Susan Berkley, The Great Voice Company, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey
By Jerry Vigil
In RAP’s early years we featured an article from Susan Berkley who outlined eleven tips for making a great voiceover demo [January 1991 RAP]. Since then, Susan’s voiceover business has flourished, and she has taken her voiceover career into several directions including coaching and teaching. This month’s RAP Interview catches up with Susan’s successful career. We get some valuable tips on getting your own voiceover career off the ground, and we get some insights into the lucrative business of voiceover. Susan has lots to offer, and this interview barely touches the surface. If you like what you read, you’ll want to visit her website at www.greatvoice.com and/or drop her a line at the contact info at the end of this article. And yes, radio people can make it in the national voiceover business. Susan is one of us.
JV: You’ve been in the voiceover business for a long time. How did you get started?
Susan: I was in radio for fifteen years, and like many radio people, terribly underpaid and disrespected. But at one point of my career in the late ‘80s I was on the Howard Stern show doing his traffic, and the joke was that I didn’t get to do a traffic report. I think I did two traffic reports in two years. I became like a cast member of his show and had a lot of notoriety but wasn’t really making any money. So in 1987 I decided I was going to leave radio after fifteen years on the air and go into voiceover full-time because I had been doing some freelance and realizing that I could go into the studio for an hour and make almost as much as I made in an entire week on the radio. So I knew where I had to shift my career, and that’s basically what I did.
JV: And the voiceover evolved eventually into teaching and coaching and other things, correct?
Susan: Yes. I still work daily as a voiceover artist. I’m one of the voices of AT&T, and I’m the voice Citifone Banking, which are two of our biggest customers. But when I left radio I also started teaching. I took on some students, and as my own freelance voiceover career began to grow, so did the teaching part of it. So since 1987 I have trained well over a thousand people coast to coast in the methods I developed for doing voiceover and doing it successfully. And now I’ve got my own studio, we have eight employees working here, and we specialize in the voice prompt end of voiceover. We specialize in voiceover for telephony in all languages. So it’s not just me now. And then I also expanded the training division of my company, so it’s not just for voiceover but it’s also for presentation, public speaking, and voice for business. I work with companies and help them train their employees to have better communication skills.
JV: Where do you find the time to do all this?
Susan: It’s just starting to wear on me actually, but as you grow a business, you start to get a lot of leverage, and that has been wonderful. I’ve got an incredible team of people working with me, and together we were really able to grow the business. I wrote a book called Speak To Influence – How to Unlock the Hidden Power of your Voice. The revised edition will be out in the fall, and now I’m working on a voiceover book as well.
JV: What are your thoughts on the excess of people who have gotten into the voiceover business since the “guy/gal next door” voice became the big thing?
Susan: There’s a steady stream of people coming to me for training, and a lot of people say they want to do voiceover, but not everybody has what it takes to really do it on a professional level. Not that they don’t have the potential. I think people don’t realize what it really takes to attain mastery of the voiceover art. They think it’s all about talking. It isn’t. And it’s not even about having a great voice anymore. You need acting skills. You also need a tremendous amount of perseverance and marketing savvy. Those are the things I teach.
And it may now seem like there’s a lot more people in the market, and that might well be true; but I think there’s always been a lot of people doing voiceover, and it hasn’t just been a small group of people doing it all. Just do the math. Think about how many commercials there are. Of course, we’ll never know exactly how many commercials are being recorded everyday, but there’s some 10,000 radio stations in the United States. Say each one is running an average of 12 minutes of spots an hour? Take away that some of those are done by the production staff in the station who are not being paid extra for it, but the rest are being done by somebody. If you multiply that out, that’s hundreds of thousands of commercials being recorded every single day. James Earl Jones can’t do all those spots.
So yes, there are a lot of people breaking in and doing this. But not everybody is going to last. Producers are always saying they’re looking for fresh new voices, and they’re always going back to people they can count on in the studio. There’s a lot riding on making a right decision and a wrong decision when you hire voice talent. If you hire the wrong voice talent, it gets so embarrassing. I had a situation here where I was doing a local radio spot the other day. They wanted some incidental voices and said, “We have a very low budget. Can you call some of your students to come in and do this? You know, just kind of give them a break?” So they knew they were getting some new people, and I always love to give people a chance. I called a local guy in, and he just couldn’t do it. He couldn’t hack it in the studio. It was embarrassing for me, it was embarrassing for the client, and it was embarrassing for the guy.
So I think experienced voice talent or people who have been in radio for a while and have done a few voiceovers shouldn’t even worry about the competition because it’s easy to have a great sounding tape with the digital technology, but it’s not easy to perform when it finally gets time to be in the studio.
