, as a young girl, mine got out of control and I ended up having a huge balance and then spending this atrocious amount of interest on it and I, like you, was told that credit is bad. You should really just pay for everything. You should have the money right. If you don't have the money for it, don't buy it Right, which I agree with right. 

18:37 I know where that philosophy is coming from. It was meant for protecting me. However, you still, I think, need to have the money before you buy it, but now you can use the credit card as a tool to get more right and to maybe get more value for that. So I think the idea, the premise, is still the same Make sure you have the money before you buy it. I mean, in an ideal situation you should have the money to buy it, Otherwise maybe not buy it and then use a credit card as a tool that has benefits and perks and all those other things so that you can get more value out of it. 

19:11 Absolutely, yeah, yeah. So what sorts of things, danielle, do we have to watch out for when maybe we're using credit cards for our business or shopping for credit cards in our business? Are there any red flags out there? What do you? 

19:21 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) recommend? I recommend having a business credit card, specifically one that is for business. You can get like what would be a personal credit card in your business's name, but that goes back to sort of mixing the business and personal. There are business credit cards for a reason. I would utilize a business credit card when you're looking to open up a credit card for your business, and it does need to be in your business's name. 

19:50 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yes, I agree, I have both a business and a personal. Yeah, american Express and Costco. By the way, I have both a business Costco card and a personal Costco card. 

19:58 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) Yeah, so just whatever is business and personal, they are completely separate entities. Your business, if you run your business in a certain way with like a LLC, for example, it has its own federal identification number. Yeah, so like it's really a separate entity. So if you're going to be looking for a credit card for your business, look for business credit cards, and I have found that business credit cards will offer certain protections for things that we utilize, things for business for. I even saw American Express Platinum has like a credit for the Adobe Creative Cloud, and so if you utilize, you know, adobe Audition, for example, then maybe that's something you know you want to use it for. So, looking for things for a business, looking for a business credit card, is the first thing that I would take a look at. 

20:46 Second of all, be prepared to get a new credit card if you do have like large purchases that you're already planning for, going back to essentially having the cash on hand to justify the amount that you're going to be spending, so that you do not start paying interest on this card that you were trying to get you know value from? 

21:05 And the other things that I would look at are is there an annual fee for the card Because you are spending money to have this card, and are you able to justify that annual fee with the benefits or the credits or the perks that you're getting by having this card? And there are plenty of cards out there that do not have an annual fee, and that's something to think about. 

21:24 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I was just going to say. It used to be a thing where almost all the cards had an annual fee and then they started. And again, I think it's all a sell right, it's all a sell mechanism right. They started most of the ones. I won't even entertain the idea of one that has a fee, unless, of course, the benefits outweigh, and I haven't had a card with a fee for many years. I don't know what about you. 

21:45 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) I have several cards that have fees. 

21:48 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) So then that means that the benefits, though, the benefits though are outweighing those fees that you pay every year. Okay, and especially, I think you're going to find that in a business credit card sense right the fees versus a personal card, because I think a lot of times personal cards people are looking for no fees right, they're looking to get the best deal possible. But for businesses, I think companies want to say, all right, for this fee we'll offer additional protection for blah, blah, blah. And it's very interesting because I never actually looked into. I have an American Express business credit card and just because of the simple fact that I got money back every month was enough for me, and I never really looked at beyond that what it offers. And so now I'm going to go back and look at the fine print and see what protections it offers and warranties and maybe additional deals that I'm not taking advantage of Exactly. 

22:37 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) I mean one of my business credit cards offers protections on rental cars, so it offers that like you don't have to buy that insurance Exactly. 

22:45 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) So really which is a huge fee these days Exactly. Oh my gosh. 

22:49 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) So, taking a look, it kind of becomes a little bit of a matrix of like okay, this covers this and this card will cover these things and everything else. And, like I said at the beginning of this episode, I get really nerdy about these things. So you know, I have a spreadsheet about all the different things that my different credit cards can provide for me in terms of bonuses and value. 

23:10 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) And now do you have more than one business card? 

23:12 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) I now have a second business card. I just this week opened my second business credit card. Like you, I prefer to have everything streamlined on one card. 

23:22 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Sure, but I couldn't say no to 250,000 points, I mean yeah, no, I get you and those points will apply. And then you know what? Here's the deal If you do open up an extra card and then you find out that it's no longer serving you with that value, then you're done with it. There's typically no penalty for not using it. 

23:38 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) What I would say to that and for me this is always my calculus, personal or business opening up a new card is is there a downgrade path? So you don't necessarily want to close the account because that may work against you. But is there a way to go from a paid card to downgrade to a no-fee card, and so I always think about that when I'm looking at getting a new credit card. Is there a downgrade path to a no-fee card that I can open up instead? 

24:07 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Now you just made me think of something different. Now, when I bought a car again, I was fortunate enough to have money in the bank and I could have paid cash for that car. However, I opted to put half down and pay the rest of the half on the finance plan, because the finance plan was 1%. I had 1% and it was like literally, I think, over the course of seven years, I paid $500 or something, I don't know. It was like a total of $500 to do that, and the reason why I did that was to gain better credit, because if you don't have any credit, you don't have any credit. 

24:44 You know what I mean you can't get good credit if you don't have any credit. And so when my husband and I got married, we were trying to consolidate credit cards and pay off debt and get that out of under the way, but we realized that you do need to have some credit cards in order to keep good credit and for people to entertain business loans to you. So having good credit is an important thing for your business and, as a matter of fact, I happen to know that when we were buying a home and myself being self-employed right, they looked at my credit card. They looked at my business credit card because they wanted to see what do I pay on a monthly basis? How much money am I putting out? That was part of my certification that I could be part of that mortgage that we were going to get for this house, and so having good credit actually was working against me. 

25:45 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) So what I was told and what I understood to be true about just avoiding credit was not going to serve me for the things that I wanted, in the long run, to buy a house or to get a really nice apartment or qualify for certain things, it requires having credit, and not having any at all was not helping me, and so utilizing credit cards as a tool and respecting it and paying off the credit cards in full or paying on time those kinds of things really do help. So not having credit at all really can hurt you, but utilizing it improperly can hurt you even more. 

26:16 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) So, bosses, use your credit wisely to invest in your business and to get extra value. So great discussion. Danielle, thank you so much for joining me today and again, I look forward to our sessions all the time. I look forward to talking with you about money bosses out there. Great big shout out to our sponsor, ipdtl. You too can connect and network like bosses. Find out more at IPDTLcom. You guys have an amazing week and we will both see you next week. Bye. 

26:48 - Intro (Announcement) Join us next week for another edition of VO Boss with your host, Anne Ganguza, and take your business to the next level. Sign up for our mailing list at vobosscom and receive exclusive content, industry revolutionizing tips and strategies and new ways to rock your business like a boss. Redistribution with permission. Coast to coast connectivity via IPDTL. 

Discover the art of developing self-awareness and confronting the illusions we create both personally and professionally. Join Anne and Lau as they tackle the challenge of overcoming self-doubt, emphasizing resilience over inherent talent. By embracing our realities and addressing the falsehoods we tell ourselves, you'll learn how profound self-awareness can shape our lives. The BOSSES discuss how trusted companions and self-reflection can shine a light on our paths, leading to greater authenticity and success. Explore practical techniques to turn setbacks into opportunities for growth. We discuss the delicate balance between trusting external advice and listening to personal intuition. 00:00 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) You know your voice has the power to move, to persuade, to inspire. Imagine taking that power to its fullest potential. With guidance and expert production, I can help elevate your voice to new heights, making every voice script resonate with your audience. Let's empower your voice together, one session at a time. Find out more at anneganguzza.com. 

00:26 - Intro (Announcement) It's time to take your business to the next level, the boss level. These are the premier business owner strategies and successes being utilized by the industry's top talent today. Rock your business like a boss a VO boss. Now let's welcome your host, anganguza. A VO Boss. Now let's welcome your host, Anne Ganguzza. 

00:45 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Hey everyone, welcome to the VO Boss podcast and the Boss Superpower Series. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzza, and I'm here with my amazing, wonderful friend and co-host, ms Lau Lapides. 

00:59 - Lau Lapides (Guest) Thank, you so much, I'm already getting verklempt. Incredible to be here, as always, love it Law. 

01:06 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I love chatting with you and I have a very interesting topic, I think, today. 

01:12 Because, I love me some Peloton. 

01:14 So when I'm not Pilate-ing, I am Peloton-ing, or I am pre-coring, but I'm Peloton-ing a lot and I have a favorite instructor. I have a couple of favorite instructors, but one of them for those Peloton people who know, cody I love Cody. I was spinning away and Cody said you know, my therapist asked me how do you know when you're lying to yourself, or do you know that you're lying to yourself? And I thought, wow, what a great question. First of all because it really makes you kind of stop in your tracks and think Honestly, laura, throughout my life there are many times that you kind of know, right, you kind of know when you're lying to yourself. Maybe you're in some form of denial, but you're lying to yourself. And I think that we need to delve deep into this Lau today and ask our bosses do you know when you're lying to yourself and what are the stakes in that and how can you get past that? Because I think that to be productive and to really be successful in this business, you need to stop lying to yourself. 

02:20 - Lau Lapides (Guest) Yeah, and I think that there has to be at least a brief bullet hit list of how do you deal with that, Like, how do you even know? How do you start to know what are some of the dead giveaways that you may be lying to yourself? The first one that comes to my mind is do you have or are you aware of? I think you have it, but are you aware of your inner voice? Are you aware of it, do you? 

02:43 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) hear it? Oh, I hear mine all the time. That's a very interesting question, because I actually thought everybody hears their inner voice. 

02:51 - Intro (Announcement) No. 

02:51 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) But I actually have read that scientific studies say that not everybody has an inner voice. My inner voice talks to me all the time. Oh my gosh, all the time. What about? 

02:59 - Lau Lapides (Guest) you. Yeah, mine is very strong and very loud and I already know all the justifications and lies I tell myself when I hear the voice in order to do something. And that's the next question I have is once you spot that inner voice, what are the common hyperbolic statements or lies, or fibs? That you're coming up with that. Feel really good to you to say in order to void out that voice. 

03:27 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Well, first of all, what if you're someone who doesn't have an inner voice? Is that something that you can assess? Can you make an inner voice come out? Maybe people don't define it as an inner voice. Maybe they define it as a belief system, right? Maybe? 

03:40 - Lau Lapides (Guest) they hide it, Maybe they bury it, Maybe they've been shamed to listen to it. There's a lot of reasons why I think people don't discover or find their inner voice. I think one of the things that I've always done I always chalked it up to just being a creative ensemble type of person but I think it is helpful in a sounding board of understanding what is the objective truth for you and your circumstance if you can't discover it on your own through your inner voice. 

04:08 One of the things that I find helpful is surrounding yourself with really incredible people, brilliant people that you know and trust and feel good about sharing certain things with that you can soundboard with and see is it matching what you may be saying internally or not? Because there is a community truth about how people see you, hear you and, especially if they know you, they know your thought process right so they can sort of catch you when you're going off track. 

04:37 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yeah, yeah, it depends on life situations, right, I'm going to say the first inner voice is the truth, right? The inner voice, really, I think, is your truth, and do you listen to your inner voice, meaning, do you know when you're lying, do you know when you're lying to yourself, that kind of thing? So I think that's when you're denying that inner voice from having any say in kind of the truth, or you're in a denial of the truth, or you're in a denial of acknowledging that the truth is going. We're getting really deep here, but you're acknowledging. 

05:08 - Lau Lapides (Guest) Go right there, I'm right with you. 

05:10 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) You're acknowledging that you're not ready for the truth right now. Right, you're not ready for it, because to get through that truth or to listen to that truth may require an effort that is like gargantuan and superhuman to get beyond that truth. And this could be anything. It could be personal, professional. I mean, of course, personal affects professional. But I'm going to kind of focus on the professional, having had an inner voice that I denied through personal issues because I wasn't ready to face them. And so for me it's kind of like you get really good at telling yourself lies, you get really good at justifying why you're not listening to that inner voice. Yes, because it keeps you safe. Right, it keeps you safe in a lot of ways, or it keeps you from I don't know why. Is it that you don't want to look or do the work that's required to get through the truth and to align with the truth? 

06:03 - Lau Lapides (Guest) Well, there could be I mean for psychological reasons, lots of reasons, but I think one deeply psychological common reason that I see in a lot of actors, artists, voiceovers and women is the sabotaging effect of arguing with yourself that you cannot be good enough. 

06:22 It's not possible for you to get this successfully done because of X, y, z, you're not worthy, right, you're not worthy. So therein lies your inner voice. But is the inner voice being honest and truthful, or is the inner voice a sabotage voice? Yeah, yeah, absolutely that. You've created as like an alter ego to help you disqualify, get out of situations you know, qualify things and get you off the hook. I think artists do that. An awful lot is to say all the reasons why they cannot do something versus why they can do something, and after a while of telling yourself those lies, you actually believe them. 

07:00 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yeah yeah, I'm not getting work because, right yeah, talk professionally, right Okay, I'm not'm not getting work because, right, you'll talk professionally, right Okay. 

07:05 I'm not a successful voice actor because right, no one's going to hire me because, right, I'm not talented enough, my voice is not good enough, I don't have the right equipment, right, and so therefore, does that allow you to? I've spent all this money and I've gotten nowhere, right? So are you going to quit? Because you're listening right to those lies that you're telling yourself, or the inner voices, your inner self is you right? So we're talking to ourselves. So inner self is you, and inner self could be telling lies that you fabricated. 

07:40 - Lau Lapides (Guest) Or it's the voices that have been with you over your lifetime that are the cacophony of voices that are not accurate or true. Yeah, that you've believed. You've gone down that road and sort of believed that that's who. 

07:53 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) That's the role that you are. They've turned into your inner voice, right. 

07:59 - Lau Lapides (Guest) And they've turned into your inner voice, where you pick up the things that you believe that people think or feel about you maybe from your home life or your friendship life or whatever that aren't necessarily an objective truth in the larger world, in the larger context of things, and that, I think, is very, very common Also, especially with women. I think just wanting to please, just being a pleaser, is a big driving force in not listening to your inner voice. 

08:27 Yeah, You're saying, oh I'll just, yeah, they want me to do it this way, I'll just do it this way. Or they're asking me for this, I'll just give it to them and putting your common sense, putting that to the side for the higher purpose of pleasing, yeah, absolutely. 

08:43 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I mean, that is so, so tough, and I'll tell you what, and I'm not getting into a political discussion, but I will say that external factors also play a part in that inner voice, right. 

08:56 I feel like the nation is tired. Female right and we've had discussions on being a female in this industry or being a female in male-dominated industries. I'm tired. I've been fighting for a long time. I've been fighting for a long time and the inner voice wants to say, right, I fight because I believe certain things to be true and that is my truth. Right, but then the other people feeding into the inner voice you're not good enough or you know what? We're never going to make a difference. Now do I feel like? Am I going back to step zero? And what is it that I need to resolve internally, with my internal voice? That's going to help me to deal right with the external factors that are flying at me in every second of the day, and that's important. 

09:45 - Lau Lapides (Guest) That's an important factor. It is every second of the day and that's important. That's an important factor because when you think about either your parents or whoever raised you when you were young, you're like a little recorder. You're like a sponge. You're picking up language and sound and cadence and everything. You're picking that up from the people around you and that's implanted in you. It's very hard to get that out and stop thinking that and doing that. So it's really again compartmentalizing. Okay, what my lived and learned experience was and still is good, bad and ugly, which everyone experiences. And then where am I as a professional in what I'm choosing to experience and who I'm creating? 

10:24 Someone was telling an anecdote about this and I thought it was brilliant and he said I get annoyed. He's like in his 40s. He's a professional, whatever it was, like a psychiatrist or something. He said I go home and my parents treat me exactly like I'm 12 again, they talk to me as if I'm 12. Mine do Right and you got to love that right. But it annoys him to death because he says I have a family, I have children, I have a successful career. It's like they haven't graduated to that level. But that's where I'm saying you have to compartmentalize all these players in your life that speak to you in a certain way, sure, that code that linguistically code shift right, that say it's okay, they knew me at different times in my life good times, bad times, young, older. Now I have to amalgamate. What does that all mean in my voice? In my voice as to who I am and what I want to be? That's hard. That's the next step. Yeah, that's the next step. 

11:21 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I mean it's interesting because, as we are talking about the inner voice, is the inner voice really what you think or is it what others think, right? Or is it a combination of both of them? And also, is your inner voice something that you're doing to escape responsibility or escape owning up to a fact that maybe you haven't done everything you can to be successful in voice acting? And then, if that's the case, right, you have to try to ask yourself why, right, why am I afraid of success? And that's a big thing, I mean, look, you can be just as afraid of success, if not more, as a failure, right? Are you afraid to fail? Are you afraid of success? And I'll tell you what. Are you afraid of hard work? Yeah, and once you're there, whatever you've deemed to be your success, right. What's stopping you from growing more than that? Or are you complacent? 

12:09 For me, my personality is I cannot be stagnant. I cannot. I need to continue to grow my business. I need to continually evolve. If I don't, I feel like I'm failing, and for me, that's the motivation I need to push myself. Now, am I afraid of hard work? Me, no, I am not. 

12:25 But some people might be, some people might think, well, I just want, I just I'm tired, I've got a lot of other things happening and voice acting should not have been this hard for me, right In the beginning. I'm the first person to admit voice acting was hard for me, and it was one of those things where I said to myself God, like, maybe I shouldn't be doing it. If it's this hard, right, shouldn't it just come naturally? Shouldn't I just have a God-given talent? Shouldn't this just flow for me? And over years of continually saying, well, I'm not used to failing For me myself. My personality is like to just keep going until I don't fail, figuring out as I go, I ultimately decided, yeah, damn it, it's hard, voice acting is hard. I think it's very rare that you have anybody that has just an innate talent for reading words off a page and making them like sound amazing. 

13:09 - Lau Lapides (Guest) I got to be honest. I don't think anyone in any of our entertainment profession has it easy. 

13:15 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I don't. I don't either. I really don't. Just because you and I have been in the industry for many, many, many years right and we've been deemed successful, doesn't mean that we feel successful all the time right, doesn't mean that we feel successful all the time right or that we consider ourselves successful at any given moment. 

13:29 - Lau Lapides (Guest) No, that's like an illusion that people want to think is a truism, is a truth. When it's not a human truth, it's not a human thing. Maybe it's a robot thing, but it's not a human thing Because we're always going through situations in our life that we're reacting to, as well as human beings in the world that we're reacting to as well as human beings in the world that we're reacting to as well. 

13:50 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) And things change. 

13:51 - Lau Lapides (Guest) And things change. But I always say, like, what's the difference? What's the main difference between someone who's young and amateur early stage and someone who is a vetted professional? What's the main difference? And it's not talent, it's the fact that we all get down. We all fall down. We all's not talent, it's the fact that we all get down, we all fall down, we all get in trouble, but we're able to get up, brush ourself off and move on. 

14:12 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Get back on the horse and make use of that. 

