It's time for a makeover

Well, my short time in the USA was a real education, and I have many stories to tell. Given that I want to keep you coming back for more I won't blow them all in this one blog.

I can tell you that I got to walk the halls of greatness that are Disney Animation Studios, where one of my favourite shows - Phineas and Ferb is created. I'll tell you all about that soon, but first, a news update.

It's time for this voice over artist to get a makeover. Having come back with a brand new demo we all agreed that it was time for a new look, so I'm delighted to say that I have recruited the skills of a graphics designer, web builder and brand new SEO specialist to really bolster my presence on line.

Work is already underway, but for now we'll keep the site just as it is, but do please keep popping back because new content is being added all of the time.

Short and sweet, because it's Easter and we've just had a special tea for Felix to celebrate his fifth birthday, hence the house was filled to breaking point and I am still picking up bits of party popper from the carpet. Fun, but I am exhausted!

OK, so the Disney story later this week - stay tuned, or whatever it is in blog land.

Auditions are Everywhere

I recently visited Los Angeles to spend some time with my favourite voice over coach, Nancy Wolfson, and to record a brand new commercial demo which will feature on this site just as soon as production is complete.

It was a short trip, but so much fun. I flew in on Thursday, had a frantic day of activity on Friday and then returned home on Saturday. Granted, demos can be recorded remotely, and I did have the means, but I was in the mood for an adventure, so I had one.

Now I’ll be talking more about some of the fun that I had in future blogs, but for now I want to talk about the one thing that struck me immediately upon arrival, and that is American customer service.

Now I could talk about the welcome I received from the car rental place and the hotel receptionist, but what I want to focus on here are the waiters – particularly those in the trendier restaurants.

From start to finish, the entire experience of visiting their restaurant is a show. They’re brimming with enthusiasm. They want to tell you all about the specials of the day, even new cocktails that they’re offering for the first time, and they’ll check that you’re enjoying your experience on a regular basis.

It might all sound a bit much – like a bad visit to a UK TGI Fridays (I don’t suspect there’s a good visit), but I actually really liked it. I felt appreciated as a customer and what’s more, I was genuinely entertained by it.

It’s important to point out of course, that this is Hollywood, which means that a lot of waiters are hopeful actors – they don’t know who they are serving and just in case that person happens to be casting the next major blockbuster, it is in their interests to be at their best.

It got me thinking though, that this really should not be thought of as a bad thing. See, it really doesn’t matter who you are serving – they are all customers, and as such, deserve your best attention just as long as they are in your place of business. Maintain that mentality, and everyone will talk about your business and what a pleasure it is to work with you, and then we all know what happens don’t we? That’s right – even more customers.

Simple really, but every once in a while it deserves repeating.

Join me next time when I’ll tell you all about hanging out with the creators of my favourite cartoon – it’s a great story, I promise!

Voiceover Artists Like Twitter

If you’ve started following this blog and have wondered where I’ve been for the last week or two, thanks. No seriously, thanks very much for following me – it certainly doesn’t hurt my ego to know that the story of my life and the swirly mist of thoughts in my brain are of interest to people in the big wide world.

I’d love to write something for you every day, but with so many projects happening at once, it can often be difficult to find the time. More importantly, sometimes I just don’t feel that I’ve anything to offer you. I’m not one of those people that post every thought and feeling on Facebook or Twitter. Whenever I feel the urge to write something, I ask myself one very simple question – “Why would any sane person care?” Funny thing…. nine times out of ten they wouldn’t, so I step away from the keyboard and turn my attention elsewhere.

Today though, I do want to talk about social networking and how powerful it really is. In this story, the service in question was Twitter. I love Twitter. When it first came out, I, like many people, simply didn’t get it. Telling people what I was doing in 140 characters or less seemed pointless. I mean I didn’t use Facebook, so why what felt like a cut down version of it? How wrong I was….

Someone I follow posted a video of a great voice over coach by the name of Nancy Wolfson. I checked her out and decided that this was someone that could really help my career, so I contacted her and in no time signed up to a series of classes and seminars. In a very short space of time she has helped me hone my skills, altered my entire approach to voice over and even helped me secure the services of an agent in the US.

I am a good client for Nancy too, and I didn’t come by way of an advert, it was a recommendation from someone that I don’t even know. The voice over community thrives on Twitter and I love being a part of that, so please come and follow me @pauljrose

The world of novelty ringtones

And so the website was born and, quite frankly, it was rubbish. To the web designers of old, I salute you. I am not a designer or a coder, my skills lie elsewhere, and if you're reading this blog then there's a pretty good chance that you know what they are.

But I was on line for the world to see, and then I decided it was a good idea to list myself on some directory sites. They were free so I figured why not? As it turns out, they turned out to be pretty useful.