JV: So you see people in radio as not necessarily out of the game just because they’re in radio.
Susan: I find that radio people have an advantage in that they’re very, very comfortable behind the microphone. They tend to be extroverts. They make relationships easily. They love to speak. They love what they’re doing. The big problem that radio people have in doing voiceover on a really major level is learning how to be conversational and not to sound like an announcer. That’s still something that casting directors and talent agents tell us when we get into auditions – no announcers. In the twenty years that I’ve been doing this full time, it’s never ended. It’s not just me. It’s that they always want that real person, casual, conversational style. And that, I think, is the main challenge of the radio person wanting to do this in a major way. That and the marketing.
JV: Have you helped many radio people get rid of their announcer voice?
Susan: Quite a few. I think in almost every class that I teach there are one or two radio people in there trying to do that, and I’m pleased that I’ve been working with some people who have been at a very high level and have wanted to enhance it even more. I think that is the attitude that makes the difference between somebody doing the odd voiceover here and there and bitching and moaning and complaining all the time, and somebody who really can count on a steady stream of income from voiceover.
JV: What about marketing?
Susan: I give voiceover boot camps three times a year in New York City. I invite talent agents, I invite producers, I invite voice talent that have been successful in New York, and I get a lot of radio people coming to those. I just released a 10-CD compilation of last year’s boot camp where I go into great detail on how to market yourself for voiceover.
Here’s what I discovered in starting my own business. I didn’t try to look to other voice talents to learn how to market myself. I looked to other successful business people – entrepreneurs, people who have built their businesses in areas totally different from voiceover because business is business, whether you’re selling a widget or you’re selling your voice. There are some things that work across the board for other businesses that I think voice talent can apply to their own business as well. I think the big problem with most voice talent when they try to market themselves is that they think there are all these people out there just waiting to hear about them and their wonderful voice. Nothing could be further from the truth.
I think the number one secret to marketing yourself well is building relationships with people, because in all these years in the business, I like to think it’s all about the best person getting the job, but it ain’t. And I’m not saying it’s about who you know because that’s not true either, because for some people that’s a cop out. They go, “I don’t know anybody so I’m just not going to make it; I don’t have the right connections.” It’s not that. You need to learn how to make good relationships with people. You need to learn how to be an incredible salesperson — a good talent, of course, but more than that, a great salesperson. And what that means is learning how to take a sincere interest in the people who are hiring you.
Having been a radio personality myself and working with a lot of them over the years, when you’re in show business — and radio is show business even at the very small level – I think it’s so easy for it to be all about us and our wonderful voice. We’re so used to getting a lot of attention when we’re on the air, being famous even in our own local markets. But that’s the worst way to market yourself. Fame does sell, but you really have to learn how to make it all about the producer, the casting director, even the talent agency — people who are working with you and hiring you. Then your business will thrive.
JV: For our readers, the radio types, we’ve always heard that acting classes are the first order of business when prepping ourselves for the voiceover biz. What other tips can you offer?
Susan: The number one thing is stop listening to yourself. All voiceovers are a dialog. Good voiceover is a dialog with an unseen other. Just like good radio works that way as well. You really need to enhance your ability to visualize the person that you’re talking to, to the point where you can actually hear their response to you. It’s like as I’m reading a line of the spot, I need to imagine what that imaginary other is saying back to me and have every line that I’m reading be in response to what they’re probably saying to me.
So it’s not about making my voice sound as good as possible. It’s about really communicating the message to that other person. And I’m not even thinking about my voice. The voice should always follow your inner intention, your motivation. Otherwise it screams “I’m announcing!” I’m not announcing. I’m trying to connect with you and listen. And to do that I need to really look at this copy as the copywriter intended. Who is this audience? What do they care? What’s the purpose of this product? What am I trying to get them to do as a result of listening to me? And if I can change their mindset from having it all be about me and my beautiful dulcet tones, and having it be more about them, suddenly the spot comes alive.
JV: How does this apply to copy that consists of two characters as opposed to a single voiceover?
Susan: When you’re doing characters, that’s even better because it takes the pressure off of you. It’s even doubly not about you. You’re somebody else altogether. So those are almost easier to do in a sense. The problem with characters is to stay in character and committing to that character. It’s a specialized area of voiceover that everybody should try to develop even if you’re not planning on doing it because it really helps to expand your range and get you out of your own head. The biggest problem learning and emerging voice talent has is their own inner demons, being so horribly focused on themselves and trying to direct themselves and perform at that same time. You cannot be both director and performer. There have been countless, horrific movies where the actors tried to direct themselves. It just does not work. You have to learn how to step out of yourself and communicate with the listener.