14:13 - Lau Lapides (Guest) Yeah, really make use of that, whereas many are not able to do that. It's holding them down, it's holding them back. There's that stone right on top of them that they're not able to move. So that voice is like as heavy as any equipment that could be out there. It's heavier. It can be either a burden or it can be enlightenment. 

14:33 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) It's up to you. I love what you're saying about the failure Again, like if you failed and you've allowed that inner voice to say I am a failure, right, without taking benefit from the fail, I'd say get back up on the horse, turn the fail around and spin that into positive things. What positive things can you take from that right? 

14:53 So, if there is the dialogue happening where I'm not good enough right, I failed, I didn't get that gig right, I was not chosen right, they didn't pick my voice, I didn't nail the audition. Take that failure and I need you to reframe it right and restructure it so that it becomes a learning moment that can be turned into success. I mean, I think that's really like how do you know when you're lying to yourself? Acknowledge it first. I think that's first and foremost. 

15:19 Once you acknowledge it right. You then have the power to take that truth and take that knowledge and reframe it, and then reframe it to successful. 

15:30 - Lau Lapides (Guest) Reframe it and how do you use, how do you utilize that reframing to be helpful in your life and in others' lives? So it becomes wisdom. It doesn't just sit in a place where it's a bad experience or it's an experience that was a great experience. It becomes a nugget of wisdom for you. 

15:49 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) That becomes your proverb of how you live your life and how you utilize that in your life and we're speaking, so I think, so ethereal, and I want to kind of bring this down to like okay, I might have a student who's come to me and said well, I spent thousands and thousands of dollars on this demo and now everybody tells me it's a piece of garbage and I guess I just didn't know or I failed or that's it, that's why I'm not successful. So I always try to tell people look, life is a learning journey, right, and what sort of energy is positive or helpful? If you're going to sit there and berate yourself for getting a demo that maybe some people don't like, right, or that you don't like or doesn't serve you, that energy is wasted on yourself, like nobody else really cares. To, be quite honest, right, turn that, reframe it around, say I've made an investment, I have now learned and know that maybe I wasn't ready to make that demo. 

16:38 - Lau Lapides (Guest) Maybe it's learning money for you. Maybe you had to learn that Exactly that's your investment money for your business. 

16:43 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Absolutely. So you turn that around and you learn, right, you go get yourself a different coach. You learn until you feel because I believe, right, I believe we all know and then say, well, I trusted my coach. Well, I think there's also that inner voice, right, that says I may be not ready, but I'm going to put my trust in my coach and I get it. Guys, I get it. But also I think there's an inner voice in you that says maybe I wasn't ready for that right, but my coach says I am. And so you didn't listen to that voice? Right, you don't know that you're lying to yourself, right, when you're saying something doesn't feel, right, I don't feel ready. 

17:17 - Lau Lapides (Guest) That's the lie comes in, that's the pleasing, because you want to please your coach, you want to please your whoever, and say are you happy with me, are you proud of me? Did I do what you wanted me to do? Yeah, right. And that's where you have to start saying okay, they're my trusted advisor. I pay them for that, absolutely. But I can't put them all in one basket? 

17:38 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yes, exactly, instead of being completely angry and saying it's all their fault, right, In reality. Right, you need to listen to that voice that, hopefully, I mean maybe you did completely put all your trust in them, but then again, now that you've learned right, now that you've learned from it, now you know, maybe I won't put all my trust in my coaches and I will take that little voice in my head that said maybe you're not ready. Right, they said I was, but I don't feel ready and I didn't tell them about it so that they could reason with me and say no, really you are, or maybe you're not right. That's just the demo readiness. Right, like, what about the audition? What about the person that auditioned and didn't get the gig? 

18:21 - Lau Lapides (Guest) There's so many lies that we can tell ourselves about this right. Oh, we somehow always believe that voice. 

18:24 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) We always listen to that voice and believe that voice, Right? Oh well, all right. 

18:31 - Intro (Announcement) I voice. We always listen to that voice and believe that voice, right? 

18:31 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Oh well, all right, I did the audition and I must have sucked, right, I sucked, so I didn't get the job. There's the lie. There's the lie that you tell yourself Now. You don't know, right, you don't know that you sucked. 

18:34 I mean, maybe you do, maybe internally, you kind of know, oh, I haven't really coached a lot, maybe I should get somebody else's opinion to see, because I haven't developed an ear yet. So maybe it's something that somebody else can help me with. Maybe I don't suck, maybe I just need somebody else to give me some tips, or I need some additional coaching, right, or I nailed it, and then I heard the commercial and God, I can't believe they got hired Right. So there's the lie. How did they get hired? You know what I mean, and so how are you resolving that? 

19:06 - Lau Lapides (Guest) Right, Right, I think the discipline to say, okay, I want to always pay attention to the inner voice inside. But a very famous neurosurgeon said this and I thought it was so brilliant I believe it was David Amen, he's like on the speaking circuit as a neurosurgeon. He said believe it or not, you don't have to believe everything you think. And I was like whoa, astonishing, Because we somehow think if we think it then it must be true. Yeah, agreed, but we're forgetting all the immense biases, experiences, sort of mental slurs that we go through in our life that help formulate those thoughts. So that's not to say that you don't understand an inner truth or have an inner voice that can't lead you in the right direction. It's just to say you don't have to believe everything you're thinking. 

19:57 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yeah, you can manifest. I'm a big believer in manif. Yeah, you can manifest. I'm a big believer in manifesting. You can create. You can create with your thoughts. You can re-envision, you can reinvent, you can redirect. I absolutely believe that, with your thoughts Right, like they are so, so powerful, and of course, that audition that you didn't get right, and then you're like, oh, I must be no good, don't believe that. Right, you're telling yourself aloud and think here are all the possibilities that Ann and Lau have said a hundred times in an audition demolition. There's many, many reasons why people get the job or don't get the job right, and not all of them are directly under your control. I mean absolutely. So maybe you didn't suck, you are good and that's okay, and it's okay that you didn't get the job right. So you audition, you forget it, right, and ultimately you don't believe the lie, that you're telling yourself that you're not good enough for it and whatever you do, you must discipline yourself to not shed and forecast everything you're thinking. 

20:55 - Lau Lapides (Guest) They call it oversharing, but it really is forecasting what exactly is in your mind and you're doing that to purge yourself of guilt. Oh yeah, oh, let's collect 500 for this hour. I'm telling you, this is like good stuff. Don't purge on other people. Don't go through that catharsis. That's a private journey for you, Because guess what the casting director or the business person in front of you is thinking why did you just say that? I don't see that at all. What's happening? Are you okay? Like literally they're thinking, are you okay? Because you're forecasting something onto me that I don't even know what you're talking about Right Now? You and I are coaches. We catch that stuff and we try to remedy that. But you do it on the wrong people. You can never go back and make that impression again on them because they'll always. I remember Barbara Corcoran. I look up to her a lot as a mentor in business and she's a more mature woman. 

21:51 on Shark Tank if you ever watch Shark Tank, yeah absolutely she says I always Rolodex in my mind, whether you agree with this or not. I just thought it was very interesting the way she put this. Whenever someone, especially a woman, breaks down crying in front of me when they're pitching their product, I always kind of roll a dex that in my mind that that's not someone I can work with. Now, that's not to say that you can't cry. It's not to say you can't feel emotion. You should feel real emotion and not hide that. However, when you forecast and overshare those emotions with people you don't have relationships with yet, they Rolodex you, they compartmentalize you in a place where they say I don't know what they're telling themselves. 

22:30 I don't know what they're thinking and feeling, but it's not my experience of them, so from a business standpoint it can be very harmful. 

22:37 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Well, that translates right into social media Just saying right your responses, right Whether people respond like share or not, right your response. Is somebody's going to Rolodex that response in their brain and say I don't think I can work with that person based upon what they just said. Happens every day, every moment of the day. 

22:58 - Intro (Announcement) Yeah, all the time, all the time. 

22:59 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) And so understand that as well. Right, and so if you are oversharing, right Again, in a professional setting, especially, like you said, I think the key is with people that you do not have relationships with yet, right, People that do not know do not know your perspective where that's coming from, right. And even if they do know where that's coming from, where that's coming from right, and even if they do know where that's coming from, they may Rolodex it and say I don't think I can work with that person. Right, and I get that, and we get that too as coaches oh yeah, oh, I can't work with that person. 

23:28 - Lau Lapides (Guest) No, I can't work with that. And that's like you trying to find the jury. That's the jury, that's the audience, that's the of people that will agree with you on what you're saying. That's not the place to do it Right, and it's not even an objective truth in any way. It's just a whole bunch of people who may be agreeing with you on whatever you're saying. So you have to be careful. You have to like be careful in who you trust with your inner voice and with your inner self. 

23:56 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) So I'm going to make this educated guess that when I ask the question, how do you know when you're lying to yourself? Right, I think you have to start with. How do you know when you're lying to yourself, when something is not necessarily going the way that you want it to right? I think that's one telltale way to start really looking inward and asking okay, so why are things not happening? Why am I not getting the gig? Why am I not getting the gig? Why am I not getting any business? Why am I not successful? Or why do I feel like I'm not successful? Asking yourself those questions and just sitting quiet in the moment and really thinking about what are the steps to achieve success? Why are you not getting that gig? 

24:33 Well, to get the gig, certain factors have to take place. You have to have talent right, but not always right. You have to have talent right, but not always right. You have to have talent, you have to be in the right demographic, you have to be in the head of the casting director, which none of us are. So there's certain factors that are beyond our control. And when that happens, we have to also put in our head that there are certain factors beyond our control. So maybe we didn't get the gig because we have no control. 

24:55 The daughter of a close friend. They gave the job to her, versus they changed directions and went with a male instead of female, or whatever. It is right. Understand that there are things beyond your control and that's okay, rather than I am not good enough, right, right, and taking things. Why am I not getting more work, right? Why am I not getting more work? 

25:14 Well, sit down and take a look at. How much coaching have you had, right? How much training have you had? Are you as skilled as you can be? Are you marketing yourself as much as you can be? Why, if not, are you not marketing yourself, right? Well, you don't have the know-how, you don't have the money to invest in a marketer. You don't have the money, right. Why are these things happening? And really sit down and just I would say, write it down. Right, write it down. What are the things that you're not achieving, that you want to achieve, and what are the steps that you need to get there, or what are the conditions in which, when they're met, you will have success in that or not success? And then really sit down and ask yourself to be truthful right. How much of this is under your control? How much of this is other people saying this is the way it is and influencing your inner voice, or how much of it is your own self-sabotage? 

26:04 - Lau Lapides (Guest) Yeah, and what you're really talking about here, which is, I think, the nugget here. The bottom line takeaway is hold yourself accountable to finding your voice, listening to it and understanding it right. So, for instance, if there's danger for you, if there's an instinctive acknowledgement that you're making, don't just ignore it and do it anyway. Don't just ignore it and overlook it anyway. You oftentimes will go wrong when you do that right, or when someone gives you feedback and you have to actively listen and absorb that feedback, and they say 5, 6, 10, 15 times. I don't know why you just said that. To me. It's not true or accurate. You should stop doing that. Stop doing it Like you've got to stop the behaviors. 

26:50 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yes, now you go to external sources. Right, when you've listened to your inner voice and your inner voice is not helpful, right, that's when you turn to your accountability buddies, your trusted colleagues. 

27:01 - Intro (Announcement) Or sabotaging. 

27:02 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) yes, Right, your trusted colleagues, and you bounce that off of them, and then that is what's going to help, hopefully, reframe right. You're lying to yourself, right, and your inner voice that can be lying to you or sabotaging you, whatever that is, wow. That was deep. By the way, vaughn and I are not we are not in the business of mental health, however. This is just based on our own experiences, so, please, take what we say with a grain of salt. 

27:28 We're sharing our experiences to hopefully help you with yours, because we are not therapists, so please keep that in mind, and we're just here to share. 

27:39 - Lau Lapides (Guest) It's very true. And I have to say, if you're in business and studying this kind of work over years and years and years, you'll find that the more quality the script, the more quality the copy, the more they have something in common with great writers, great thinkers, great philosophers, great psychologists right? So we don't need to be like a clinical psychologist to understand the analysis of a line from Shakespeare. Like we can figure that out at a certain point and say how does that connect to my life, my lived experience, how does that connect to me uniquely as a person? Is that part of my voice and I mean my inner voice and my mechanical voice as well? Yeah Right, and that's what we call finding our voice. Voice and my mechanical voice as well? Yeah Right, and that's what we call finding our voice. Like finding your authentic voice means like doing that work, doing that homework. 

28:25 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Good stuff. Oh my gosh, Woo Woo. I'm tired now. My inner voice needs a break. We need a latte after that, or something I know. All right. Well, before my latte, I'm going to give a great big shout out to our sponsor, IPDTL. You too can connect and network like bosses. Find out more at IPDTLcom Lau. I love you. It's been amazing. 

28:46 - Lau Lapides (Guest) I love you. 

28:47 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) And my inner voice says I love Lau, I love Annie and I love Lau and I love myself and I love my inner voice, even when it misbehaves. 

28:56 - Lau Lapides (Guest) And we love all of you listening, and that's why we share these inner thoughts. 

28:59 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yes, Thank you guys. You have an amazing week and we will see you next week. Bye. 

29:06 - Intro (Announcement) Join us next week for another edition of VO Boss with your host, Anne Ganguza, and take your business to the next level. Sign up for our mailing list at vobosscom and receive exclusive content, industry revolutionizing tips and strategies and new ways to rock your business like a boss. Redistribution with permission. Coast to coast connectivity via IPDTL. 

2025 is the year to become "acronimble" by familiarizing yourself with one of the most important acronyms in the industry: CRM, which stands for Customer Relationship Management. The BOSSES discuss how the right CRM tool can streamline how you engage with clients, leading to better organization, and more business opportunities. Learn how to maintain meaningful connections without constantly reinventing the wheel, and discover the strategies that help you organize client interactions to promote continued work. Through personal stories and practical advice, The BOSSES highlight the evolution from old-school Rolodexes to cutting-edge digital solutions, empowering you to manage your client interactions like a BOSS. 00:01 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Hey, amazing voiceover talents. Do you ever wish boss marketing was as fun as it was being behind the mic? Well, check out my VO Boss Blast. It's designed to automate and make your marketing simpler. You'll benefit from your very own target marketed list, tailored to meet your goals and your brand. The VoBoss Blast Find out more at V. The VO Boss Blast Find out more at voboss.com. 

00:27 - Intro (Announcement) It's time to take your business to the next level, the boss level. These are the premier business owner strategies and successes being utilized by the industry's top talent today. Rock your business like a boss, a VO Boss. Now let's welcome your host, Anne Ganguzza. 

00:46 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Hey everyone, welcome to the VO Boss Podcast and the Real Bosses series. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzza, and I am the BOSS with the VOS. That's the voiceover strategist, Mr Tom Dheere. Hello. 

00:59 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Tom Hello. So that's boss VOS. 

01:02 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Boss, VOS. 

01:03 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) The BOSS VOSS, boss VOSS. 

01:04 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) The BOSS BOSS with the V-O-S. 

01:06 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) BOSS with the V-O-S. 

01:08 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) And you know, tom, let's continue the acronym party, shall we? Yes, please, Because I'll tell you what it's the beginning of the year, I'm going to manifest multiple new contacts and you know what I need to be able to keep track of those contacts in a BOSS CRM. 

01:26 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Whoa, whoa Boss, boss CRM. What do you? 

01:29 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) think Boss, boss CRM I like that. And you know, people ask me about what CRM do I use? What CRM do I use? And so let's talk about 2025 CRM. 

01:40 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Fantastic idea, anne. First off, just to make sure everybody knows what we're talking about, CRM is Customer Relationship Manager. It is a fancy way of saying some form of system where you store your client information potential clients, current clients, past clients' information which you can use as a home base for your marketing strategies. So you use the CRM to develop relationships with customers. So just make sure everybody's on the same page. 

02:13 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Then you could be CRM BOSS, you could be a CRM boss. 

02:17 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) You could be a crim boss. No, we'll stick with CRM. 

02:22 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) But CRM reminds me of crumble cookies. Oh wait, now I'm going off. 

02:28 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) I diverge into a tangent of cookies. I was thinking crumb, like the god that Conan the Barbarian worships. All right, we're really getting off the rails here. 

02:34 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I can see where my brain is versus yours. 

02:36 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) You must be hungrier than I am. 

02:40 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I love cookies, me too. So, speaking of CRMs, so, tom, let's talk about why, first of all, is it good to have a CRM? Why do we need one? For a boss business? 

02:51 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) It is critical for voice actors to have a CRM, because I tell my students that my definition of marketing is the art and science of developing meaningful relationships. That's what it is. You want meaningful relationships with clients. Now, we all know why you want meaningful relationships with clients. Now we all know why we want meaningful relationships with clients and they know too is because we want them to give us money to talk Like. We understand that, they understand that. And at the same time, it's complicated and there's a lot of moving parts to all of this stuff. 

03:24 Having a CRM well, why you want to have it is because you don't want to have to reinvent the wheel every time. You want to get voiceover work. Also, it's a relationship manager, since you are trying to develop relationships. Relationships have beginnings. They start in a certain way Hi, my name is so-and-so Nice to meet you Handshake, firm handshake and all that stuff. And then it's the getting to know you stuff develop an understanding of each other, what you can offer each other, what you both need from each other, and developing trust. Trust is one of the most important components of any relationship, be it personal or professional. So why have a CRM? You do it to develop trust and nurture relationships with clients. 

04:15 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) And Tom, can I just say I love that. Can I just say, as a girl with about a million and a half and I kid you not a million and a half unread emails in my Gmail, if I don't have a place that I can go to see where are my customers, right, if I'm not doing something to organize that, basically emails just fly through my inbox and so I might forget that I was in contact with my client maybe a month ago and I needed to follow up with them for a particular reason. Maybe they were saying let me get back to you on this and I need to follow up. And so if I just relied on my trusty email system which, by the way, has a million and a half unread email messages and guys in my defense, right, I got a Gmail account in 1990-something Okay, how many years is that? Thirty-some-odd years, a long time. 

05:04 When it began, I was one of the first like few hundred people that had a Gmail account and, because Google is a search engine, I just never deleted anything. So I have records, by the way, from my clients, if I want to. I have records going back to like 1992 or 96. I can't remember which year but yeah, that's amazing. 

05:21 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) I know it's crazy. 

05:22 That's amazing, but fun stuff Another thing to keep in mind is that, for a moment, take out the word relationship and replace it with the term sales funnel. Yeah, a good CRM helps get voice seekers into the sales funnel and pushes them through the sales funnel. There's different permutations and levels for different people, but for me, my sales funnel terms are brand awareness, consideration, decision, advocacy. Brand awareness you send the cold email Hi, so-and-so explainer video company. My name's Tom Dheere. I'm an explainer video narrator. 