A company that developed mobile phone ringtones were looking for someone to recreate dialogue from films and TV shows. Copyright rules meant that they could not use the originals, so they needed someone who could do as many impressions as possible.

The work was fun and fairly simple. I would listen to a clip and try my best to reproduce it, and I came up with a policy that I use in my business still today - if you don't feel the is good enough, you simply don't pay me for it.

Well many of them were good enough and there's a good chance that some of you reading this may well have downloaded me into your phones at some point. But there was more that we could do. We decided to think about what the characters would say if they were telling you to answer your phone or read your texts and this became a whole lot of fun. I was writing scripts, and my clients were always pleased that I had really captured the essence of what those famous characters might say if they were telling you to answer your phone.

Now I admit that my phone has no novelty tones in it, but it's always nice to hear a stranger's phone ring with one my tones, see a smile come to their face of people who hear the tone and know that I had a hand in that.

Eventually, these tones lead to the creation of The Voicemonkey and we will talk  about that in a future blog, although the link is there if you're the sort of person who reads the last page of a book way before you reach the end. I know I am.

Until next time.

Payment Terms and Why They're Wrong

And so for a brief interlude from the story of my life to share some thoughts with you. Have you noticed how a good number of blogs out there are nothing more than rants in written form? There’s nothing wrong with that – I mean you only have to look at some of my older posts to see that I use writing as a means to vent my frustrations without resorting to alcohol, violence or listening to anything by Morrissey. 

None the less, this week I feel like challenging the status quo, and I would love to get your thoughts on the subject. Why is it, in the corporate world, that the buyer gets to dictate the payment terms? 

Just so you understand what I mean, I have people who will ask me to do a job for them and then tell me that their terms are to pay in 60 days. Well how exactly is that fair? I’m the one who provided the service and my terms are substantially less than that!

It doesn’t work that way in other walks of life does it? I mean it’s not like you go into McDonalds and point out to the person behind the counter that you usually pay in restaurants after you’ve eaten the meal! They have a system in place and we – the customer  - need to work within that system.

So how have we let this happen? We’ve considered ourselves as smaller than the customer. If some mighty organization wants to pay us within 60 days then we should be grateful for their business and just accept it, right? WRONG! They have come to you because they want to use the service that you provide. They could probably find someone cheaper, faster, more local or with better terms but no, they’ve come to YOU – you and you alone have exactly what they are looking for. 

Now don’t get me wrong, as a small business I am genuinely thrilled at every enquiry I receive, so please keep them coming, and I am sure that we can agree on some payment terms that work for both of us.

Chapter One - Eric Cartman

The story begins in the small offices of a recruitment company in Harrow in the late 1990s. I received an unsolicited email, and back then receiving any email meant that you had truly arrived - in fact Spam was still thought of as a canned meat and the inspiration for a Monty Python song. If you don't know it, it goes "Spam spam spam spam..and so on". Actually, it might not be so SEO friendly to keep writing that word, so I'll stop. Back to the story and naturally, I opened the mail.

What was presented was a flash animation that someone had created. the whole thing must have been around 100k in memory, so I set it to download and went to put the kettle on. When I returned, there was an image of a fat little boy in a red top and a blue bobble hat who then broke into a very unflattering song about someone called Kyle's Mom. 

I thought it was quite funny, but also thought little more of it. I chuckled inwardly - it was an open plan office - and went on about my day. Months later and Channel 4 ran a trailer for a new cartoon series coming to Friday nights called  South Park and naturally, I recognised one of the characters straight away.

Friday nights were a gathering at my place back then. Good TV, mind altering cigarettes and Doritos were the order of the day. And so South Park began and the little fat boy in the blue hat started talking to his friends and without even blinking, I copied him, much to the delight and amazement of my friends.

Well this continued for a little while until someone asked me the question that was to change everything. "Who else can you do?" he asked. Well I had always played around with voices, in fact in my college play I portrayed 14 different characters, all with different regional accents, but I had never really thought about it. Voices were just something I had always done.

Turned out that I 'did' a lot of people, mostly cartoon characters, and it was suggested to me that I might be able to do something with that skill. So I recorded some voices and built a rather crude website. All graphics, little text, it's little wonder that no search engine ever found it, but back then the shed that housed Google had not yet even been built!

Well I put myself out there and waited. And waited. And waited some more. As for what happened next, well in the interests of turning this into a series, I'll leave that for next time.

Cartman continues to be one of my favourite voices to do. I don't remember who sent me that mail or why, but if you're reading this then I would like to thank you. That one, seemingly insignificant act changed the course of my life forever.

Let's start at the beginning

Several  months ago I decided to hire a group of SEO experts to help me get my site onto Page 1 of Google, along with all the other search engines which make up the remaining 4% global market share.