JV: Should radio people use their current position to jump-start their voiceover career? Is it okay to say “I’m in radio” to a talent agent or producer or casting director?
Susan: Milk your position in radio for all it’s worth. That helped me when I was on the Stern show. People will take calls from people they know. A big challenge all of us have is getting people to take our calls, getting people to listen to our tapes. We really have to think outside the box, and everything helps. You should be using the Internet. You should be sending emails to people. But you also need to be sending things in the mail, and you need to be making tons of phone calls. Tons. And meet people.
As to whether it’s okay to say you’re in radio, yes and no. In a major market it could be a kiss of death depending on the agents that you work with because there’s still such a stigma, and they’re so terrified of somebody being an announcer. They want actors. That’s what radio people need to understand; they want actors. But if you’ve proven yourself as an actor and they also know that you do some radio and they can hear you on the morning show or whatever, then that’s cool. I think maybe for morning people it’s less of a stigma because on a morning show they want you to be a personality anyway. But if you’re working at a tightly formatted station where basically everything you read is a liner and you barely say two words that are your own, then that can be a problem. But there’s plenty of work in non-broadcast where if you’re a smooth reader and if you can sound corporate and get through highly technical copy and you’re fast in the studio, man, you’ve got it made. You really do.
JV: Do I have to have an agent?
Susan: Absolutely not. I don’t have one. Only had one for two years out of a very long successful career. However, what agents do do for us is they get the casting breakdown, and this is especially important in the major markets. I won’t know about some of the bigger auditions for ad agencies unless I have an agent or a really close relationship with a casting director. So that in a sense is a liability. But there’s so much other work out there that is cast that is not union. So it doesn’t mean you won’t work; it’s just a different kind of work.
Being in the whole agency thing does have its down side. I made a distinct choice in my own business. My office here in New Jersey is twenty minutes from Madison Avenue, but I know if I got an agent and started playing that game, I’d be running around New York City everyday going on auditions, having to park the car and all that. And just because of the sheer numbers of people that are doing that, my hit ratio wouldn’t be as high. I prefer playing a game that I know I can win where they’re not looking at fifty other people in addition to me. I’m finding niches where it’s only me, where somehow I’m able to present myself uniquely and I’m even able to reach the decision maker. So we need to get very creative with our marketing. I believe in trying to sell from the top down, making relationships within organizations and trying to strengthen those relationships so when they have a casting, it’s no question that they’re going to call you.
JV: You mentioned non-broadcast work. What’s the industrial film narration market like?
Susan: I do a lot of industrials as well. Corporate narrations is a huge market. Billions of dollars are spent on audio/visual productions. It’s just a matter of getting to know the production companies and who’s casting that stuff. And so you go on line. You frequent websites like mandy.com and other resources I outline in my boot camp. You locate the producers. They’re casting everyday.
One of the guests I had at my boot camp is an independent producer, and she’s looking for people to grow her business with. She does a lot of demos. She does a lot of spec stuff. She’s interested in people who are willing to do something for like $100 or $200. Then later, as the stuff gets bigger and she grows, you grow along with her. I have a lot of customers that I’ve had since 1987 when I first started with voiceover, and when I started with them they were small. My company was small and I just stayed with them over the years and reaped hundreds of thousands of dollars from those relationships over the years. And as their companies grew, I started to work with other people within those companies.
People need to be patient and let the business grow but keep marketing; you must do something everyday. It’s like taking a blood pressure medicine or doing a diet or an exercise program. You have to stay on top of your marketing everyday. I think a lot of talent have a complex about marketing themselves and they get lazy. They think selling is beneath them. What is selling except making good relationships, making friends and trying to help people to grow? And if they’ve got a good relationship with a voice talent, that helps them grow. They can count on you. They know that you can convey the message the way that they intended it. And it’s not because you’re some prima donna. It’s a very different mindset.
JV: The delivery for corporate narrations is generally different than what you hear on commercials. What’s the desired mindset when doing narrations?