05:57 Now they know that you exist, which means if they open the email, clicked on the link to your website, listened to your demos, downloaded them and replied hey, thanks for sending this, we'll keep you in mind for future consideration. They are now keeping you hopefully top of mind the next time a voiceover gig comes along that you're right for. So that's part of using the CRM to keep moving them through the consideration part of the sales funnel to the decision where they actually have a voiceover that you'd be right for and they remember you and they have your demos and they have your contact information and they actually reply to you. Hey, we think we've got something for you. Could you please read this script and let us know how much you'd charge for this? You do that and then you get the booking and then it goes into the advocacy part of the sales funnel where you did such a great job that they will remember you the next time a project comes along, because you did such a great job on the last project that you worked on. 

07:01 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I love how you just explained the sales funnel because I was going to say, like most voice actors are not necessarily aware, you went through the technical aspects of a traditional, like marketing sales funnel. Here I always have to go to my lipstick. 

07:13 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Okay, let's go to your lipstick. 

07:14 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) It's not in Ganguzza, unless I got my—okay. First of all, I have to have a need. I have to have a need, right, and so I may or may not be aware of different brands of lipstick, right, but because I've used this lipstick before, I'm going to start with my Chanel. Right, I have my Chanel lipstick and they're top of mind because literally they sit right here on my desk, because when I do my podcast video, I've got to make sure I have my matching lipstick. 

07:40 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Oh, your lipstick matches your headphones. 

07:43 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yeah, brand awareness. That's one thing. What's the next step in the funnel there, Tom? 

07:47 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Consideration. 

07:48 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Consideration. Now, what are the factors that are going to have me consider? Now, just equate this to your voiceover business guys. Basically, this is the layman's terms of like okay, so what is it? The considerations of? Why am I going to buy this brand? Right? 

08:01 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Yeah, what are the advertising and marketing techniques that that company is going to use to remind you how awesome their lipstick is? 

08:09 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Right, exactly. And also, what is my experience with the lipstick? Right? So I'm on their mailing list, right? And does Chanel go on sale? Well, no, but that's also brand awareness too. So we know that certain things don't go on sale. Chanel doesn't usually go on sale, but anyways, I keep up with them with their mailings and that's how they keep top of mind with me, but pretty much I also use it all the time and it sits there, so I visually see it. So it's either in my inbox or it's sitting here in my desk, right? What's the next step after consideration? 

08:37 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Decision. 

08:38 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Decision Okay, do I have the money at this time? Do I have the need? Do I have the money to buy this? Right. And I make that decision. I click on the email Right Because they say, oh, new colors are out and I'm like, oh, I could use a new color red Right. So I make that decision. I click, go to the website and then what's after? 

08:57 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) the decision I buy it, right. Advocacy, you buy it and then advocacy. 

08:59 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) So if I buy it and I love the color, oh my God, oh guys, have you seen? All right, all my friends, I'm going to say did you see this color? Isn't this color amazing? Right, and I might even throw up like a social media. You know, like, ooh, branding awareness. Anne Ganguzza Voice Talent, right, branding awareness. I love this new color red, because you got to feel confident in the booth so that you can voice confidently. And so there we go, I'm going to advocate for the brand. So not only am I advocating for my brand, but I'm advocating for this brand as well. So that kind of just took you through the sales funnel with, like, just a traditional lipstick. Sorry, tom, you could maybe use a flannel shirt as an example. 

09:35 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Well, I'm a Maybelline man myself. 

09:37 Oh, okay, there you go, so I want to take exactly what you said and now let's look at it from the lipstick maker company's perspective. 

09:46 They've got people that they want to buy their lipstick and they want them to love their lipstick and come back for more. So they have their own CRM and through their television advertising, through their radio advertising, through their digital and streaming advertising, through their print advertising on the side of a bus or in a magazine of some sort, they are trying to get people to be aware of them, brand awareness, and keep them top of mind, which is why there's always kinds of print and digital and other forms of advertising. And if they get you on that mailing list, they can send out emails at regular intervals based on people who haven't bought their lipstick yet and people who possibly have bought their lipstick yet. They also look at did they open this email, Did they use a promo code to try the lipstick or get a discount, even though they don't do discounts, which is very interesting because a lot of brands position themselves we are so valuable and we are so coveted, we don't need to discount. We don't need to do that. 

10:50 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I did that for many years. It's very interesting for Chanel to do that. It's an interesting psychology behind it. 

10:55 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) There is a psychology. 

10:56 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) There are a lot of times where, if something is so cheap, I'll be like oh, I'm not so sure about the quality of that. I'd actually rather pay a little bit more money because I feel like I'm getting better quality. And that's the whole like. Know your worth, guys. Right, what should you be charging? Charge what you're worth versus going cheap, right. 

11:12 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) More expensive equals superior from a branding and psychological point of view. So Chanel, chanel, right. Chanel sees all of us, potential customers, brand awareness, consideration, actual customers, decision and advocacy, and they use CRMs to get lipstick buyers into the sales funnel and push them through. Exactly Translating that to voice actors. We want to do the same exact thing, right, and a good, robust, interactive CRM can help us get voice seekers into the sales funnel and push them through. 

11:45 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Absolutely, and you'll be able to know at what point in the funnel they are at Exactly. A good CRM will tell you exactly where they are in the sales funnel so you'll know what to do for the next steps. Maybe they need an additional email, maybe they need a phone call, maybe you'll put out some more social media advertisements, that sort of a thing. So really depending on where they are in the CRM is when you make that determination and decision on what to do. So now, tom, the question is we know why we need a CRM right and we understand the sales funnel and all voice actors need to understand that sales funnel, because we are selling our products, we're selling our voices. 

12:17 Let's talk about actual CRMs. I mean, there's many of them out there. I know people constantly ask me which ones I use and I think the answer may surprise you unless you've listened to a podcast of mine before but I don't use any one. I use a multitude of CRMs in combination with one another because myself personally, I don't find one that does everything for me that I need. What about you, tom? 

12:38 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Yes, different CRMs fulfill different needs. Now, what we are talking about, and what most voice actors ask us about, is the software or app. 

12:57 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) If you have a Rolodex from the 70s or 80s or 90s. 

12:58 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) That's a CRM. Yep, yep, yep, A spreadsheet, A spreadsheet. Exactly that was the very next thing I was going to say A spreadsheet is a form of CRM. 

13:04 Yeah, I had an index card box. So in 1995, when I got my first voiceover demo and my coach told me to cold call because that's back then pre-social media, pre-pay-to-play, free home recording that was pretty much the only thing you could do. I would use a CRM of index cards and I had those little you know with the little tabs that would separate them into production companies, recording studios, advertising agencies, so on and so forth. That was a CRM and then that evolved into spreadsheets. I do still use spreadsheets regularly, but I also use an actual software app CRM. 

13:43 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Myself as well. 

13:44 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Now, neither Anne nor I are getting paid to sponsor or affiliate or promote any particular CRM, so we are going to be talking to you about this purely through what our experience has been without hawking, and then we get a little kickback. 

14:00 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) So I'm going to tell you, my first CRM well before voiceover was a Rolodex, and then, ultimately, it turned into a spreadsheet so that I could keep track of my customers, and that was based off of. You know, I started doing all my accounting online right through my accounting software, and so it was my customer base, right, that was thrown into a spreadsheet and then I would track things that way. So, you guys, crms don't have to be expensive. They can be very simple and it can be whatever you're most comfortable with, and that's what I started with. And then it ended up being my Gmail, right? My Gmail, where I would separate things into folders for different clients and then keep track of them that way, and then a couple of plugins for the Chrome browser that worked within Gmail to help me keep top of mind with them, and then, tom, I'm sure we'll get into the other ones that we use. What? 

14:48 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) about you. 

14:49 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) You started as a spreadsheet right. 

14:50 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) My start is the index card box, which then turned into spreadsheets, and then 2003,. I started using Act. You remember Act by Sage? I used that one for almost 10 years, so yeah, around 2013. And I think it either got discontinued or something weird happened with it, or I didn't like the features, or they started charging too much. I don't remember what it was. Then I did move to Gmail as well. 

15:17 I'd been using Gmail as an email account for a while, but then I started to use it as an actual CRM. One thing that's nice is that you can use what? Is it G-Sync or Google Sync? So I synchronize my Gmail with my Outlook folders, so I have Outlook which is how I manage all my email. 

15:38 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Oh, I have Gmail folders. 

15:40 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Right, and this is the great thing about it. I have Gmail folders, but they automatically sync with Outlook every time. So if you look at Gmail, and you look at the Outlook folders. The folders are exactly the same. So if I move one to one thing in one, it moves it to the one thing in the other, which means if I'm at my desktop, on my laptop, on my tablet or on my phone. 

16:01 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Outlook is amazing. 

16:02 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Outlook is amazing. Anything I do with Gmail or Outlook, it automatically synchronizes with all of my devices. 

16:08 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) In my defense, I would have Outlook as my most favorite email client ever and when I was working in the corporate world I had an Outlook account. And when I left the corporate world to go into voiceover full-time, I no longer had an Outlook server right to go to and Gmail at the time wasn't syncing up with Outlook nicely, or Outlook wasn't syncing up with Gmail nicely, so I literally got used to using just Gmail. Okay, but it's funny because my husband does use Gmail with Outlook and he just filters everything into his Outlook because Outlook is just wonderful visually, it's just a nice way to organize things in folders. But I've gotten so used to my Gmail in folders that I'm really used to and filtering. I have automatic filtering and that sort of thing, but I totally love Outlook. 

16:51 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Right, I'm looking at the bottom of my desktop. For me it's Google Workplace Sync, because I have a paid Google Workspace account. And Google Workspace is great. 

16:59 It does all kinds of fun things. 

17:00 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I can do it now. 

17:02 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Yeah, and I never even thought about Gmail as a CRM that I'm using now because I have a folder for every client in Gmail, because every time I have any kind of correspondence with any client, once the correspondence is over, I drag that email into that client folder. Now do I use that specifically to market out of? No, but it is a robust, legit CRM because, like, for example I'll give you a perfect example 2019, a potential client reached out to me and said hey, I'm developing this app, I'm getting a grant, I've got the level one grant for it, so I've got enough money to pay you to do this with the app and then, once we get that done, then we're going to apply for a level two grant. So I did the work in 2019 and 2020. We had an email exchange in 2021. And then a few weeks ago, three years later, the client said hey. 

17:53 I got the level two grant. We're ready to keep going. 

17:55 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yep love that. And at first I'm like who? 

17:57 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) the hell is this? Because it's been three years? But then I'm like. I looked at the email and then I'm like but you can go back. I went back and I looked in Gmail slash Outlook and I saw the folder with that client and all of our correspondences dating back to 2019 were there. 

18:10 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I know it's wonderful. This is also really good, and files, yeah, and everything. 

18:17 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) What's also good is often like I'll have a client and years will go by just like that and they'll say hey, I've got another explainer for you Charge same as last time. And I'll be like I don't remember, but my CRM does, because I look in, I see the email and last time we charged this, and then I can make a decision yeah, that's good. 

18:38 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Or it's been a few years. So now I search engine and again, I'm an authority on that because I have a million and a half unread email messages. And, by the way, they're unread because what I do is I subscribe. Just for those people that are wondering, I subscribe to every corporate list, every corporate list, because I want to learn as much about how companies that I want to voice for market to their customers, and so I sign up for a lot of mailing lists and I just let it filter through so I can see how they market. And that's honestly how I learned marketing Tom really through just everybody else and looking at everybody else. So I don't have a problem with not having an empty inbox I know some people do but again, I must have probably, I want to say, a good 300 folders within my Gmail. 

19:17 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Oh yeah, Me too I have hundreds. 

19:19 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yeah, at least, and I have rules that filter emails coming in. 

19:24 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Absolutely. Looking at my inbox, right now I have 14 emails in my professional inbox the Tom and Tom Dheere inbox. 

19:31 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I have more than that and that's cool. 

19:32 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) But, like I said, when I'm done with the conversation I drag it into the client's folder and I've got this archive. For what did we do? How much did we charge, like all this stuff. But I think, anne, people want to know which app software-y type CRMs do we recommend. So what do you use these days? 

19:49 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Okay. So in addition to my Gmail, I use multiple because it depends on what I'm working with. So right now I have a Wix website and I have the VO Peeps website. I have the VO Boss website. Obviously, I've got Anne Ganguzza. 

20:00 So I've got three main brands where I have websites, and so for each of those I have the Wix CRM. So I have people who subscribe to Anne Ganguzza, people who subscribe to VO Peeps, people that subscribe to VO Boss. Each one of them on the Wix website has its CRM utilized by Wix. Because people subscribe, they get placed in the CRM there, which is great because then I can send emails to those lists. I can also check and see if I've sent an email out to a list, I can see how many people have opened it, who've clicked on it and who've actually purchased, and it really has a nice series of accounts for that. And also I can just work from my contact list to send emails and categorize them as clients, categorize them as, let's say, coaching students or however I want to do it. So Wix is my first. 

20:48 I have three really for each domain and then I also use ActiveCampaign because I use the VO Boss Blast that I sell as well to direct market to companies. I have a list of over 90,000 creative companies, advertising agencies, rosters, production companies, and so that is part of that marketing package. And so I have ActiveCampaign that I use to house the contacts. Now, most software and you'll agree, tom will charge based on how many contacts you have in there. So, at least for ActiveCampaign, I have like 200,000 contacts in ActiveCampaign and so I pay a hefty price for that and they charge per contact. But I'm doing that because I've got a list of 90,000 and I've splitting that list up and doing marketing for other VO bosses and so I spend a lot of money on that product. So between the two Wix, well, three on that product. So between the two Wix, well three, gmail, wix and ActiveCampaign. I've got three CRMs that I'm utilizing for different needs Cool. 

21:48 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Like we've already established, I use Gmail and I do use spreadsheets for very niche-y genres like political, because I like to see in one space who they are, what their contact is, when did I reach out? Did they open the email, did they reply, did I get on their roster, did I book? And then that stuff eventually makes its way into my CRM. Like Anne, tomdeercom and VOStrategistcom are both Wix-based sites, so I have two separate CRMs. The TomDeer CRM is obviously for voiceover clients, the VO Strategist CRM is for students and I have different tactics and strategies and I have different sales funnels and workflows for each of those and they both work great. For many years I also I remembered I used to use MailChimp and before that I used Vertical Response and they were both great they were both great. 

22:41 But the one Vertical Response and they were both great. They were both great, but the one the CRM that I was using religiously before I fully migrated to Wix was Cloze. C-l-o-z-e. 

22:51 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) This is a fantastic CRM. I know the name. 

22:52 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Just vision this you wake up in the morning, you get an email in your inbox saying, hey, these are the people you haven't reached out to in three months, and then you can click on that name and then it takes you to cloze and it'll say oh, would you like to use one of the email templates that you created? You click on the template and you look at based on what genre of voiceover they cast, where they are in the sales funnel, and it already it populates it with their name. You can obviously do a little extra personalization as you see fit. Click send. Then you'll get a notification if they open the email. You'll get a notification if they clicked on any links in the email and it has a project manager. So if you, for example, narrate long-form e-learning or an audio book, you can set up benchmarks for like audio book record and deliver the first 15 minutes, get approval for the first 15 minutes, record chapter one, record chapter two, record chapter 20, send them an invoice, do corrections, market that this book is now on sale, and so on and so forth. It's fantastic. It's only like 200 something a month. 

23:56 And and did not know this before I say it is I just realized that you can rent my video Clothes for Voice Actors at voestrategistcom. Right now it's a rentable video, so you can stream it for $5 for 72 hours. You can just rent it. Most of my videos are 20 bucks, but that's one of the videos that I'm promoting for five bucks and Ann didn't even know that and I didn't even think about that when we were like what are we going to talk about this month? So when we were like what are we going to talk about this month? So yeah, so if you go to veostrategistcom, go to the video section, you can rent it for $5. 

24:24 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Now one thing I just want to say, tom, is like, no matter what CRM you use, it does take some time to set up. I mean, there is some work involved in setting up a CRM and getting your contacts in there. I had tried Nimble for a while, but Nim based their pricing on the size of your mailbox and, of course, with over 1 million unread emails, it was prohibitively expensive. Now you said, tom, for the low price of only $200 a month, which may or may not be something that people have in their budget. But I will say that that's really nice. That Cloze will say hey, look, you haven't contacted these people in three months. I think that's wonderful. 

24:57 Right now I have like a boomerang app that's on my Chrome browser and, I think, gmail. Now you can schedule emails and if you need to respond, you'll notice it'll come back, say, hey, you haven't responded to this person in five days. So there's kind of that built into it. But just know that a CRM, no matter what you do, if you get one, that you're going to pay a monthly fee. I think Nimble was like 20 bucks and then they're like no, with your blah, blah, blah, it's going to cost you a hundred and I'm like I'm not going to pay a hundred dollars, I've already got most of what I need anyways. 

25:26 You really need to just assess what your needs are and then figure out what works for you, because you don't have to pay anything. I don't pay anything right now. Well, I do. I should say that I pay for Wix and I pay for ActiveCampaign, but depending on what is comfortable for you and what will help you to stay top of mind and keep yourself top of mind, because sometimes I'll forget. Oh gosh, I should have responded, or I should reach out to this client, because gosh knows you could be losing work if you forget to. I've got clients who say, yes, I'm going to buy this, or I want to come back to this, and then, if you follow up, sometimes it's just that little nudge that is top of mind, reminding that we'll get you that sale. 

26:00 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Yep, and one thing I will say clothes is about 200 something dollars a month, but if you think about it, if you use that CRM and you book one explainer video for $300, you made your money back and everything else after that is profit. 

26:14 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yeah, absolutely, absolutely Good conversation, guys. I don't know if we'll ever like get the question stopping about the CRMs, but you know what guys Do, what comes naturally to you, what's comfortable for you. As far as Tom and I making recommendations, I mean, we have a combination of CRMs that work for us and we've named a few of them. But really do your research, guys, and know that it will take you some work to set it up. But I think if you've got a CRM that's running, I mean I'll tell you what that CRM saves my butt every month, and more than that, by being able to communicate easily with people that are subscribed to me and people that I want to reach out to. So it's absolutely worthy investment for bosses. So thanks again, tom, for your words of wisdom. 

26:59 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) You're amazing. Thank you, as always, for having me. 

27:01 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yeah, bosses. Big shout out to our sponsor, ipdtl. You too can connect and network like bosses, like Tom and myself, real bosses. Find out more at IPDTLcom. Guys, have an amazing week and we'll see you next week. Bye. 

27:15 - Intro (Announcement) Join us next week for another edition of VO Boss with your host, anne Ganguzza, and take your business to the next level. Sign up for our mailing list at vobosscom and receive exclusive content, industry revolutionizing tips and strategies and new ways to rock your business like a boss. Redistribution with permission. Coast-to-coast connectivity via IPDTL. 

In this episode, Anne Ganguzza sits down with Sean Savage, a seasoned musician and audio producer with a wealth of experience in the creative industry. The BOSSES share how they each authentically evolved their careers in podcasting. They open up about the pivotal moments that defined their path and how they found inspiration for their creative processes. In a world where our digital presence often shapes our identity, Anne and Sean are excited to join forces to launch an inspiring new podcast series called The Myth of You. This podcast is an incredible opportunity to dive deep into exploring the stories we tell ourselves and the myths that shape our reality. Together, Anne and Sean will challenge, inspire, and guide you as you uncover the narratives that influence your life.