As they worked tirelessly to see just how many times I could use the term ‘voice over’ without looking like I was trying too hard (that word again was ‘voice over’, just in case you missed it), they noticed that I had not posted a blog in nearly a whole year.

This of course, was bad. At one point I was keen to share my thoughts on anything and everything that came my way. Soon enough however, I realized that these thoughts could be condensed into 140 characters and posted on Twitter, and when you’re raising two children, time does become somewhat of a luxury.

But blog I must, and so it is that I find myself rummaging around the deepest corners of my mind to see exactly what it is that I could share with you, all the while asking the most important question – why on earth should you care?

Well that’s up to you, but if it helps, I promise to keep these short, mildly informative and perhaps even less mildly entertaining. 

One question I get asked a lot (aside from ‘did you pick up the milk’) is how I got started as a voice artist. I’m usually asked this by people looking to enter the industry themselves, and I am happy to tell them, because I know that when I was first looking, I would ask experienced people how they got their start, and I’m forever grateful to those people for the time that they gave me.

So if you’re looking for inspiration, stay tuned – or subscribe to an RSS feed or however these things work. Go easy on me – if I understood all the technical ins and outs, I wouldn’t need to pay someone to do my SEO for me.

My story begins…..in the next blog.

HOW IS YOUR MEAL?!?!?!?!?

Well, here we are six weeks into parenthood and it's really going rather well. Oh sure, we're up every three hours without fail, I've lost over half a stone thanks to simply not eating properly, and we've a new found hatred for any parent who tells us that their darling child is 'already sleeping through the night'. Oh how blessed and lucky they are - the bastards.

Well as luck would have it, 'er indoors and I decided to take ourselves out for a nice, and what we hoped would be, romantic meal. We'd got ourselves one of those lovely vouchers and decided that would leave our three year old son Felix at home with the keys to the toolshed and liqueur cabinet, and simply take Tami with us in the pram. She sleeps soundly in public places and clearly has not yet developed a sense of shame. I wonder at what age we get that? I'm still waiting for mine.

Well the first thing we did was to make sure that the restaurant had baby changing facilities. Trust me, no amount of fine dining can make up for having to lay a changing mat on the floor of a public toilet and pray that there are no nasty surprises.

As luck would have it, they said that they did, so we were all set. Now the restaurant is in Chelsea, and whilst that it is only 16 miles away and should therefore take around 40 minutes according to my ridiculously optimistic sat nav system, the drive took close to an hour and a half. That, however, was not the problem...

The problem was that, as we entered, we were greeted with the sounds of lots of people talking. In and of itself that really doesn't seem so bad. What I failed to mention is that these people were attempting to have a conversation over music being played so loud, it was a wonder that they were not pouring into the streets with blood spouting from their eardrums.

Now don't get me wrong - I'm not some 40 year old prude who doesn't appreciate a bangin' tune, but this place was louder than the runway of a major international airport. Oh sure, Tami stayed asleep for the 4 minutes that we were in there, but at what cost to her health?

Naturally, we left, but it did get me to thinking - why would anyone create a restaurant where people could not talk over dinner? Surely any dining experience is about more than just the food. If I have to destroy my vocal chords just to speak with someone sat 3 feet away from me then I just can't see the value in that.

Clubs are loud, pubs are sometimes loud too, but does all of our modern technology mean that the only way I can ask my wife if she's enjoying her meal is to send her a text message? It seems that in every decade, something new is blamed for killing the art of conversation. I never thought a meal out would be one of them.

Welcome to the world

Well usually I like to use this platform as a means to share my views on all things stupid with anyone who can be bothered to read them. It's a fun and cathartic process for me. My wife asks me where I come up with my ideas and I point out that it really doesn't take very long for someone to annoy me, and then I get to vent on line.

However this week, I am all mushy and nice - a lot like peas, if you will. The reason should be fairly obvious from the picture above. My wife and I are celebrating the birth of our daughter, Tami Erin Rose.

One month after successfully getting our son out of nappies, and the cycle begins once again. The 4am wake up calls, the ridiculous price of formula, wondering how long it will be before she can crawl over to the DVD player and destroy it. For all these reasons and more, I am actually very happy.

And so I would love to report that in my euphoric state that nothing has annoyed me and that everyone the world is actually marvellous. I would love to, but I can't. However I will save my rant for the next blog, just to keep it fresh. I will give you a spoiler alert though - I win this one, and the big company that annoyed me have their tail between their legs, so HAH!

Until next time.

Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

The Game of Buying and Selling

Hello my blog loving friends (both of you). As I pour out my soul in a desperate attempt to amuse, inspire and above all, improve Google page rankings, I find myself thinking about the way people shop.