Susan: The imagery for the industrial stuff is what I call teaching mode, and it depends on the technical nature of the copy. If you have a lot of very technical, dry stuff to get across, number one, we need to understand what we’re reading about even at a very lay level. So if I have something in a technical area I’m not familiar with, I’ll have them explain it to me in layman’s terms as closely as they can, kind of give me an overview of the script. What exactly does this drug do? What’s the purpose of this computer technology piece here? Help me understand this. Then I get a general understanding. I’ll look up all the words before I go in. I’ll get the script in advance. I need to know how to pronounce everything properly, and there are some wonderful resources online. There’s websites like m-w.com where you can hear words pronounced. It’s an online dictionary. The other day I had a job where I had to read lots of foreign currency names like from the country of Ghana and places like that where you would never come across these words, and bartleby.com had the pronunciations for me. Usually the client also will have somebody at the session who can help you with the pronunciation, but I think it really speaks to your professionalism if you come in and you’re prepared with all the technical terminology, you’ve read through the script, and you can read it smoothly. And once you have an understanding of what you’re trying to talk about and what items are going to be bulleted in the video, you can indicate that with your voice.
So it is a different kind of delivery. They tend to be a bit slower than commercials because you’re usually not running a clock for industrials. It’s kind of an even delivery that’s warm, yet authoritative depending on the style they want, whereas commercials are obviously all over the place.
JV: The cost of VO talents these days… has that gone down because of the supply of talent out there?
Susan: You know, I was very dismayed yesterday. I went online and was looking at some of the new talent sites out there. On this one particular site they had several levels of talent. You can get the ($) single dollar sign talent to the ($$$$$$) six dollar sign talent. The little one dollar sign is $25.00 a spot and the six dollar sign talents start at $300 a spot. And then there’s the people with the little star, and they have they give you a quote. And I’m like, come on! I think the talent themselves trying to be bargain basement does them a huge disservice. Are we like tires? We’re not tires. We’re not like some commodity.
You need to, number one, start turning down work, but also help people to understand that in a sense they’re going to get what they paid for, but also that we’re worth something. We need to have the self-respect to value our own talent, and we also have to help the client understand that we’re not a commodity. And never forget that the voice talent is part of a larger production budget. Say they’ve got $10,000 to work on this project. Most of that will go for the video and the location and the spot buy or whatever it is they’re doing. And they have a range within which they can pay the voice talent. It’s a game. Our job is to try to find out where the top of the range is and not be afraid for what we want. I think most producers know that if you’re good you’re going to ultimately save them money, make them look good as well, and that we should be fairly paid.
For non-union work, try to use the union scale as a guideline. You can find that at aftra.org or sag.org. It’s up there for everybody to see. Even if you’re working non-union, try not to undercut what union talent is making. And try to get what you’re worth. Negotiate. Take a course in negotiation and you’d be surprised on how much money you can make from this. A lot of voice talent way undersell themselves.
JV: What about the guy who has a rent payment due, mouths to feed, and who doesn’t care if he gets $150 or $25 for the voiceover, he just needs the bucks?
Susan: If they’ve called you and they like you and they want to work with you, I don’t think they’re going to run away. They’re not going to make the decision based on price. If you word it correctly, they’re not going to go, “uh, that’s too expensive; I’m going to call somebody else” and hang up in your face. That’s never happened. You never quote price without asking a lot of questions. So before I even ask them what they can pay on a job, I want to know where it is. I want to know what their budget is. I want to find out all about what’s possible. I was talking to somebody the other day that found me on the Internet, and they wanted voice talent and said it’s just for a little local gift shop in town. I found out they were only paying a few hundred dollars to buy the time on this television station. They would faint if they heard my normal rate. But I’m not going to do it for $25.00. It is not a job for me. Bye. But there are plenty of other jobs out there. I just don’t think that lowering your price is ever going to work for you in the long run. And those people that are doing it, they won’t be able to stay in business.
And you don’t want to work with bargain basement shoppers anyway. Most people don’t buy on price. Some people buy on price but many people don’t. Look at what happened to me the other day; I brought the wrong person into the studio. The producer knows that if he does that, he’s going to look terrible. And not only that, he’s ending up paying more because of the studio time. The voice talent can’t cut it. It sounds like garbage. Guess what? He’s just lost two hours in the studio, and now he’s got to go back and find somebody else that does know what they’re doing. Actually, this price-cutting thing is not even as wide-spread as you think. And let’s not underestimate those producers. A lot of them are very savvy.
I think it’s like scare tactics in a way. People get very, very negative and they get discouraged, and it’s just an excuse because they’re not marketing themselves well enough. Maybe some of your readers can honestly tell me they’re really working hard marketing themselves and overall they’re finding that price is an issue. I want to hear from those people.
JV: You mentioned your voiceover boot camps. Tell us about the services you provide that you think would interest our readers?
Susan: Let’s start with what I can do for free. First of all, everybody should go to greatvoice.com and subscribe to my Inside VoiceOver newsletter. Every month I send them really good tips and I answer questions about the business. Then I teach by teleconference. My classes are by audition only. It’s great for people that live in cities where there is not a live voiceover coach. It’s an eight-week program geared toward helping people sound as natural and conversational as possible and getting that announcer sound out of their voice. There’s a mix of radio and civilian people in the classes.