In this episode, Anne Ganguzza is joined by Danielle Famble to explore the impact of money mindset on entrepreneurial success. Delve into the ways societal norms and gender roles shape our financial perspectives, and discover the power of open conversations about money. Anne and Danielle emphasize the link between mindset and financial prosperity, especially for voice actors, and share strategies for shifting from a scarcity to an abundance mindset. By addressing subconscious beliefs about money, entrepreneurs can unlock creative opportunities, fuel innovation, and ensure enduring business success. This episode invites listeners to challenge traditional beliefs, embrace a more inclusive approach to money management, and cultivate a sustainable future through proactive and creative financial strategies. Join the conversation to empower your entrepreneurial journey and transform your financial mindset.

00:00 - Advertisement (Ad) I've just finished listening to Creative Brilliance with Improv, Anne and Lau, and all I can say is yes, ladies, improv is absolutely one of my favorite activities, and the life of the pre-life is real. Remembering that the run-in line or your lead-in line does not only exist at the beginning of your read, but throughout, it's a critical activity. The running conversation that has to happen in your head truly makes a difference. So, ladies, thank you so much. I greatly appreciate it. 

00:40 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Hey boss listeners, are you ready to turn your voice over career goals into achievements? With my personalized coaching and demo production, I'm here to help you reach new milestones. You know you're already part of a boss community that strives for the very best. Let's elevate that. Your success is my next project. 

01:15 - Advertisement (Ad) Find out more at  anne ganguzza dot com. It's time to take your business to the next level. Find out more at Anne Ganguzza. 

01:25 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Hey, hey everyone. Welcome to the VO Boss podcast and the Boss Money Talks series. I'm your host, anne Ganguza, and I am thrilled to be back again with one of my favorite girls to talk about money Danielle Famble. Hey Danielle, hey Anne, good to be back, danielle. I have a secret to tell you. 

01:52 What I love money, and I don't think that's a secret oh gosh, is it just me or is it that some people don't like to discuss their relationship with money, and I think that's a very important thing, obviously for us running businesses is our relationship with money. 

02:06 I mean money matters, and I think we have to really talk about what our relationship with money is like. Because, I'll tell you, when I was growing up as a female, it wasn't a thing to make money. Like my parents, my dad went out and it was the breadwinner and it was always kind of like ingrained in my brain that I was supposed to do other things, and not necessarily it wasn't. My critical role was to make money. 

02:31 But, in my business, I certainly don't have another purpose than to be able to make money to help survive. 

02:39 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) Yeah, it's almost like the purpose of a business is to make a profit and that profit is making money, money. Yeah, I totally agree. I think it's a sociological thing. I think it's also we're sort of taught that talking about money is too risque and it's not polite yeah don't be greedy. We're running businesses and businesses need to make money, so we should talk about it Absolutely. 

03:09 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) And I'll tell you what I'm not really shy at least on this podcast about talking, and that's why I'm so happy that you're here to talk about money, and this whole money talk series is just like makes me a happy, happy girl. I just I like talking about it because I think it's something that, as business entrepreneurs, we don't discuss enough of right we don't discuss, and especially for myself and my values and things that were taught to me when I was growing up were completely different than what I need to implement in order to have and run a successful business. Again, one very primary one was that women were not breadwinners. They were meant to have families and do other things, and so I really was kind of at a standstill when I was growing up because I was seeing things that were demonstrated to me that I didn't necessarily think should be true. 

03:52 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) And I think there's also this like belief about money that maybe that it's hard to make money or you have to struggle to get it and I really believe that money can come easily to you if you learn about it and understand it and know how it works. But yeah, I mean for me too. I mean I grew up with parents who are entrepreneurs and seeing my mom and dad work together and my grandparents even working together to make money. It wasn't necessarily that imbalance in a way of the man goes out and is the breadwinner, and that actually was totally happening in my home. But in terms of business, I was seeing, in my life anyway, sort of more of an equal partnership when it came to money, but we never really talked about it. 

04:41 It wasn't something that we discussed. I just happened to pick up on what I saw and then I made assumptions based on what I saw that may or may not have been true. 

04:51 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I love that you said that because you're right. Money was like one of those things. My grandmother I'm from that age where children should be seen and not heard. 

05:00 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) But, money. 

05:01 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) You don't talk about money. It's not polite, right? It's just not. You don't discuss money, and you're right. I saw things, I witnessed things and so I made my own assumptions. I'm so glad that you mentioned that because you're right. Some of these assumptions maybe were incorrect on my part and I grew up thinking a certain way and it affected how I thought about money, right, and how I thought about well, I guess I need to go out and get a job. It didn't occur to me that I could make my own money and be my own boss, and I think, had I maybe had a different relationship with money or maybe learned about money at an earlier age? Gosh, I will be the first person up on my platform my soapbox saying that if you're in grade school, you should be taught about money Like from a young age, you should be taught about money, financial, financial responsibility, relationships with money, because I think you need to have a healthy relationship with money. 

05:55 I don't think it should consume you. However, I think you should have a healthy relationship with money. That means that you're not afraid of it, you're not afraid to talk about it, you're not afraid to learn about it, and I think one of the best things you can do is educate yourself about anything really, and money is no different. Educate yourself about money, because it truly is something that we do need to survive. Oh for sure? 

06:16 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) Yeah, absolutely. I think you touched on it a little bit. But there is an inherent fear and money can cause a fear response a little bit, especially if you don't have it or you need more of it to get to where you're trying to go in life or in business. I'll tell you a personal story. For me, my education, learning about money and how I needed to interact with money, really came from a trauma response, because I got sick and I needed to take some time away from work, and I was working as a waitress. If you don't go to work, you don't get paid, and if you don't get paid, then you're not going to be able to, like, pay your bills. 

06:56 So for me, I was working a job that, like, required my daily attendance, and if I was not able to do that for whatever reason for me that was a health reason then it affected my money and I didn't have the savings in place to be, able to catch me if I needed to take some time away from my income generating source my job, I thought, and I got a random illness that just kind of took me out, and even for a short period of time actually, and I realized that I did not have the infrastructure in place to make sure that I would be okay even if I couldn't go to my job. 

07:47 Sure, yeah, educate myself about money and how money worked and how I can be a participating factor and how I can have, like, my own security when it came to money. And for me, having money became a security blanket and that drove me into almost a fear-based or trauma-based response that if I didn't have money I was not secure. And that belief system really got me in a negative place around money and work where I could not stop working because I needed that security. 

08:10 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Right or money will get you happy. 

08:12 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) Right, and that didn't happen either. 

08:14 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) So there's that fine line between we need money, we need to have that healthy relationship with money. However, money may or may not make the majority of us happy. However, it is needed for our businesses to survive, right, and it's needed for personally, for us to be able to pay the bills and to survive, and so different people have different relationships with money, and also financial arguments are probably one of the top sources of divorce, right. 

08:44 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) Yeah. 

08:44 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) For many people, and so it's such a delicate balance. I mean, how can we have a healthy relationship with our money, danielle, how do you secure your healthy relationship with money? 

08:56 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) I think. First, it requires you to take inventory of where you currently are right. So if you think about and that can be a scary thing that can be a very scary thing because you're having to really assess your own beliefs and belief systems and get down to. 

09:15 I had to. I dealt with this in therapy because it took more than just me to get that out. But really, I mean, when you think about money like for you, anne, when you think about money and like making money or having money, do you feel like cringe and does it make you feel small, or are you like oh money, I'm so excited. 

09:36 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I feel like I already know that's kind of my go-to. That's your thing, oh money. 

09:43 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) And really having. If money and the idea about money makes you feel small or repel, then imagine that energy is not going to be coming to you or stressed, or stressed, it's not coming to you. 

09:53 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Which is a lot. Yeah, you're right. And so there becomes that abundant mindset, right, I mean? And there are some people who just don't subscribe to that theory of abundance, but I very much am like well, I'd rather be more in a positive abundant mindset than a negative mindset, because just my personality is one where I don't like to be sad or unhappy or stressed and money can absolutely be a source of stress and especially gosh knows in our businesses that we are our own entrepreneurs. 

10:22 That is probably the number one reason that most people don't make it in the voiceover industry, right, is they're not making the money they need to survive, of course, for their businesses to survive or them to survive personally, and that becomes then a great source of stress. So how do we deal with it in a way that doesn't bring us so much stress, right, that it is detrimental to our business? 

10:45 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) There's so much more to your business than just money, although in this series we've obviously talked so much about money and financial principles and everything else. But there's so many other things to your business and if there is a way that you can have fun in your business and bring that levity and light and joy to your business, the money I have found does come. I used to be a musical theater actor before I became behind the mic and I found that when I was happy and joyful for my friends who were booking work, I actually started booking more work. There was almost like this reciprocity of joy and light and acceptance and abundance to oh there's enough and I see there's enough. 

11:33 I celebrate my friend for booking work. That means that there is a job that can come to me as well. So I think it feels, and it seems a little bit woo woo and is there an actionable thing that you can do with it? Maybe just celebrating and being joyful for the work that's coming for other people who are booking work, if they're sharing it, like on social media, for example, but also being grateful for every single opportunity. Every audition is an opportunity to work. It may not be paid work, because maybe you're not getting paid for that audition, but it's an opportunity to work and to do something that you hopefully love to do, and do it joyfully. 

12:08 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yeah, yeah, I talk a lot about being joyful and following our paths and really because I mean I'd rather be joyful than not joyful when I have to work, and so if you take that mindset right and apply that to money, right, Be joyful about money. 

12:25 Be, joyful about the fact that it can come to you, right, and that, when it comes to you, it affords you the opportunity, maybe not to buy the fanciest new car or the fanciest new mic, but it affords you the opportunity to continue in this creative process that brings you joy on a day-to-day basis, right, the more hours of joy that I can have in a day, the better. 

12:48 Right. 

12:49 And if I can do that while making money and I can allow the money and have that mindset of abundance, that, yes, I'm happy for anyone that can survive in this industry, and especially now with all this craziness, with people being fearful of AI taking their jobs away and the race to the bottom. 

13:06 Right, when you worry and stress out about the race to the bottom and people and things taking your job away, you are taking all that energy and putting it into a place that is not going to help you get more jobs. And so, in reality, if you focus your energy on being the best that you can be and finding the joy in the work, the jobs will follow and I believe that the money will follow. Now, how much money these days, has the market changed? I mean, I think, again, education plays a big role in this and education in regards to the market right and in education in regards to your business sensibilities and your relationship with money. Well, if the market is not necessarily there like it used to be, then what can you do in regards to your financial situation to either rectify that, change that evolve, that, do something different, while still maintaining that joyful, abundant mindset? 

14:02 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) Oh yeah, I also like knowing all the different resources that are out there to help us learn, knowing that there's the GBAA rate guide that can help inform how you quote jobs, or what is an industry standard rate, what is a guide that I can use to help me or even other voice actors and just saying, hey, listen, I'm thinking about this particular rate, how does that line up? Or what do you think? Having coaches or mentors line and not being, as you're calling it, that race to the bottom, and then that can be very joyous, because it's a collaborative effort that we're all making sure that the money is staying within livable standards of living rates so that we can all win. That's really helpful and that helps maintain for me, it helps maintain the joy. Also, I just feel like you have to think about where your mentality about money is coming in, because if you are not addressing that, it will come out when you negotiate your own rates for example Sure when you least expect it, Exactly In your daily actions and you don't realize yeah. 

15:19 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) You're right. I love that you're talking about negotiation because you're right, that attitude, those thoughts that you have about money will absolutely come out in negotiations, with money and even I would say, in your auditioning and your confidence in your product. 

15:32 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) Yeah. 

15:33 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Right, I mean it can. Absolutely. Well, I am not worth you know what someone else might be worth, because I'm just starting out, I'm new, and again that relationship directly parallels, I think, with your relationship with money, because as voice actors we are all worth, we are all investing money in this business and we are all worth a particular amount and we should never consider that worth being lower or low, just in general, Kind of like in money. Is money bad? No, Money should be thought of as a means to good and positivity. 

16:08 It's a resource, a tool to help us achieve our dreams and our joys and to do something that can propel us further right. Money will help me to take my career further, take my business further right. I can make more investments. I can find another genre that brings me even more joy, that kind of thing. So, really, that relationship I think that you have with money go back to if you're stressed out, if you're nervous, if you're all about like, oh gosh, I'm not going to make it because AI is going to take over or it's a race to the bottom these days. And in reality, I think that if you take that energy and focus it on, how can I resonate abundance, right, how can I resonate abundance in my business? And that, of course, I think again, when you talk about business, I think you can't not talk about money. 

17:04 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) It's impossible. 

17:05 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I think it's impossible, because you can't run a business without money and you can't sustain a business without money and you can't grow your business without money. Yeah. 

17:12 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) Because, again, I've said this several times the purpose of a business is to create a profit and you have to be making more than you spend to run the business. You, in order to do that, you have to be making more money and growing your business as time goes on. And if you have a fear or your belief system about money is limiting your ability to grow your business and scale your business, then it's going to be a very uncomfortable time running your business. And if you want to have a business for years and years and years, imagine living your life that way for years and years and years it's just not fun. Yeah, yeah. 

17:49 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I mean, I like to think of it in terms of money, mindset and mindset in general. Right, you have a choice. You have a choice in how you think and how you think about things, and for me, I'd much rather think about things from a positive perspective, just because I don't like to be unhappy and I don't choose to be unhappy, and so I try to think of everything in the more positive light, even if let's say, oh, it's been slow this month, right, and maybe it's been slow for a couple of months, right. So how do I take that worry, that potential financial worry? It's like, oh gosh, how am I going to make the payments this month? How am I going to pay my employees this month, and really kind of take the time that you would spend worrying about that in terms of, all right, sitting down, and these would be positive aspects of how all right. So now maybe we are slow this month, so what can we do to rectify that? 

18:40 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) What can we do? 

18:41 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) How can I how? 

18:43 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) can I do this, how can I rectify that, so that I won't have this worry, this cloud hanging over my head? What can I do? Can I market more? Maybe once in a while you might have to accept a job that is maybe below what you initially quoted, right, and maybe that's something that you will concede to and not think negatively about that right Totally, in terms of thinking of it as a financial stepping stone, right, and having that relationship where you're not angry that you're making less right For this one time. Right. 

19:15 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) But there's joy in making something at all. There's joy in making money. 

19:19 What I love about what you just said is think about how much more creative freedom you've just given yourself by turning that fear, that worry on its head of how can I pay the bills this month, into what do I need to do, how can I make some additional money or income or do something different. Then you have the option to say, okay, wow, as a creative, as a person who is a creative, an actor, a person who makes things from other people's words, and I turn that through my body, into this thing that I've created and added value to the businesses and the organizations and the companies and the brands that I voice for. Sure, absolutely. When you think about it like that, oh, my goodness, imagine like the joy and the levity that comes from that. Yeah, because then you can become more creative. Okay, yeah, maybe I will negotiate this particular job and I don't get the amount that I wanted to. 

20:14 But look, I made some money. Or look, I'm auditioning different style or genre or work with someone, like there's so many possibilities there. When you open up your mindset to how can I, what can I do, what are the opportunities out there? Because I look at all the auditions that are out there let's say, on a pay-to-play site, if you can see like all the auditions are out there. They're looking for human beings. They're looking for people to do that work, and so, if you look at these as opportunities, the opportunities are all around you. You've opened your mind to it. 

20:51 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) And I think if you allow and we talk about like, allow the money to flow like a river you know, if you allow that money, if you think abundance, if you think joy, if you think about allowing the possibility of money rather than, oh God, I I can't do this, or I can't charge, or that client is trying to jip me out of. You know that kind of negativity where, oh, they're trying to jip me out of what I'm worth. So it's good to know what you're worth, but it's also good to know that when a company states they have a budget and they can't meet the budget that you initially want, that you turn that on its head and you say, okay, well, it's an opportunity for me to make, maybe not what I originally intended, but also it's an opportunity that I can then take and turn into other opportunities. 

21:37 So, rather than being angry and complaining and going to social media about it or that kind of thing, from an educational perspective, right, really trying to take a different look at it in terms of okay, that wasn't what I initially would have wanted, but you know what, this opportunity to work with this company, maybe I'll get another opportunity and it will turn into something that is more positive than negative. 

21:58 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) Or saying no to that opportunity also gives you the opportunity to work with somebody else, because your time is a limited resource and you can't get more of it. So if you're spending your time with something that is not the right fit for you, you're not making the type of money that you're wanting to make, or you just you're mad because you said yes to this thing because you really needed the money. 

22:19 you may not be able to take on something else that is a better fit, so understanding the cost benefit of saying yes or saying no to something might be what brings more into your business, more money to you. It's all flowing to you, you know, like a river. It's called currency for a reason, because it's got to move. 

22:37 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Oh, I love that, love that analogy. It's called currency for a reason. Yeah, absolutely. Just trying to take things that maybe are not productive for either your workflow or your mental state regarding money and finances, especially when it comes to this business. And this is not easy, guys, we know this. I mean I've been in this business, gosh, close to 18 years and, danielle, you've been in the business for enough years to know it's a marathon, not a sprint. Yeah, business for enough years to know it's a marathon not a sprint and, honestly, the attitude and the positivity with which you approach your business and money opportunities has a direct correlation with your success. 

23:18 I really believe that? Yeah, I do too. It's just one of those things. So, really, I think, sit back and look at your relationship with money and your stress levels around money and maybe just sit down and write down. We can turn this into a goal setting podcast as well, because I do believe that setting financial goals and we have a podcast on that as well can really help to benefit how you can see your relationship with money and help you identify where you might need to work on things right. 

23:48 So if you're looking at your financials. You're taking a hard look at what your financials are coming in and going out and then assessing, okay, where are the opportunities? And, instead of being angry or depressed or frustrated or thinking you're not enough, figuring out what did work and then figuring out what other things do you think could work. And I'll tell you, there's nothing wrong with in your business while you're growing it, to get other sources of income from other careers. I mean you don't have to be completely all in voiceover. You can do computer consulting or technology consulting or web design or any other thing. I mean work at a restaurant. There's nothing wrong with that in terms of financial opportunities and looking that as a positive to continue on a good relationship with money that can allow you to expand your business. 

24:38 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) Yeah, absolutely. 

24:39 And another thing I can tell you for me, when I was working on my belief systems around money and how I could, you know, improve that was finding a sense of gratitude for the money that I had. 

24:51 One of the things just on a personal level, one of the things when I was really struggling with this is when I would open up my bank account and look at the amount of money, I immediately felt shame and scared and sad and just a lot of these negative feelings. Looking at the money that I had, it is simply just a fact of what is there right now, but it also is proof that I have the ability to make money. So one of the things that I did and it could be something that the listeners do as well is develop a practice of just simply greeting your money and saying hello to your money every day. I love that. So what I would do is I would open up my account, look at the money, feel whatever feeling I was feeling and then just say, hey, money, good morning you know there will be more or less or what have you, but like hey, and just looking at it, for what? 

25:42 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) it was let's get more friends. 

25:43 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) Let's go make friends. Let's go make friends. 

25:44 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Let's go make friends, let's go bring on some more people here. 

25:46 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) Yes, exactly, and really just looking at the account and letting whatever feelings come. But those feelings are not real, they are simply feelings. Those feelings can actually help or hurt you in trying to bring more friends to the money that you already have. 

26:02 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Exactly, I love that. So, yeah, you're right, looking and saying hello and addressing your money and facing it right on a day-to-day basis. It's kind of like, gosh, my weight loss journey, right. I didn't want to look at the scale, I didn't want to look at the numbers, I didn't want to. I was scared and every time I would look at the numbers it would bring this feeling of shame and horror and sadness and so the more you do it, the easier it gets right, so that you can try to take that mindset and turn it into one of gratefulness, one of positivity. And the same thing with your money. 

26:35 Look at your money scale. I'm going to say, on a day-to-day basis, greet it and then say what can I do? And for this, what can I do to maybe gain more money, weight right and be grateful for what you have on the scale at that time and really assess what is it that you can do to change this in a more positive way? I mean, gosh, what a great conversation. I mean money is a mindset. It really is. And you're right, it really is the way that you feel about it. It's just that they're just feelings, right. 

27:06 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) I've been told and I heard this saying feelings are not facts. Right your feelings while they are completely like real to you, it may not be the end result. It's just the feeling that comes up and you can, just like you train your body, just like you train your mind, you can train your feelings and really, it just takes. 

27:25 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) You can choose joy. These are choices that can be made and you can choose joy. You can choose joy at any given moment of the day. 

27:28 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) These are choices that can be made, and then, when you choose joy, imagine how much more abundance will be coming your way. 

27:34 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Right. Choose joy. Choose money. Choose to look at your money and then choose to turn that into gratefulness and positivity, and that will allow the currency to flow. 

27:45 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) the river to flow. 

27:46 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I love it. Oh my gosh, what a great episode. Danielle, thank you so much as always for sharing your gems with us in this series. I really, really am loving it and I can't wait till our next one. Bosses, I'm going to give a great big shout-out to our sponsor, ipdtl. That allows our currency to flow and our voices to flow over the line. You can find out more at ipdtlcom. Guys, thanks so much for joining us and we'll see you next week. Bye, bye, everyone. 

28:15 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) Join us next week for another edition of VO Boss with your host, Anne Ganguzza, and take your business to the next level. Sign up for our mailing list at vobosscom and receive exclusive content, industry revolutionizing tips and strategies and new ways to rock your business like a boss. Redistribution with permission. Coast to coast connectivity via IPDTL. 

00:01 - Rick MacIvor (Ad) Hi, this is Rick MacIver with the VO Video Village YouTube channel. You know, when I started doing voiceover, I listened to the VO Boss podcast religiously. It was my go-to source of information about the industry and I still listen to it to this day. Every week there's an amazing new guest and Anne is able to really get some great information. I just love it. So thank you so much, Anne, looking forward to next week's episode. 

00:33 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Hey guys, it's that season again. Are you feeling that tickle in your throat? Don't let a cold or flu slow you down. Combat your symptoms early with Vocal Immunity Blast, a simple and natural remedy designed to get you back to 100% fast. With certified therapeutic-grade oils like lemon to support respiratory function, oregano for immune-boosting power and a protective blend that shields against environmental threats, your vocal health is in good hands. Take charge of your health with Vocal Immunity Blast. Visit annganguzacom to shop. 

01:09 - Intro (Announcement) It's time to take your business to the next level, the boss level. These are the premier business owner strategies and successes being utilized by the industry's top talent today. Rock your business like a boss a VO boss. Now let's welcome your host, Anne Ganguza. 

01:28 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Hey, hey, everyone. Welcome to the VO Boss Podcast and the Boss Superpower Series. I'm your host, nn Ganguza, and I'm here with the one and only Lala Pitas. 

01:40 - Lau Lapides (Guest) Hey, annie, back again. Happy 2025, and yet another year. Here we are. 

01:46 How, many years, how many? 

01:48 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) years Lau. It's been years. 

01:49 - Lau Lapides (Guest) A decade, I don't know 20?. I feel like you know, we came out of the womb and we knew each other. 

01:55 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I don't know. 

01:56 - Lau Lapides (Guest) It feels like forever, but it is over two years now. 

01:59 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I think it's two and a half, at least, almost Two, and a half At least, almost, if not more, if not three Lau. 

02:03 I'm telling you, I am manifesting that 2025 is going to be my best year ever, and I say that because we've come off of a tough year, not just a tough year necessarily for your business, but just a tough year, I think, in general for everyone, mentally, physically. I mean. It's just been a tough, tough, tough year of 2024. So I am ready for 2025, despite whatever may happen in the world, I feel like with this political climate, I want this to be the best year ever for my business, and so I had a couple of podcast episodes and we do this all the time right End of year assessment how are we going to make this year the best? But I really want to stretch Lau and talk about how we can go beyond the typical. Well, let's write our goals down right and let's do this for the year. 

02:52 Let's talk about how we can really, I think, manifest success and stretch ourselves out to be the absolute best that we can be, and to be mindfully and skillfully healthy for 2025. 

03:04 - Lau Lapides (Guest) Stretching. That's my thing. I love stretching, and when I say stretching I mean really kind of motivating our folks to just move in directions that are uncomfortable, that you may not have experienced before. Those are the best, where you have no idea what the outcome is. Because the truth is, you know, in our profession we get seasoned. After a while we kind of know what to expect. We know kind of the behaviors of clients. We get to know that right. But we always want to refresh, we want to feng shui the spirit. How do we do it? Put ourselves in an environment that we're not used to. That's going to help us grow, and as a talent, as a person, as a business entrepreneur, what could that mean? Well, some examples I like to give. Why not take a fencing class? Why not get into a class where you're doing mime and you're not talking at all? I love that? 

03:58 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) How do? 

03:58 - Lau Lapides (Guest) you communicate through your body, through your mind, through your spirit, without the aid of the copy of the script. This is all going to be tools in the toolkit that you're going to pull when you get back in your booth and say, wow, how did I feel when I was locked into my body, how do I? 

04:16 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) unlock. You know what. I think I love that, but I think, before we figure out how we're going to stretch right, let's sage the space, so to speak right. Let's sage the space, so to speak. Right. Let's sage the space, let's clear the space right. And what are some things we can do to kind of clear away all the? I like to say clear away what was last year and now? How are we going to start fresh? How are we going to start new? How are we going to sage our space, and I mean physically? You could I love sage, I'm a big sage burner. I like to sage it to create new energy. But that saging right could be. Maybe you decide to take up a little bit of meditation, a little bit of breathing exercises. I know that, stretching yourself mindfully, but also physically as well. I started taking Pilates last year and I'll tell you what I feel great, and I do it early in the morning. 

05:08 - Intro (Announcement) So, as a matter of fact, this morning I was at 6.30 am class. 

05:09 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Wow, Discipline. I love that so I can start my day right. I do a 6.30 and a 7.30 back to back and I absolutely love the way it makes me feel in the mornings. There's a lot of just default. There's breathing in there, right, and we talk as voice actors how important breathing is. And breathing is amazing. I mean, first of all, we breathe every day, but like focused, right, conscious, like breathing exercises which by default happened in my Pilates class, really helped me to expel the negative energy and take in the new energy and really helped me to feel more balanced, more focused, brings down my blood pressure and you know, what's so funny is I've learned to breathe so well that literally it becomes this challenge. Well, you know that I still go see my doctor, my oncologist, all the time and they're always taking my blood pressure right, so for a while there my blood pressure was high and they prescribed medicine for me, right. 

05:56 And so ever since I was you know, I got myself a little bit healthier. Thankfully, my blood pressure is actually a little bit on the lower side, but I also take my blood pressure every single day right Just to make sure I'm on top. I have learned how to breathe so that I can lower my blood pressure. Like it's insane. And in my little Peloton classes too, you can actually see your heart rate and so if you do active breathing right, you can see how it brings down your heart rate. You can see how it brings down your heart rate. So I think staging the space, so to speak, or physically do it, but also stage the space. Take some time in the morning for meditation and breathing to get you in the right head space and physical space for a great day ahead and a great year ahead. Oh, I love all of that. 

06:38 - Lau Lapides (Guest) And you know we've got to get out of that fight or flight, breathing yeah, which, the truth is, all of us do it. I mean because we're running around, we're running all over the map and we'll go into the what we call the upper thoracic breath, the clavicular breath. That's our throat, our chest, whatever Can we live, of course? Can we have a great life, definitely. Is it effective for speaking? Nope, it isn't. And that's our gift, that's our craft, that's our job is to speak for a living. 

07:06 So we want to move that down into the diaphragm and everything you're doing, annie, is just a gift to be able to do that. And it harkens back to me when I was a young kid in college studying theater, that some of my professors would use this, saying They'd say leave your trash at the door when you walk in the studio. Leave it there, don't bring it in with you. That's your emotional stuff that you're bringing in. I'll give you new stuff to deal with and don't worry, don't worry, when you leave, it'll be there for you to pick up and take with you. I'll give you new stuff, I'll give you new stuff. 

07:37 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Don't worry, I'll give you new stuff to deal with right Unless you're using it right for the scene ahead right. I mean, take it through the door if you need it. But a lot of times that baggage right it's not always. I'm going to say 99% of the time I'm going to say maybe that's not necessary for voice acting, unless you're playing a role that calls for that. 

07:57 - Lau Lapides (Guest) Right, right. I think that if you're going to use it as a reservoir of emotion, to call upon, it has to be compartmentalized, it has to be disciplined and dealt with. It can't just be dumping, it can't be unloading your day or unloading your life in the space because it's number one, it's not professional or appropriate, but, number two, it doesn't feel good, it doesn't make you a cleansed breath performer, which is where we want to go. We want to go to a full sort of centered, grounded place of where the breath is coming from. So I love that. I love that. No one loves sage more than me. I actually named my son Sage, oh yeah, well, there you go I adore sage. 

08:38 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I think it's really important to just sage out your space Totally, totally cleansing. 

08:44 - Lau Lapides (Guest) Are we ready for some how-tos yet, annie? Yeah, sure, let's go, let's do it. I'm going to lay one on the friends. That is really unexpected, but from an actor's point of view it's very elevated technique. And look into it and go online and look it up. It's called Rasa Boxes, something you're never going to hear in voiceover. It's an elevated boxes on the floor made of tape, literal boxes. The actor steps into the box and becomes an emotion in that box and it's very specific and it's very much a deep dive and intense and when they step out of the box they immediately lose that tone, immediately 100% cleanse themselves of that emotion. Think about that. The crossover to me is when you're doing like audiobook or you're doing character work, you're playing 10 different characters. You don't want any bleed of sound, right, absolutely Well, we don't want any bleed of spirit. Sure, we want to know that if you're enraged, you're the witch that's enraged, that you step into the box where you're the peaceful fairy and there's no bleed from one box to another. 

09:59 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) But can you evolve that emotion? Can you be the fairy that is maybe angry to begin with and then becomes cleansed of that anger? Somehow Can you have one foot in one box and one foot in another and play that way. You know why. 

10:15 - Lau Lapides (Guest) I love you so much Because you're brilliant and you're always 10 steps ahead. You just single-handedly skipped over two years of MFA graduate work because skip a year or two and you're going to start melding and shaping and mixing the boxes together. But the point is it's intentional. Yes, yes, it mixing the boxes together. But the point is it's intentional, it's a choice. It doesn't just happen because I can't control myself and my output. I love that. 

10:41 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I love that because when I'm teaching acting for narration one of my classes that I've taught in multiple places I talk about how your emotion can evolve from the start of the sentence into the end of the sentence, and that requires control and it requires, it does require focus, a lot of focus, in order to intentionally go from one emotion to another, to add that interest and that texture and that storyline. 

11:05 - Lau Lapides (Guest) That's great, yes, and this is a physical, if you will, a physical incarnation of that not just internal but it's actually physical, so you can like. 

11:14 We used to do as little kids play. What do we call it? Hopscotch? We used to go from box to box. You're literally going box to box and we're doing that in our life too. We're going from script to script, character to character, intention to intention, but it defines it. I think that's where the stretch comes. How do I stretch the ability of going 100% deep dive immediately and then pulling out of that immediately? It reminds me of a professional ball player. So if you're like a baseball player, someone who's sitting on the bench but they are not warming up, they are 100% ready to jump in the game and go. Is there a script Lau or is it just it's improv? Well, I mean, the experiment of it is all improv, and then you can install that into your scripts so that you know exactly what the boxes are. So there's no sitting on the bench kind of saying, oh, I'm going to warm myself up into it, I'm going to figure it out as I go. It's either you're 100% committed to it or you're 100% out of it. I love it. 

12:15 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I think right now I look at, I'm looking at boxes right now. I think we can play this not just physically, but I love the physical aspect of it. 

12:21 - Lau Lapides (Guest) It's a cool thing. We can play it On Zoom. 

12:23 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) We can do it we can play it on Zoom too, because maybe Anne is the angry box right, and maybe Lau is the love box Right, if you think about it, and then we could just like okay, improv right, there we go. And so I'm not angry right now. But see, that would be tough for me, right? I've got to like work. I'm gonna have to work on that, because I don't like to be angry in my real life. 

12:40 - Lau Lapides (Guest) But here's the thing you learn as an actor. You're not just as a voiceover talent, you're not just being that or becoming that. You're playing an action based on a situation, yeah Right. So it's your job to figure out what's the situation. 

12:57 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Oh yeah, as we say, who are you talking to, right? What's going on? That is so important again, because we talk about, like, how are we evolving as successful businesses with digital disruption and AI and increasing like size of the industry, and how do we compete while we become the actor right that can evolve and meld with whatever we're being asked to do, and a lot of times, I'll ask people to create that scene in which the words on the page will make sense and will allow you to connect with those words in a meaningful way. And so that's where a lot of times, my students will be like but wait, they're like oh, now I'm asking them to think and it's like but this is hard and I'm like it is Like you know, if it were easy we'd all be voice actors making millions of dollars. 

13:40 But even then that would be kind of cool. 

13:42 - Lau Lapides (Guest) But yes, it's also the commitment in the relationship. So I think that's what makes it hard is like you don't realize you're making a commitment to a relationship immediately, without the intellect or analysis that we want to take to be safe. Right, kids are great at that. If kids played Rasa Boxes as a game, they'd jump right in and be the evil queen. They'd jump right in and be the fairy princess, because they understand it from an emotional EQ, emotional quotient way. 

14:12 Yeah yeah, yeah. And so we're so intellectual these days, which is fabulous. We want to be able to analyze our script, of course, but we miss the part where we're connecting our mind to our feet, to our center, to our heart, to the ground. Right, it's actually quite Native American in a lot of ways. When you look at it, it's very soulful, it's very spiritual, it's very grounded to not only the spirits above us, the gods above us, but also the nature, the ground, the trees, the roots. 

14:43 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Love it. I love it. I think we should have like a Zoom class on that. I think we should. 

14:47 - Lau Lapides (Guest) We should have a Zoom class maybe during our audition demolition. That could be fun. That could be a ton of fun. 

14:53 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) It is fun, it's hard in a good way, yeah. 

14:56 - Lau Lapides (Guest) And so what's the name of that again for our bosses out there that want to jot that down yeah, the name of the technique is called RASA R-A-S-A boxes, rasa boxes you should really look it up, and it's a sort of international kind of methodology that's used by actors of all cultural backgrounds to reach their characters deeply and quickly. 

15:19 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Right, yeah, Deeply and quickly. Now that's the thing, because I've got a lot of students who they're like but this takes so much time and I said honestly, like, if you think about it, like how much time did that really take? Ten minutes, Did I just work with you for ten minutes on it? I mean, it's just one of those things where I asked you, okay, what's that moment before, right? And so, what is that scene? Why are you even saying these words? What's the purpose? All right, so I love that. So we've got we're saging, right, we're saging, we're cleansing and we're meditating, we're breathing, and now we've got something that's helping us to stretch outside of our boxes, or in the boxes, so to speak, for the acting technique that we just talked about. What else is there Lau out there that can help us? 

15:57 - Lau Lapides (Guest) Well, I think you and I practice this all the time, subconsciously we do, and that is the grounding, and there's many techniques for grounding. But you need to ground yourself In the acting world. We call it sinking in. We can tell if you're not sinking in because you're floating. 

16:13 you're somewhere floating, we can hear you processing the material still yes yes, you're not grounded, you're not centered, you're not sinking in, and there's different ways to do that. Sometimes people will want a stone, a crystal, a liquid, something that's warm, that is with them and touching them and around them. That helps them ground their spirit. Sometimes it's just a mental focus, like athletes may do. They may visualize and say I'm grounding myself to the ground. 

16:44 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Now, that's a physical, that's what I like, that I'm getting, that this is physical and I use this. Actually, laura, I did steal this from you and my students because I say grab your heart right. Yes, touch your heart because then it's going to help to connect you with those words in a meaningful way, right. 

17:01 Yes and I believe that that will help to ground you as well, like literally. I mean, of course I've got objects in my studio that I can touch, I can feel I can connect to, but of course, since I'm looking at the script right, I have to be careful because I don't want to look away from the script, because I might drop a word or two. But I love like just grab yourself that kind of like just kind of connection. 

17:22 - Lau Lapides (Guest) Yeah, it's also prep. You can stop your session and do it at any time, but it should be a prep for you, so that you're not going into it cold and expecting yourself to warm up as you go. 

17:34 but really grounding yourself and centering yourself as you're there. And you know, I actually have found that to be very disturbing to many students over the years and it probably was to me when I was younger in that we forget that we have a muscle that's the biggest one. We have the heart. We forget what that is, yeah, and so it reminds us of not only love and warmth and connection, but death. Yeah, because it reminds you there's mortality as well as life, and that's something that actors have to come to over aging and over time, because it just is a maturity thing. I think that when you feel your heart and you know, this is my lifeline to living it's also my lifeline to dying as well, and there's a beauty in that not to be morose, but there's a beauty in understanding that you're vulnerable at all moments in life. You're not in control of anything. 

18:32 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I think the vulnerability, that's a great word. If I had a word to put in my studio to help me to connect right and to get past the words of it all and the sound of it all, I think it would be empathy. 

18:42 - Lau Lapides (Guest) Yeah, yeah, well, the mortality, I like to think is also connected to humility. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, modesty and humility and understanding. We're not that great, that big, that important that we can't be gone at any moment, so what that provides for us is the understanding of what others are going through, yeah, what others are traveling through in that journey and that takes away from, oh, the ego of it all right the ego, you know I have something I say a few times in my classes about being a great e-learning narrator is to be a great teacher right yes, and if ego rules your classroom, get out of the classroom, right. 

19:15 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) If ego rules your acting in reality, right, it's really not about you, it's about serving your audience, your scene, and really doing that justice Now. So we've got our sage, we've got our stretching to get out of the box and to get back in the box and to get back in the box. 

19:35 What are some things that are not necessarily voiceover related that we can do to expand right our creativeness and our creative brain. And I like to say things that aren't necessarily like voiceover related, and I'll start it off by saying aren't necessarily like voiceover related and I'll start it off by saying for me, if you can do it financially, travel Traveling to another country can give you a wonderful perspective. 