For those who want something a little more comprehensive, they should plan on coming to New York City for my voiceover boot camp. If they go to greatvoice.com they’ll find a schedule, which they’ll also get if they subscribe to my newsletter. I’ve got one coming up May 15-16 in New York City. Those are ridiculously low priced at $595 for the two days, and there’s an optional third day at the studio. The tele-class is also $595 for the eight-week program. The boot camp is available on CD, and that’s also available through the website with a complete money-back guarantee. And coming soon I’ll have a book, but I need to know who you are so you can find out about the book. Subscribe to my newsletter or call us up and ask to be put on our mailing list. You’ll be in touch with all the things we do.
I’m also going to be starting a monthly coaching program, kind of like a group coaching program where I’m doing special interviews every month with producers, recording studio people, you know, people who can hire voice talent. And you’ll get a weekly fax from me and a monthly audio cassette, sort of like an inner circle club that I’m going to be starting soon. That’s great for people that want that on-going motivation from me where they can stay in touch with the industry, and it all starts at greatvoice.com.
JV: What’s one of the first things you tell radio people that come to you and say, “I want to get in to voiceover? What can I do to get started?”
Susan: There are two main areas. Let’s look at your demo. Do not produce it yourself. I don’t think we can be objective. Let’s face it; everybody that’s reading this has access to some wonderful equipment and can get into a studio and probably knows how to make a phenomenal sounding tape, but you owe it to yourself to bring in an outside director. I just don’t think that we can produce and act at the same time. So that would be the number one caveat. When doing your demo, try to get a set of outside ears to come to the studio with you. Even I have my own studio, but I never do my own demo. I have somebody else that produces it for me.
You need a separate one for commercials. You need a separate one for corporate industrials. You need a separate one for promos. You need a separate one for books on tape if that’s what you want to do. And you can even specialize. I’m doing one now for medical narration; that’s a specialty of mine. And all those things can have their own track on the same CD, a brief 90-second track on the CD.
JV: Now when you talk about an outside producer, do you mean have somebody else produce each individual spot or promo on the demo, or have somebody else produce the demo from spots you may have already produced yourself?
Susan: Well I think that the voice talent themselves, if they’re RAP readers, they know how to do produce the demo. So you don’t have to pay somebody else to do the post-production, unless you want to. But for the individual spots, it’s the talent direction part of it that’s key. We cannot direct ourselves. You’re just going to go mental trying to do it. You cannot be objective about your own voice. Everybody knows that. They should know that if they’re in radio. It’s so hard to be objective about the sound of your own voice.
And I want to say something else here because maybe they don’t realize that the spots we do as part of our production shift by and large are not acceptable for a voiceover demo that you’re going to send out to agencies and producers. You’ve got to have yourself reading national copy. Not the commercials for Jerry’s Waterbed Store # 59. That will not do it for you. Let’s face it, most people have not done a real live honest to goodness beer commercial or whatever it is for a national client, so what you do is you get the copy by transcribing off television or radio, or maybe you have it laying around the station. You go into the studio and you cut it as if you really did that spot.
JV: Where does one find good directors for a demo?
Susan: We do demos here although it’s not our core business. A really fast and easy thing to do is call up a production company and offer to pay a producer to direct you. Pay them by the hour for their time. And that has twofold benefits. Number one, they get to know you, and they might call you in for real work because you’ve reached out and you’re actually paying them for a few hours to come and direct you. And number two, you really get an experienced set of outside ears. You want to pick somebody that’s in the trenches every day doing the kind of commercial and/or the industrial corporate work that you want to be doing.
JV: What do you enjoy most about what you’re doing?
Susan: I was just thinking about this the other day. I’m back on the air. I do a talk show now at a local station just to have the job of doing it. I’m intoxicated by the smell of the microphone. I just love it. It lights me up like nothing else. I was born for this. And when I’m not doing it, it’s not as good a day as it could be. And I think I share that with everybody else that’s reading this interview right now. That’s our birthright. Let’s get out there and let’s do more of it. We all have something to say. We’re blessed with a unique talent, which is our voice. Not everybody has that gift. So we have to use the gift that we were given. That’s my favorite part of the job, having the privilege and the pleasure to make a living using a gift that I was given. That really lights me up and makes my day.
Don’t listen to naysayers. There’s tons of work out there. You just need to be flexible and learn to find it. And if I can help you, I’m here for that. I really am because it gives me great joy to really see somebody succeed.