19:56 Anything that can get your creative juices flowing, that and a good movie right. So I watched a couple of great movies on the plane going out to Europe and then I was in Europe, experiencing different people, different cultures, and just watching and listening and talking and that allows me to grow spiritually, mentally, and it helps me in my performance. I mean it helps me to draw upon different experiences. 

20:19 - Lau Lapides (Guest) Huge, huge, it's everything, or even this is what I've been doing recently going to different areas and towns in my state that I've never been to before or have never heard of, and just kind of driving around looking at properties, looking at businesses, looking at to expand my universe as to what surrounds me that I have not paid attention to yet, and how does that make me feel? How do I relate to that? I think that that's important in me being able to bring it into my knowledge base, my mindset, and to that EQ. Think that that's important in me being able to bring it into my knowledge base, my mindset, and to that EQ, that emotional quotient of understanding how others are living, how others are connected to the universe, to the world, to the, whatever, wherever they live. I think that's so important. I mean it doesn't have to be expensive. 

21:04 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I mean, you could go to the mall and people watch One of my most favorite things I like to do when I went to New York was just hang out, sit down and watch people, because you can learn so much by absorbing the energy. It's not even about necessarily like, do you have to go to a class to learn something? I mean you just be absorbing the energy and for me, I like to be around positive energy, but sometimes being around negative energy also tells you like, oh okay, then that's also a learning experience. 

21:29 - Lau Lapides (Guest) It reminds you too, like how do you do that when you have to do that? Because you and I are pretty positive energies and we try to stay hopeful in life and smile, but how do you do that when you have to do that? Maybe you're in a very somber or serious script, maybe you're in a character that is deeply defeated or unhappy. How do I reach that? Again, rasa boxes, how do I get into it? Very quickly and deep dive it? By understanding how people live, how they function, how they are in the world. That EQ, I think, is so—I would even venture to say, even though we're super intellectual beings, at least where we come from, culturally, eq is almost more important because it is really taking into consideration the other, the other person in a really important way, in a deep way, that many people just don't do. 

22:19 They don't think to do, that it's so about not you. 

22:24 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I mean ultimately, yeah, ultimately it's not about you. 

22:27 - Lau Lapides (Guest) Ultimately, it's not about you. 

22:28 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) It's not, but it is about you serving others or serving a purpose that can help you in the end. Right, I think it's not like you're not going to benefit if it's not about you. The fact is that it can benefit everyone, I think, if it becomes about the person. 

22:43 - Lau Lapides (Guest) Okay, so listen, I feel a quote coming up and I must allow it because I'm working on Shakespeare right now in one of my classes. As for a mirror held up to nature. So that is the human spirit by Shakespeare held up to its audience. In other words, I'm the actor, I'm the performer, I'm just mirroring you, the society, the need, the value. I'm showing you your own humanity. Yeah, absolutely. 

23:12 - Intro (Announcement) Or at least I'm attempting to. 

23:13 - Lau Lapides (Guest) I'm attempting to do that. So in the mimicry, if you will, in the mirroring, there is a profound psychological effect with your audience. It's not only like this business-like ability which comes. That is important, but it's trust. It's a nugget of heart value that lasts people a whole lifetime. That I know you do and I strive for that. It's sure we want to make money, sure we want to be successful, sure we want to do all that, but we want to make long, meaningful relationships with our audiences so that we can have that legacy. 

23:47 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Absolutely, I mean I always was that person who had a positive legacy. Absolutely I mean, right, I always was that person who had a positive outlook on life. I mean, it was always like, you know, you and I are kind of bubbly personalities and so I that kind of has run my life, and when things happen that are not expected, like that were not in my control, I had health issues, right that, where all of a sudden I faced mortality, right, it amplified. It amplified that it wasn't about me In amplified that it wasn't about me. In reality it wasn't about me. 

24:10 And what do I want to leave? What is my legacy? How do I want to be remembered? Right, right, and it really is about like, well, when you work 70, 80 hours a week, nobody like misses their work. When they pass on, right, it's not like, oh damn, I should have worked more. It's a funny thought though, Right, I should have worked more, but really it's, I should have lived more. And I think that really kind of planning and making time for that is important. So my husband, the other day he you know now where he works, you can take a mental health day he took a mental health day. 

24:41 You know where he went? Disney. He went to Disney. And Disney is a great refresher for creativity. I'll tell you that. There you go, because you can just go and relax and have fun and allow yourself to feel right, yes, and not necessarily beaten down by the stresses of your work life. 

24:58 - Lau Lapides (Guest) Just be present. Yeah, be present in the moment, having enjoyment, having fun, having an honest enthusiasm right Right Now. Who said this? Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. 

25:11 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yeah, I have to look up who that was, but it's so true it's funny because everybody's like he went alone, he went by himself and I'm like, yeah, I said look, Jerry looks at Disney, the way I look at shopping, Like I can go shopping for hours. I mean hours, I mean when. 

25:23 - Lau Lapides (Guest) Jerry travels. 

25:25 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I go like on a Sunday or a Saturday I'll go to the mall for like four or five hours, six hours, believe it or not. Sure, have some dinner. Sure, just walk around and observe. That's what I do. I observe, that's a lot of what I do. I'm like, yeah, I shop too, but I observe and I literally could do that all day long. So I'm like, yeah, no, I let him do that. 

25:44 - Lau Lapides (Guest) Okay, does that fall in? Just to circle back Now is that now falling into the rejuvenation factor, the regenerating? Does that fall into that stretch factor of like? What are you doing to rejuvenate and regenerate that helps you stretch, helps you grow, helps you? 

26:02 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) learn all these things? How does shopping help Anne grow? Well, you know, believe it or not, in a creative sense, right, we know that I'm a fashion buff. Right, we know that I'm a fashion buff, right, I'm not necessarily buying everything up in the stores, but I'm curating, I'm looking, I'm combining, I'm doing that creative, like whatever it is that creative assemblage in my head and building outfits, whether I actually purchase anything or not. And then I'm looking at people. I'm saying, oh, I like that, I like. Oh, look at that, would look good with that. And so I'm exercising Believe it or not, it's a creative exercise for me. And Jerry's like, oh, you're out shopping. No, I'm creatively exercising. 

26:38 - Intro (Announcement) I'm stretching. This is going to help my business. 

26:40 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I'm stretching this is going to help my business, but it is something like that, and you know I always say watching a great movie, something that can move you, move you to an emotion, to tears to happiness, to joy that is invigorating and that to me, is like okay, I want to make someone feel like that or I want to have an impact like that. 

26:59 And how can I achieve that? How can I do that? Through my day-to-day voice acting Right, cause I mean we all know cause, we're all in it Right, but it's not to be minimalized. 

27:08 - Lau Lapides (Guest) I mean, it's not just, oh, it's just voice acting Hell no, I mean that's something that someone says from the outside, not from the inside right when you're inside of it. Everything's a challenge. 

27:18 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yeah, and I'm like oh yeah, meryl Streep makes it look easy, right, she's an amazing actress, right. But that did. It did not happen overnight, and I think that, of course, there are people who have gifts, but I'm not to say that those gifts don't require work, you know, to develop and grow. 

27:35 - Lau Lapides (Guest) That's the actor challenge, though. When you see great actors, it looks easy, it looks like it's natural, they're born doing it. They don't need coaching, they don't need classes, they just do it. No, you haven't seen the whole back end of that and they just do it. No, you haven't seen the whole back end of that. And they continue learning growing. 

27:56 Yeah, johnny Depp is famous for going right into the culture and the mindset in the background and living it for a couple months before he shoots a film. You know what I mean. It's like hard work. There's a lot of hard work involved in building authenticity. Yeah, absolutely, Absolutely Right. Is there not like a bit of a what's the word? Paradox in working so hard to building authenticity that has a technical kind of fake structure to it and that is, you know, being on a microphone, right, but you have to be able to do that. You have to be able to do that and balance both. 

28:25 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yeah, oh, I love this conversation. This is such a great beginning of the year conversation because it's so different from just write your goals down, and, of course, I still think you should write your goals down. But hey, before you do that, right, take stock, sage out, get yourself out of the box, go through these steps and then stretch right and then do something that will stretch your creativity even further so that you can have the absolute best 2025 ever, ever. 

28:52 - Lau Lapides (Guest) Unbelievable. I feel like we should have for that segment. We should have shaved our heads, been on a mountaintop in Tibet and drinking really delicious tea, like. I feel like we missed that part of it, but it was extraordinary, as always. 

29:05 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Next episode, Lau and I will be coming to you from, yeah, drinking our tea. Oh my goodness, bosses. 

29:12 - Intro (Announcement) Delicious. 

29:12 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) It's been amazing. Thank you, Lau. As always, it's just a pleasure and I look forward to our next episode together. Bosses, you too can connect and network like bosses, boss superpowers, and find out more at IPDTLcom. Big shout out to our sponsor. You guys have an amazing year week, year day, all that good stuff, and we'll see you next week. Bye. 

29:35 - Intro (Announcement) Join us next week for another edition of VO Boss with your host, anne Ganguzza, and take your business to the next level. Sign up for our mailing list at vobosscom and receive exclusive content, industry revolutionizing tips and strategies and new ways to rock your business like a boss. Redistribution with permission. Coast-to-coast connectivity via IPDTL. 

00:00 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Hey bosses, real Boss, Tom Dheere and myself have a very special deal for you guys. Tom, tell them what it is. 

00:08 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) All right, anne. If you use the promo code BOSSVOSS that's B-O-S-S as in V-O-BOSS and V-O-S as in V-O-STRATEGIST, and the number 24, so that's BOSSVOS24, you get 10% off my 30-minute check-in, my one-hour strategy session and my one-hour diagnostic. 

00:27 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) And you'll get 10% off all coaching packages and demos on the Anne Ganguzza website. So, guys, black Friday starts now and runs till the end of the year. So everybody, get yourselves on that site and get yourself a discount. BOSS, VOS, BOSS, VOS 24. 

00:43 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) BOSS, VOS 24. BOSS. VOS, BOSS, VOS, 24. BOSS, VOS, 24.

00:47 - Intro (Announcement) It's time to take your business to the next level, the boss level. These are the premier business owner strategies and successes being utilized by the industry's top talent today. Rock your business like a boss, a VO boss. Now let's welcome your host, Anne Ganguzza. 

01:07 - Tom Dheere (Host) Hey everyone, welcome to the VO Boss Podcast and the Real Boss Series. I am Anne Ganguzza and I'm here with amazing real boss Tom Dheere. Hey, Tom Dheere. 

01:18 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Hello Anne Ganguzza. 

01:19 - Tom Dheere (Host) How are you? 

01:20 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I'm doing good. How are you? Happy holidays. 

01:23 - Tom Dheere (Host) I'm doing awesome. Happy holidays to you. Thank you, tom. Last week we had an amazing discussion about how to take stock and take a look at how your year has gone so far, and I think that it's very appropriate at the end of the year here to have another discussion about how we can best prepare for 2025 so that we can have the best year ever. 

01:45 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Absolutely Now. I've done videos like this or taught classes that discuss this every year for probably the past 13 years or so since I started instructing, I want to do something a little different than the normal thing that I do. We'll get to that, but before we, started recording. 

02:03 I was listening to a podcast that was doing a post-presidential election Monday morning quarterback reverse engineer breakdown of like what happened. We're not going to talk about politics on any level, but there was something very specific that the guests talked about. They were talking about identity politics, as in how do you identify and how does that influence what you think, what you feel and, of course, obviously, how you vote, and of course, there's gender and race and all of those types of things. But they gave a very specific example of like, for example, west Virginia coal miners. They said, okay, west Virginia coal miners, we know better than you because coal is naughty, so we're going to take away your jobs, but we're going to get you a job coding, and to some people that's like oh, what a wonderful idea. But to the coal miners that may be a horrible idea. 

02:57 And this is why I talk about politics, because people identify in certain specific ways. And I'm also talking about this not from a class level but a vocation level, because coal miner is an identity. Farmer is an identity, zooming out more. I work with the land, I work with my hands, I like to work outside. This is who I am, this is what speaks to me and feeds my soul as a person, as well as puts food on the table. 

03:28 The reason I'm bringing up this, anne, is because and I never even thought about this before I identify as a voice actor, and I know that may sound weird. I identify as a coal miner, I identify as a farmer, I identify as a voice actor. But I decided I wanted to be a voice actor when I was 23 years old, like I was a kid, you know, I just dropped out of grad school and I decided this is what I want to do and it's the only thing I've. I mean, I've had a part-time job doing this and that I've had full-time jobs to make money, but it was all the means to an end of being a voice actor. So I have identified as a voice actor my entire adult life. How does this relate to how to get ready for the new year? I think all you bosses should think about how do you identify? And I'm going to break that down into two very specific categories. 

04:20 Yeah, as an artist or as a business Now, Anne as the wonderful performance coach that she is helps you realize the artist within you. I, as the VO strategist, help you realize the business that is within you. Right, this is what's really important is that if you identify 100% as an artist and spreadsheets and keeping track of invoices, be damned, you're in trouble. You're not going to be the artist that you want to be and eat. If you're 100% business, I want to do the genres that make the most money and keep all this artsy, fartsy stuff off my lawn. You're in trouble because now you're refusing to identify with the artistry. That is voiceover. That requires emotional journeys, expression. You know there's psychology and inward reflection and all of that stuff. 

05:17 - Tom Dheere (Host) So you need to identify then with both. Correct then? Is that what you're saying? 

05:21 - Intro (Announcement) Because I was just going to ask you can I identify as an educator. 

05:25 - Tom Dheere (Host) I always think that. I say it multiple times. I feel like I've been an educator all my life because I used to teach my dolls flashcards from the very beginning. I mean, that's what brings me joy. And, yes, voice acting, of course. Voice acting because that's the creative aspect of it, right, but probably a little bit more. I enjoy being an educator and sharing things with others and hopefully inspiring and motivating, but also I really love entrepreneurship. So I feel like that teaching with entrepreneurship that's how I identify and it's funny because, tom, that you say that because all my life, through my career, before I was in education in some form or fashion, all along I also was placed in these management positions where I would be the liaison between the art department and the technology department. So I feel like I've got the creative and the business or the technical side within me, and so I think I've always identified with two, really two different aspects of it and I love that you just said that because you just I feel good now. I feel like I feel seen. 

06:27 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yeah, absolutely, and part of having an identity or how you identify is you also demand, or you should demand. I would like to say that people see you as who you are and I had this problem with friends, people that I thought were friends in my 30s because I identified as a voice actor, and they didn't take that identity seriously. They didn't respect my identity. And, to your point, the fact that you could work in this corporate environment and liaise with the business people and the marketing people. It means you speak business, you speak marketing, you speak entrepreneur, you speak art and you also speak educator. 

07:06 I identify as an educator Also, you identify as an educator. You can identify as more than one thing, but with the artist and the business part, which are two critical components to be effective as a voice actor, you need to be in touch with both of those things, have a level of self-awareness, because some people come in from a theater background, a very heavily artistic background. Some people come from a radio background, which is an art form in itself, but it's very announcer-y as opposed to storyteller-y Storyteller-y, I guess that's a word now. 

07:40 - Tom Dheere (Host) That's a good word, Tom. 

07:42 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Storyteller-y. You don't have to identify as a marketer to enjoy or tolerate marketing as a voice actor. It's a part of what you need to do, but at its core you need to identify as an artist. I would say at your core, because this is about expression and engagement and getting people to feel certain ways and obviously do different things. Go buy this car call now. Operators are standing by, but identify that. The business too. 

08:08 - Tom Dheere (Host) Well, here's what I like about this and this is what I like to tell my students is I always step back when people are like I don't really relate, I don't resonate with this genre or I don't resonate with or I don't like marketing and I don't like certain parts of this running this business. And so, in reality, I always try to tell them to step back and say what is it that you love? Because I would say creative and entrepreneur. Right, creative entrepreneur? You know that kind of thing. I identify with multiple levels, I mean, and under that, creative is voice actor, but I also love, like voicing corporate, and I love voicing e-learning, of course, because I identify as an educator, but I love corporate as well because it's a challenge To me. 

08:47 I say step back and look at the things that you don't like and embrace the challenge, because that speaks to your creative part, like solving a problem. And so, for me, I've always told people, if you really truly hate and you're trying hard to find inspiration to get into that character, embrace the challenge. If you don't know like what kind of an actor or what kind of a character to be when you're teaching and e-learning, you need to embrace the challenge of how are you going to teach this lesson in an engaging manner. So step back. If you don't like corporate copy, step back and say there's a story in there somewhere. Where is it? 

09:19 The challenge is to find that, and the challenge for me as an entrepreneur, is to solve the problem of how am I going to make money with my product, right? And so it's always that challenge, that intellectual challenge and that creative challenge, that speak to both or three things that I identify as which is creative, entrepreneur and educator. So it speaks to all of those things running a business, and so those things that you don't enjoy, that you hate, try to step back and look at the challenge that they present for you and embrace the challenge and embrace how are you going to solve this problem. And that's what I feel like helps me to love all aspects of it and, of course, the stuff that I really don't love. We've talked about this before, tom. We say go ahead, outsource it to the experts in the field. 

10:02 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Right, it is difficult to reconcile all of these hats that you have to wear to be an effective voice actor and remember that, yes, you only have one head, so they kind of stack up like Dr Seuss's Bartholomew in the Thousand and One Hats. It's not easy. This is not an easy thing to do. So, with all that in mind, I brought up the how do you identify as a voice actor, or how do you identify as an educator or a marketer or a business person, because that should inform what you need to do and what you need to be and what you need to have to set yourself up for success in 2025. 

10:45 Because, yes, a goal, I want to make this amount of money, I want to get this kind of representation, I want to produce this demo, I want to get on this social media platform. All of those are valid, all of those are important, but you can only be effective if you know who you are and understand who you need to be to be effective. Whether you like it or not, if there's one thing I tell all my students is the voiceover industry does not care. If you don't like social media, the voiceover industry does not care. If you don't like spreadsheets, the voiceover industry does not care if you don't like auditioning. It does not care. It has no sympathy. Either you do it or you're out. 

11:26 - Tom Dheere (Host) People hiring your voice don't care. People hiring your voice don't care. They just want the voice. 

11:31 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) They just want the product, they want the voice, they want the invoice, you know. 

11:38 - Tom Dheere (Host) And I do want to say to your point of making sure you know who you identify with, but also know that you can evolve and change right, so your identity can change and evolve. Because if you want to diversify that business, right, Setting new goals for next year If you want to diversify into another genre I mean the broad spectrum part of it is I identify as a voice actor. Is there a specific type of voice actor that you truly identify with? Oh, I really consider myself, you know, an audiobook narrator, right, and so you can evolve and change right that identity or narrow down that identity or broaden out that identity based upon your goals for the following year. Because I know that myself, in order to diversify my business, I've had to do that, and it doesn't happen overnight sometimes. Sometimes you've got to sit with it and think it and let it come, because it's a creative challenge. 

12:26 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Absolutely. I'm so glad that you said audiobook narrator is the first example, because there's a handful of genres that people will say I'm this genre before they even say that they're a voice actor. What do you do for a living? I'm an audiobook narrator. That's one of what I call the lifestyle genres, as in you can be a full-time audiobook narrator. 

12:49 You can be narrating audiobooks five days a week every year and have a pipeline, and do it at the exclusion of all other genres of voiceover and make a good living doing it. So a lot of people identify as their genre before they identify as a voice actor. In general, I'm the opposite I'm a voice actor, and the reason why I say that is because, well one, I love storytelling and I love storytelling in all its forms whether it's a 15-second commercial or it's a 30-hour audio book. 

13:19 It's all storytelling. I'll tell any story you want and any style that you want and any medium that you want for any audience that you want. And then some people say I am an e-learning narrator or I'm a cartoon narrator, and that's good and I think it's healthy too, because the firmer of an identity that you have when it comes to setting goals for the new year, which is what this conversation is all about it's easier because I tell my students vague goals will get you vague results. Specific goals will get you specific results and that feeds into vague efforts. 

13:51 - Tom Dheere (Host) Exactly. And if you narrow down that you want to get into, let's say, audiobook narrating, then you'll have a specific set of goals that will help you to get there. If you want to be an e-learning narrator, you have specific sets of goals that will get you there. So, yeah, I think if, at the broad level, you say I am a voice actor, I am an artist, I'm a business person, I'm a serial entrepreneur I like to call myself that Because I love the challenge of like how can I make money from this? And it makes me feel like I don't want you guys to think I'm all about money, but it's not really that. It's about the challenge of taking something and building it from the ground up and then that kind of exhilaration and satisfaction when it works is amazing. When it doesn't work. 

14:32 You know what I learned from that as well. 

14:34 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Oh, you know what I want to do now, Anne. I want to use this as an example for you. So for you bosses who are watching this, you want to set goals for 2025. Maybe try it through the prism of identity. Let's use this example In 2025, I wish to identify as an e-learning narrator. That's your goal, okay, so what do you need to do to be able to achieve that goal of identifying as an e-learning narrator? Well, the first thing is training and, of course, I use e-learning as an example, because you should go to Anne Ganguzza to get your e-learning training. But can? You should go to Anne Ganguzza to get your e-learning training. 

15:08 - Tom Dheere (Host) But can we ask one question? Yes, can we ask one question before we say I want to go into e-learning. Why, why do you want to be? 

15:14 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) There you go. Why do you want to identify as an e-learning narrator? I think that's important, right, and that's a fantastic question, because for some of you it may be I've been a school teacher for 25 years and I'm retiring and that's what you want to do. Or you just may be an academic, you may be a scholar and you just love learning. So you want to share your love of learning as opposed to being a teacher, and you want to share your love of teaching. So figuring out the why is a great way to start. And then, once you figure out that, why? Because e-learning, as Anne can tell you, takes on many different forms. Medical narration is a form of e-learning, narrating textbooks, narrating human resources, resource guides or, you know, forklift, certification for construction workers, or executive summaries or any or a number of things, and some of that you may identify with more strongly and others you may not identify with as much. But once you figure out that why, then you go to the how. 

16:15 Why do I want to identify? Why could I identify as an e-learning narrator? And then, how can I do that? Get training with Anne, make a great demo. Then you need to figure out the marketing part of that you also need to build, possibly, a landing page on your website. Maybe you need to build a list of e-learning clients that you could direct market to. Maybe you need to join some online casting sites that have a lot of e-learning casting opportunities and so on and so on and so forth. So you can kind of plot that out. If, by December 31st 2025, you have said I now identify as an e-learning narrator, both inside and outside, and, like Anne said, figure out the why that's the inside part and then training, demo, website marketing, casting sites, direct emails, which turns into e-learning jobs, now you can realize that goal of identifying as an e-learning narrator. 

17:11 - Tom Dheere (Host) Now also, if I could just interject and say that, when you're figuring out what it is, what are your goals for the following year? And I think also researching the industry. Tom and I have spoken about the industry and how it's evolved in past episodes and how it's evolved in past episodes, and I want you to know and we also just came back from a conference where we were discussing how are these genres being affected by disruptive technologies such as synthetic voice or AI? And, just to let you know, e-learning is alive and well, as well as corporate. I personally, I talk about looking at the market space, right 33.2 million registered companies. How many of them are going to use synthetic voices? Probably the ones that don't care about engagement or storytelling, right? And that's the same amount of people, I believe, that didn't care that the narrator could tell a story either, and maybe they just had a nice-sounding reading voice, and so they might hire somebody for that, and so the same people that are going to hire for that are going to still hire for that, and they may go to AI. 

18:12 But I believe that there's a huge, huge market. It is the largest market out there, really, of all the genres, when you're talking about percentage of opportunities out there. So, guys, just because you might be hearing stories about how all e-learning is going to AI, I stand up and object to that, not because I don't want it to, but, honestly, when you look at the realistic numbers of the market space, yeah, some of it's going to go there, but some of it's going to go there for every genre, right. You still have a really large market to work with here that I don't see going away anytime soon. Tom, I don't know what about you. 

18:46 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I still believe that there's plenty of work for everybody that knows what they're doing. 

18:51 And the question is do you bosses know what you're doing? I would say just the fact that you're having this conversation with us and listening to us means you are much farther ahead of the game than a lot of other people, because you're taking it upon yourself to educate yourself about the voiceover industry through the VO Boss podcast. With all that in mind, yes, the industry is changing. Yes, ai is here. It has been here. It is causing the overall voiceover industry to contract. That is unquestionable, and some people are asking it from the perspective of genre, and Anne heard me say this when I moderated the AI panel very recently at the Mid-Atlantic VoiceOver Conference, that I think it's a bottom-up thing, that the lowest budget content will be the stuff that gets eaten up by AI. First and this is why I'm going to talk to you about this part bosses, about setting your goals for 2025. 

19:45 Another mission, because there's goals and then there's missions. A mission to identify as an e-learning narrator I think is a very noble mission and we kind of walked through that. But another mission can be to be a better storyteller than AI, and you have to be that because more and more of the work is going to get eaten up on a low performance low budget level, which is, for the most part, entry-level work for lack of a better term for a lot of people who are entering the voiceover industry. So that means you need to make sure that you have quality performance training storytelling training, on-camera theater, opera, improv, stand-up comedy. Get that training to complement Aang Ganguzza's e-learning training and all the other wonderful coaches out there so you can hit the ground running and already be relevant and already be more of an effective performer than AI. 

20:40 - Tom Dheere (Host) And you know what else, tom, worst case scenario and I don't want to like worst case scenario for next year, but worst case scenario there is no voiceover industry anymore. Right, if you've gained all these skills, right, building a business Hello, building a business right. Understanding how to have a product, market it and sell it right, you have a business. And also performance wise right, as an actor. Gosh, these performance skills can be put into so many everyday opportunities for work. If, for whatever reason Now I'm not going to say the voice industry is going to fall out, but I think as business people, we have to always be prepared, right. So those skills that you develop right in becoming the best actor that you can be, are going to help you down the road for anything that you do, if you're presenting, if you are trying to sell yourself in an interview, I mean, all of these things really are beneficial, I think, to your personal and professional growth and development. So it's not a waste of investment ever. 

21:34 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I don't think it's funny because, as you were saying that, I thought of two professions. There are people who train lawyers to speak in court. That requires an acting coach of some sort. And there's another voice actor I know who trains actors to be professional patients at medical schools so they can exhibit certain symptoms, so the medical students can diagnose their ailments. 

21:58 - Tom Dheere (Host) So this is not about exit strategies for when? 

22:00 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) AI eats voiceover. But Anne's point is very sound. 

22:05 - Tom Dheere (Host) Yeah, no, it's just investment, yeah. 

22:08 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yeah, investing in yourself. Here's another thing that I'm starting to notice. Yeah, search engine results. If you're using Google or Bing or Yahoo, whatever, I've noticed that, at least with the voiceover-related searches, which is most of what I do for various reasons, ai companies are starting to show up more in the sponsored results. 

22:32 - Tom Dheere (Host) Have you noticed this, anne. Well, I know that the AI answer is always coming up first, and so I don't know if I've noticed AI companies specifically advertising their services. But AI answers and responses. 

22:39 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yeah, this is what I'm saying. Absolutely, it's both, because, like I use a Chrome browser. 

22:44 I tend to use Google the most often and I'll get that AI answer before I get other answers, but it'll be the AI answer. It'll be these AI-sponsored companies, as, pertaining to voiceover and then all the normal Google results, I'm wondering that a lot of these AI companies have been recruiting and contracting with voice actors like us, and now that they've gotten enough of a voice roster of human voices that they're cloning speech to speech or text to speech, and they've gotten all their software ducks in a row and they've gotten all their marketing ducks in a row, that they may be going for it possibly this year. And I say that, bosses, to light a fire under your butts. It's time to stop being professional students. It's time to get out there and start working. Keep getting your coaching with Ann, keep producing your demos, keep developing your skills, but get off the fence. Get on top of it. 

23:38 - Tom Dheere (Host) So you can go and advertise your product. All right, so we've got step one. Right is how do you identify right, your, why? 

23:46 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) right. 

23:47 - Tom Dheere (Host) Understanding, I would say, educating the industry and what it is that you identify with. And if you want to move into or add additional genres or whatever you want to do for your business, to really investigate, educate yourself on that. And now we kind of have the goal that we're setting and then we're working backwards right, we're like reverse engineering the goal. So what will it take to achieve that goal? What other tips do you have, tom? We're writing this down, I assume, because that's what I tell people. It always helps to write down. 

24:16 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I certainly hope our bosses are writing this down. 

24:18 - Tom Dheere (Host) I don't know if I have much writing skills anymore, but you know I do have paper and pen and there's lots of great planners out there. 

24:24 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yeah, I will give some quick tips that I usually talk to my students about, now that we're talking about identity, which also is a form of how do you define success? So that's a part of it. How do you identify? Figuring out which genres, like we said, you want to identify as an e-learning narrator in 2025. But then the third one is what are the portals? Your bosses have heard me talk about this before the three portals of voiceover that connect voice actors to voiceover casting opportunities, which are representation, online casting sites, self-marketing strategies. So, for example, if you want to identify as an e-learning narrator in 2025, most agents don't cast e-learning. 

25:04 - Tom Dheere (Host) Correct. 

25:05 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Which means you don't need to seek representation in 2025, most agents don't cast e-learning Correct, which means you don't need to seek representation in 2025. However, there are tons of casting sites that have lots of e-learning opportunities and, of course, you can engage in direct and indirect marketing strategies to build lists of potential clients, cold email them more follow-up emails to stay top of mind, so you can see how. Now you can kind of plot it out into I need to be this, why do I want to be this, how am I going to do this and who am I going to connect with to get the casting opportunities that I want? 

25:34 - Tom Dheere (Host) And, by the way, part of that direct marketing where you're doing the cold emailing and generating the lists and stuff that Tom helps you to do as well the VO Boss brand has a product for direct marketing as well that could be of interest. That will also help you with all different genres e-learning, corporate and that is using a vetted list that exists and you can find out more obviously at vobosscom and set up an appointment to talk to me about that as well if you're interested. That's another valid marketing. In addition to the marketing that Tom talks to you about, I think you need everything you can get. To be quite honest, get yourself out there, I agree. 

26:11 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I agree. 

26:12 - Tom Dheere (Host) Well, tom, this has been a great conversation. So, bosses, we are manifesting for you and with you, the most successful 2025 ever for all of you. So make sure that you are taking stock in how your year has gone and let's go ahead and set those goals. And, guys, we're here for you. We want to hear feedback how is it going, how are your goals being set, and what do you guys want to do for 2025? So, tom, it's been a pleasure, as always. Thank you so much for all of your words of wisdom, and I'm going to give a great big shout out to our sponsor, ipdtl. You, too, can connect and network like real bosses. Find out more at IPDTLcom. All right, guys, have an amazing week and we'll see you next year. Bye. 

27:01 - Intro (Announcement) Join us next week for another edition of VO Boss with your host, Anne Ganguzza, and take your business to the next level. Sign up for our mailing list at vobosscom and receive exclusive content, industry revolutionizing tips and strategies and new ways to rock your business like a boss. Redistribution with permission. Coast to coast connectivity via IPDTL. 

Delve into year-end evaluations and developing a robust plan for next year's voiceover success. THE BOSSES share expert advice on setting clear objectives, utilizing effective marketing techniques, and maintaining enthusiasm in the unpredictable realm of freelance work. They give invaluable advice on maintaining passion, setting precise goals, and implementing effective marketing strategies. THE BOSSES also share strategies for balancing financial and time investments to align emotional satisfaction with professional objectives.  00:00 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Hey bosses, real Boss, Tom Dheere and myself have a very special deal for you guys. Tom, tell them what it is. 

00:08 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) All right, nne. If you use the promo code BOSSVOSS that's B-O-S-S as in V-O-BOSS and V-O-S as in V-O-STRATEGIST, and the number 24, so that's BOSSVOS24, you get 10% off my 30-minute check-in, my one-hour strategy session and my one-hour diagnostic. 

00:27 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) And you'll get 10% off all coaching packages and demos on the Anne Ganguzza website. So, guys, black Friday starts now and runs till the end of the year. So everybody, get yourselves on that site and get yourself a discount. BOSS, VOS, BOSS, VOS 24. 

00:43 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) BOSS, VOS 24. Boss. VOS, BOSS, VOS, 24. BOSS, VOS, 24.

00:47 - Intro (Announcement) It's time to take your business to the next level, the boss level. These are the premier business owner strategies and successes being utilized by the industry's top talent today. Rock your business like a boss, a VO Boss. Now let's welcome your host, Anne Ganguzza. 

01:06 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Hey, hey everyone. Welcome to the VO Boss Podcast and the Real Boss Series. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzza, and of course, I am here with the one and only amazing Mr Tom Dheere. 

01:18 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Hello Anne, hello bosses. 

01:20 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Hi Tom Dheere. Hi Tom, it's getting close to the end of the year, getting cold, getting ready for the holidays. At the end of the year, I always try to kind of step back and take a look at how did my year go, and I know that this is what you do. This is kind of like this is like your thing as the VO strategist. So I'd love to hear how you evaluate your year, because I want some tips actually, and I'm sure the bosses out there can always use some good end of year tips for evaluating how your business is going. 

01:57 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) And I'll be happy to share those. I do the feels. You know. There's the emotional part of it. Just how did I feel about the year? Did I feel energized? Did I feel motivated? Did I feel satisfied? The emotional part of it Just how did I feel about the year? Did I feel energized? Did I feel motivated? Did I feel satisfied with the art of it? Was I able to express myself in the ways that I wanted or needed to express myself as both a voiceover artist, but also as a human being, Because there's a psychological aspect to what we do, Everybody has a different reason for why they want to be a voice actor. 

02:26 You know, like Tom Dheere loves to tell stories. I love to talk, I'm a big talker, I'm a fast talker, but I just love telling stories. I love going on journeys and guiding people through journeys. And it's funny because ever since I did my very first paid voiceover in 1996, I've always had the question you know, how'd I do as an artist? You know, and every year the answer is a little bit better because I learn a little bit more. 

02:49 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I love how you evaluated, first of all, the why. Right, because I think we always need to step back and say remember your why. Why are we doing it in the first place? Right, because if it gets to the point where it's stressing you out too much or you're I'm like my corporate job did that. 

03:04 So I mean honestly like one of the reasons why I did this was to go into business for myself was because I found joy in running a business. I found joy in being creative and telling stories, such as yourself. And I love how you opened with that, because when I asked you, I was thinking, gosh, you're going to bring out your spreadsheet and you're going to be like all right, the business analyst is here and we're going to talk about how our year went, which I'm sure you're going to talk about anyways. But I love how you opened it with what is your why and how did you feel about it? Because I think you have to have the feels first right in order to want to continue and have the passion and the drive to keep moving forward. 

03:41 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Well, if there's no feels, then why are you doing it? And if you're doing it just for a paycheck, voiceover is the worst way to try to make money. It's so hard. 

03:51 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) It's so hard. Wait, I feel like on the count of three, Tom, it's so hard. 

03:59 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) And it takes forever to find out if you can make money and how long it's going to take you to make money, that's going to feel like it validates you at all, and if you wanted to get to part-time or if you want it to be something that's going to cover all your expenses and help save for retirement. Like you know, if there's a hundred jobs out there, there's 99 out there that are better to make money and have a paycheck than this one. So if you are doing this, it better have the feels right Now. 

04:29 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) why do you say that, though I do want to ask you why do you say that there's a hundred jobs better at making the money? Why do we say that and the two of us are like oh my God, it's hard, but give a little more background to that, to that. Why? 

04:40 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) I'm talking in the context of something that gives you personal fulfillment. Now, in all fairness, if your passion is photography and you want to be a photographer, the principle is the same You're a freelancer. You have to figure out how to make your own work, how to market yourself, how to brand yourself, how to manage your finances. So the principles are all the same. So the self-employed things like voiceover or photography I want to be a singer, dancer, actor, model, musician, freelance graphic artist, I want to open my own yoga business or whatever. But for everything else banking, legal healthcare and healthcare and all of these things can be emotionally and psychologically rewarding, but those tend to be far more stable forms of income, you know. So my point is is that if you're going to get into something as difficult to pursue like photography or voiceover or being a musician, if it doesn't have the feels, then why are you doing it? You're just some kind of masochist who just likes to make your life as difficult as humanly possible, you know. 

05:42 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I read an interesting blog about when you're in freelance and you're doing stuff like we're voice actors. I mean, it's all about certainty. Right, we've given up our certainty, because if we've worked for people in the corporate world like I did, I mean I was certain I was getting that paycheck every two weeks, I mean as long as I was employed. This. Now you've entered into the era, or into a vortex, of uncertainty, and that is, I think, where Tom and I are like it's hard, it's hard and yeah. So if it doesn't give you the feels, then yeah, you have to make a lot of sacrifices for that. 

06:15 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Voiceover the vortex of uncertainty, the vortex of uncertainty. 

06:20 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I'll tell you. Not that we don't love it. I mean, gosh, we've both been in this over 15 years, right, tim? So it's like, really, I mean I would not have stayed with it. I don't think I could ever work for someone again, unless it's like an in-out get paid for the job and we're done. 

06:33 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Oh no, I can't work for anybody again. 

06:34 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) All my jobs? Yeah, I enjoy my, and the first step is to assess the feels right. So do we still have the same feeling about voiceover. Do we still find the same joy in it as we did when we started? Okay, all right, that's good, that's step number one. Then what, tom? 

07:05 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Well then, it's time to break that down, because everybody has dreams in voiceover and people like Ann Ganguza, who is a masterful genre coach and demo producer. 

07:09 That's part of the journey of helping to make your dreams come true. Get quality training, get a demo that you can use as a marketing tool to get the casting opportunities that you want to help make your dreams come true. But I tell all my students, vague goals will get you vague results. Specific goals will get you specific results. Yes, I also say that vague efforts will get you vague results. Specific goals will get you specific results. Yes, I also say that vague efforts will get you vague results. Specific efforts will get you specific results. So, when it comes to analyzing your business and reconciling the feels with what do I need to do and be and have to fulfill me? Narrate cartoons or video games or military history, audio books or college textbooks or whatever it is that blows your hair back to get the feels that you desire? You need to be able to put in the time and money and energy and effort on a business and marketing sense to be able to get the casting opportunities that you want so you can get the feels right. 

08:00 Yes, absolutely, and this is why, I tell my students the more specific you are about what you want, the better of a chance you're going to have to get what you want, and your goals can change from year to year. 

08:11 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) So then, is this the step that's next in terms of like figuring out goals that you want for the next year, or are we still in the assessment phase of how, this year, went. 

08:21 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) It directly flows into the goals that you want, because your goals also are going to change from year to year. So like, for example, this is 2024. One of my main voiceover goals was to book political voiceover work. I'm doing my research and taking classes and listening to experts in the area. I knew this was going to be a big opportunity to be a political voice actor for a lot of people. 

08:46 My worry was that my sound, which is not the vote for this person and if you don't, the other one will eat your children. Like, I can't do that. My vocal folds are just not thick enough to be able to pull off that, or at least I just sound like I'm trying too hard. So it's like is there a place for me with my personality, my skill sets, the thickness of my vocal folds, to be able to get voiceover work? So I set a number for myself of how many political jobs I wanted to do this year and what are the things I need to do to be able to achieve those goals. So training yes, check. Little JMC, little Brandon Perry Okay, check. Demo yes, got the spots. Also added and embellished the demo with previous political work that I'd done in 2022 and 2023, because that's when I decided I wanted to give this a shot. And then marketing acumen Get representation that specializes in booking political voiceover work, going on casting sites and keeping an eye out for political work, as well as optimizing my profile to feed the algorithms to get political voiceover work. And use direct marketing strategies to be able to develop relationships with production companies that specialize in political work and develop relationships with them and get work. 

10:05 And I did all three of those things and, to a greater or lesser extent, it worked in all three of those ways. So I did hit the number of political spots that I wanted to book this year. How do I know that? Well, I can count, but how does one keep track of this stuff? So I use my cash flow sheet, which is a free download at vo strategistcom, and it tracks every penny that goes into my voiceover business and every penny that goes out of my voiceover business. 

10:34 So obviously I track all of the voiceover work that I did, what kind of genre it was, how much money I made, who did I work with, how I got the booking this is where being able to look back on your year and figuring out how you did, because having the feels, like I said, is critical. It's the most important thing. But you need to find out how much money did you spend this year? Where did you put your money Training, demo production, marketing, other things? Where did you put your time and energy? Cold calling versus auditioning, versus blogging, versus social media, versus workshops, versus conferences, versus local events versus national events? And how did all of that stuff pan out? What efforts did you put into 2024 that turned into what you want, which is the voiceover bookings, to get you the feels, to get that fulfillment of yes, I am realizing myself as a voice actor. 

11:30 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) And that free downloadable has all of those aspects on there, like social media, like this is how you got the job social, oh wow, that's fabulous. 

11:38 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Yeah, so I'll talk everybody through. It is that the first column just has a little code. It's VO for voiceover, VOS for VO strategist. Because I track all my coaching stuff on there too, and then it's either the expense like you know, paperclips or whatever I bought, or a class that I took, or whatever that I attended, or whatever the voiceover is, and then I so I track what the voiceover is Do you buy paperclips, Tom? 

12:00 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I haven't bought paperclips in years. 

12:02 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) I have so many paperclips from you know my analog days that I'll never need to buy another paperclip again, so maybe that wasn't the best example. 

12:09 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I know, no, but I love it. I just was thinking about it. God, do we use paperclips anymore? Anyway, sorry. 

12:16 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Barely, barely. I barely use paperclips. I use my stapler all the time, but I don't use my paperclip anymore. 

12:21 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Right, I do too. I still use my stapler. 

12:23 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Yeah. 

12:25 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Okay, Staples. 

12:25 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Anyway, at Staples, yes, one of my favorite places. It's like Disneyland for me that and the container store, if you've ever been to a container store. 

12:33 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Oh, yes, I love the container store. 

12:35 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Love those. 

12:36 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) There's one not far from me Stupidly expensive containers, but boy do I love them. But boy do I love them. They're worth every penny. 

12:49 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) I just love walking around in there. They are, it's like Willy Wonka Good stuff Anyway. Oh, my mileage. I tracked my tolls, you know, because I drove from Manhattan to Virginia, specifically, and back. I tracked all the tolls in and out of the Lincoln Tunnel across the Delaware Bridge. 

13:04 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Can I tell you, please Can? 

13:05 I tell you, I tracked my $6 butter that I bought from the bar so that I could put it on my Royal Cousin bagel Because I'm a girl who loves butter on her bagels. And so it was like late at night and I went to the bar and I said can I buy some butter? And he's like butter. And I said, well, I have a bagel. I said, have you ever had a bagel from New Jersey? And he's like okay, and the first he comes back with two or three. Like I'm like no, no, no, no, that's not going to work for me. 

13:35 He's just two or three little pats of that container, like I need like two or three per like square inch of a bagel for that. And ultimately he says I'm going to have to charge you and I said, okay, sure, so how much is that going to cost me? He goes and I'm like I thought about it it was late at night and I really wanted that bagel and I said, all right, put it on my tab. So that's been tracked. 

13:56 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Just wanted to clear the air on that. Just wanted to clear the air of that $6 butter. It's a tax deduction because it's a food expense at a professional event. 

14:05 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Thank you, roy. Thank you, roy for my bagel. 

14:10 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) I allowed myself to eat a bagel. This time. I had half a pumpernickel myself when I was down there I ate an entire bagel. 

14:13 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I might have eaten one and a half, tom, because you know. 

14:16 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) I gotta have a lot of butter. Yeah well, I understand you had to make it worth the $6 that you put out. 

14:20 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Thank you, Uncle. 

14:21 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Roy. Thank you, roy. I track all the traveling expenses and obviously, every meal, I amount of money that I made. I enter the invoice that I generated for every voiceover that I did, the form of payment check, direct deposit, paypal, credit card, wise, formerly known as TransferWise. Oh, I also currency, because I get a lot of European clients, so I get paid in euros as well as dollars and British pounds. 

14:51 But this is how to look at your voiceover business marketing-wise is that I have a section which I either type in AB for audition booking or DB for direct booking, because I like to know did I get this through a one-to-one audition I auditioned once I booked one gig or is it a regular client or a legacy client that just said oh Tom, here's another explainer video and you don't have to do an audition? So this year, 2024, my direct bookings were roughly 80% of my voiceover work and the audition one-to-one auditions were roughly 20% of my voiceover work. And the question is you get these numbers, but what do they mean? What that means for me, tom Dheere, is that I have legacy clients dating back to 1997 that I don't audition for anymore. So that's clearly an accumulation of building regular clients over an extremely long period of time. 

15:45 And that's great, but I also need to know how relevant I am in the voiceover industry, because if you book an audition this year. That means that your voice, your sound, your performance is in demand and you're keeping up with casting trends. 

15:59 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Love that and 20% is pretty good. 

16:02 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) The other thing I do is I track the portal. How did I get this casting opportunity? The three portals in the voiceover industry are representation, online casting sites, self-marketing strategies. So, looking at my spreadsheet, so we're not quite at the end of the year yet, but we're pretty close. Right now it's only 8% of my work came through representation, 42% came through online casting. That's both free sites and pay-to-play sites. 26% came through direct marketing, 23% came through indirect marketing. 

16:33 So what do those numbers mean? Well, it means a couple of things. One, you line up the genres of voiceover that you want to do with the portals that you need to use to get them. So, for example, agents don't cast audiobooks or explainers. So if I did a lot of audiobook work this year, that means I probably got it through ACX or Findaway, voices or Ahab or any of the other audiobook-centric casting sites. Or and this also happens a lot is that you develop direct relationships with audiobook production companies Hachette, podium Publishing, Oasis, a whole bunch of other places and so I can look and go oh okay, well, I got a lot of work through that too. So it's reconciling the genre of voiceover, the type of bookings that I got, with how I got them. So, for example, political so far has been my best genre. 23.9% of my voiceover revenue was political. Second best was e-learning. I do a ton of e-learning. I've had clients dating back to the 90s, so that makes sense. 

17:35 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yes, does your spreadsheet calculate the percentage? Do you have like formulas built into that spreadsheet? That's awesome. 

17:41 I do, I'm going to just ask, because I know there's a lot of bosses out there thinking this oh good Lord, it's a spreadsheet, and their eyes are already like rolling back in their heads because it's like overwhelming. Right, but tell me, how much time does it take for them to account for this? Because, if you think about it, this is nothing more than an expense report, really, and a little bit more right If you were to travel for your job, right? And so I feel like you always have to fill out an expense report in order to get paid for it. So this is kind of like your expense report slash income statement, inflow, outflow yeah, report for your business. And so how long should you expect to sit down at the end of a day, at the end of a week, and fill that out? 

18:20 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) A couple minutes. 

18:21 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Okay. So see that, guys. It's only a couple of minutes, yeah it's only a couple of minutes. 

18:27 And so even as overwhelming, like Tom is coming up with all these numbers and these statistics from his own job and his own year, but yet he's only spent a few minutes a day jotting this stuff down, and I think it's just something like muscle memory. As much as you go and practice character development or practice your scripts, it is time invested that you have to put into your studio, and I just want to say that. I think I want to clarify, tom, that there's a number of people that get into this industry because they find joy in reading books or they find joy in creating characters. However, not everybody finds joy in the work that's required, right, to actually create and delve in deeper to that character or delve in deeper to growing a business. As much joy as these things bring you, there is work involved and I just want to acknowledge and, tom, we've said it before multiple times it's hard, right. I mean not every single aspect of your business is going to be like, I mean, until you're probably established right, eight hours in the booth doing joyful, light character work. 

19:27 If that's what you want to do, there is the other work that it takes to get you to that place to feel joyful, as you were explaining right so you can derive the feels right. 

19:38 And so this assessment, this end of your assessment, can give you such valuable insight into where you've gone and where you want to go in the future and how much time you're going to have to dedicate to different aspects of it. And so it's worth the couple of minutes and I say that it's worth a couple of minutes, like to my students that are in performance. I say it's worth a couple of minutes to do that copy analysis, to do that character development, to do that scene writing, because in the end, that's what's going to pay off and get you the gig. Because in the end, that's what's going to pay off and get you the gig. Because ultimately, you can go in and create characters all you want, but until you make a profit doing that right, that's just all you're doing is going in your studio and creating characters, and if it's something that needs to pay the bills, that may not happen. Until you put in a little more work, that may not be as pleasant. 

20:25 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Right. I mean I've been developing this spreadsheet for 20 years, and I have been developing this spreadsheet for 20 years and I have all sorts of little formulas and things in there, yeah. 

20:34 - Intro (Announcement) You get the benefit and you can have it for free. 

20:36 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Tom, is this for free? Oh my God, for free. That's so awesome, right? You don't have to put the work in that Tom. You're getting the benefit of Tom. This is why we call him the VO strategist, right? And if you need help, there he is, tom. I'm sure people can come see you and work with you, that you can help streamline this so that it becomes something that isn't so tedious or isn't something that you're questioning Well, why am I not booking work, or why is this not happening in my business? So, if you need an accountability partner and I'll tell you what I'm the first person to say that in my business, I will invest in something that will keep me on track, something that will keep me going. I have a business coach I invest in on a monthly basis, an accountability partner. Tom is like one of the best out there and he's done all this work for you. Sorry, I'm just. I'm gushing right now, tom. 

21:27 But, bosses that know me like I don't bullshit sorry, I just don't I. But bosses that know me like I don't—bullshit sorry, I just don't. I'm honest to probably a fault, but I would not talk about Tom, nor would I have Tom on my podcast so many times if I didn't believe in what he's doing and I didn't believe that you're going to gain such value. And again, this won't be an month for Peloton so that I can get on that bike and be inspired and motivated by the Peloton instructor. 

21:57 This is kind of no different right. It's worth it to me because the benefits, right that I get health-wise and joy-wise from getting on the bike and exercising and being inspired and motivated are very well worth the investment. And being inspired and motivated are very well worth the investment. And so, if this is something that you are not going to be disciplined enough to do, I believe that it's well worth your investment to really start seeing where your business has gone so that you can understand where to take it in the future right and guide it towards success. I stepped down from my podium. 

22:29 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Thank you, that was very kind of you. Thank you for all that. 

22:32 - Intro (Announcement) I have an accountability too. I stepped down from my podium, thank you. 

22:35 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) That was very kind of you. Thank you for all that I have an accountability too. I'm being truthful, I appreciate that, and I have a business coach too, and I have people in my village that hold me accountable because I have my days of self-doubt and self-loathing and laziness and stuff, and I have people that keep me on track. 

22:48 But I, with my mentorship program, you're basically paying for an accountability and a business coach all in one, because folks I know bosses this stuff is hard. It's challenging on a logistical, financial, emotional, spiritual, psychological level and I am here for you. But you're grownups. You need to be able to invest in yourself and be consistent, be kind to yourself when you need to be kind, be firm to yourself when you need to be firm, and I frankly, don't care if you don't like the grownup stuff. I don't care, because the voiceover industry doesn't care either. You want to do this for money. You want to make all your goofy voices in the booth and play all day. Great, you got to put in a ton of work, a ton of work, and it never gets any easier. It just turns into different kinds of hard. 

23:38 Anne has been doing this for a long time. Right, she has her own challenges, internal and external, that are just different from the ones that bosses who are earlier in their journey have. Same thing with me. But if you really want to know who you are, what your business is, what your relationship to the voiceover industry is, beyond just your talent, and how great coaches like Ann can help you realize your talent. You need to hunker down and use my damn spreadsheet and analyze your business and take a hard look, hunker down, Hunker down and use the spreadsheet. I'm wearing flannel today for you podcasters, so I'm feeling very, very very rural, use the damn spreadsheet. 

24:17 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Oh my God, I feel like hunker down and Use the damn spreadsheet. Oh my God, I feel like hug her down and use the damn spreadsheet. See, like even Tom and I have fun with character development. So I mean honestly like it just makes sense. 

24:26 And I'll be completely honest with you, we run our businesses for a purpose and we're doing this for a purpose, right? And I want to support the joy that I have in doing what I do and, yeah, there are days when, gosh, it's painful. But I also outsource some of this stuff as well to an accountant, and I've said that multiple times. I have an accountant who takes care of all my inflows and outflows and categorizations and that's a big help right then, and there she doesn't track my auditions or how I got the job, but I mean honestly, like that's just a couple of extra steps. Now there's another piece of software out there there's I think it's voice overview that does that as well. Voice overview with Danny States. Is that correct, right? 

25:07 They have kind of a CRM and people will say, well, can I do this? Can I track this with my CRM? Yeah, you probably can, right? I mean, you won't have the benefit of the mentor, a monthly kind of meeting with Tom, and even if you're using voice overview, I don't think there's like a mentorship built into that. But you know, it depends on what level you need and what level you're requiring. 

25:27 The thing that I like about your spreadsheet, tom, is that it's local, right. I'm very leery of a database that I'm necessarily putting confidential information in, like what I'm getting paid per job, unless I know that that system has like security that nobody's going to hack in and like steal my contacts. That goes for a CRM system too, right, I want to make sure that that is secured and that there's no possibility that somebody is going to go in and get financial data on me that maybe I didn't warrant anybody taking or seeing, or my client base. And so I like yours, because yours is local. You can just download it and you copy it to your computer and there it is and that's as secure as your computer is, and then you can meet with your mentor right On a monthly basis, weekly basis, however, that works and that, to me, I feel good about and I'm leery about CRM software anyway, just because a lot of CRM software doesn't do exactly what I want it to do and people are always asking me what CRM to use. 

26:26 I use multiple CRMs depending on what I need. I'm not necessarily putting in financial data. I have my trust in my accountant and I have trust in the software that handles that accounting data and that is where that data goes. Everything else is my computer and my business partner. That's it. Nothing that's sitting out there on a server. And you know I'm not trying to disparage anybody who might be subscribing to those other services, but that's just my personal feeling. I don't know, tom, how you feel about that. 

26:55 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Yeah, you got to work within your comfort level, your comfort zone. 

26:58 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) And like. 

26:58 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Anne said you can download the spreadsheet. It's on your desktop and then you can back it up to your external hard drive and it never sees the internet and you're totally safe and you got to work within your comfort level of your CRM. 

27:18 If you feel that you just need to have another spreadsheet backed up to your hard drive that has a breakdown of all of your contacts, that's all fine too, just as long as you're able to be able to interact with it effectively, so you know when it's time to market to which potential, current or past clients and how you do it, based on this work that you've done with them or the genres that they cast. 

27:31 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I don't want bosses to misunderstand to say that I don't trust CRMs. I have CRMs and I put my data on them, but I would need to know the specifics of the CRM. You know if they're a major company, I mean if they're not securing their data. You know what I mean and the reason why I'm like this is because I used to work in technology. I used to be the person that needed to secure the data so that nobody could hack in and get it, because I worked for a school with under the age of 18 children, so I needed to make sure that that data was safe. So I'm particularly anal about it. That's where my thoughts come from, so I don't want to like disparage any product out there. Just this is the way I feel about it. 

28:09 Anyway what a wonderful way to assess how your year went, because how do you know, like, where you're going if you don't know where you've been, kind of thing. Right. It's nice to be able to assess how your year went, because how do you know where you're going if you don't know where you've been? It's nice to be able to assess how your year went so that you can really assess that, make improvements for the following year, because I know for a fact that I want to grow my business every year after year after year and, like you said, even though we've been in this business for so long, it doesn't get any easier even for us. I still have to strategize. 

28:36 How am I going to grow my business next year? How am I going to evolve and change with a shift in the industry? Or, if there's shifts in the industry, how am I changing? Am I getting different performance coaching? How am I marketing myself differently? How am I planning my business? And I can't tell those things unless I've really assessed how the year has gone. So, tom, I so appreciate and we'll be putting the link for that download on our show notes page. And, of course, tom Dheere is always available to chat with. I'm sure you've got like one of those free consults that people can sign up for if they're interested in finding out more. 

29:12 We have that also in the show notes. And with that I will say bosses, I hope you had an amazing year. I had a great year compared to like everything that's been going on this year. It's been a crazy year, but you know what? It's been a positive year and I always like a positive year in my business. So, Tom, thank you so much for all of your wisdom and, as always, for being a real boss. 

29:35 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Oh, thanks as always for having me, Anne. 

29:39 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yeah, All right, Bosses. Big shout out to our sponsor, IPDTL. You too can connect and network like bosses. Find out more at IPDTLcom. Bosses have an amazing year coming up. I hope you had an amazing year. Make sure you assess it using Tom Dheere's downloadable PDF, and we will see you next week. Awesome Bye, guys. 

29:59 - Intro (Announcement) Join us next week for another edition of VO Boss with your host, Anne Ganguza, and take your business to the next level. Sign up for our mailing list at vobosscom and receive exclusive content, industry revolutionizing tips and strategies and new ways to rock your business like a boss. Redistribution with permission. Coast to coast connectivity via IPDTL.