‘Why Paul?’ I hear you cry. OK, to be fair I didn’t actually hear anything just then but how cool would that have been if you’d actually responded vocally? Pretty cool. No really, it would.

I actually think about the way people shop all of the time. A 25 year long career in selling stuff will tend to do that for you. I’d love to say that I’m a student of the human condition, but that’s just a pretentious way of saying that I think about people, and surely we all do that from time to time.

Most recently I had taken a large amount of my ‘no longer required items’ or to use a professional term – junk – to a car boot sale. My wife Shelly despairs at the 5am start, the hallway covered in boxes and the fact that I may well come home with barely enough money to take the whole family out for a Happy Meal, but none the less away I go.

Now what has made this particular sale interesting is one of the items that I have on my table. It’s a little USB device with a small hot plate that you use to keep your tea or coffee warm. It’s quirky and fun but because I now drink espresso, it’s kind of useless for me.

And so it sits on the table and loads of people pick it up and ask me how much I want for it. I tell them they can make me an offer, at which point they then ask me what the item actually is.

Let’s go over that again – just to make things clear. They want to know how much it is BEFORE they know what it is. To make matters more interesting, there are those who will ask for a price, attempt to negotiate and THEN ask what it is.

This is the car boot mentality; people are more interested in the game of negotiation than they are in actually acquiring the items. I guess that’s OK, but some people are just plain unreasonable. They pick up something which, when it was new cost £20. Second hand you’re happy to take a pound for it and then they STILL ask if you’ll do it for 50p.

Trouble is, if you tell them it’s £2 to start with, they won’t knock you down to what you wanted in the first place – they’ll just put it down and walk away. Once again, the discount is more valuable than the item.

It’s no different in any other marketplace – it’s the buyer that determines the price. Oh sure, the seller may set a price, but if nobody buys it, the price will start to come down until they do. The buyer is in control, but does this mean that, as a service provider, I should drop my prices every time someone tells me that they think I am too expensive? ABSOLUTELY NOT.

If I record a radio commercial for a client and they pay my regular rate, and then another client comes along and wants, lets say, a voice over for a corporate video, then my regular rates will still apply. A reasonable company will accept my rates and we’ll get on with the job. Why? Well I’d like to think they hired me because of the quality of my work, and not the figure on the invoice.

Now if client number three comes along, also wants a voice for a radio commercial and instantly tells me that I am too expensive, well that’s unfortunate, but what does it say about the value I place on myself if I start offering discounts just because people say so? Other respected companies were happy with my rates, so I know that there’s nothing wrong with them.

I don’t want you to think I’m inflexible, but you don’t get the bill at a Michelin Star restaurant and then tell the waiter that you could have picked up a burger down the road for £2.99 do you?

There are voice over artists who are just starting out – happy to take whatever work they can in order to build a portfolio. There are those who are veterans of the industry, represented by the best agents and demanding top dollar for their services.

And then there’s me. If the former is a cheeseburger and the latter Filet Mignon, then I’d like to think of myself as a good Sirloin – reliable, satisfying, and great with a good peppercorn sauce. OK, that last one was a bit weird, but good lists come in threes.

So please audition me first and talk rates second, because if you don’t feel I’ve got the voice you’re looking for, even doing it for free would not make any difference.

Blimey I fancy a steak now…probably should not have written this just before bed. Goodnight. 

What is happening to my language?

Well yes, it has been a while hasn't it my friends? Of course I say that, but then if you're just reading this blog for the first time then it's only been about 12 seconds. In which case welcome, thanks for stopping by, and please feel free to leave a nice warm and fluffy comment before you go - and watch out for the wet paint - thanks.

As I write this, the streets of Britain are teeming with civil unrest. People in London are angry at the police, people in the Midlands are angry at each other, and people in the North are just plain 'Mad fer it'. I myself started a fire yesterday, but only because it was quite a nice evening and I fancied a bit of a barbecue. Thanks for asking - the sausages turned out lovely.

But I get angry too you know, and allow my rage a more peaceful outlet by way of this blog. One of my biggest hates is the apparent death of our language, left in the mouths of these hooded morons who speak with an accent that belongs nowhere on this planet, and with a lacklustre approach to decent grammar and diction that makes me feel like an English teacher from some time around the 1850s.

In no particular order, let me first point out that the G in words that end in 'ing' is NOT, nor has it ever been, silent.  For some reason however, there seems to be an entire generation of people who think that it is. You know who I'm talking about. You call up a company with a solid reputation and some hooped earring Chavette who is more interested in the X Factor than her job shrieks down the phone at you with a voice so shrill that all the dogs in the neighbourhood start howling.

"Good mornin'" they cry. You respond in a professional tone "Good morninG, may I please speak with so and so? "E's in a meetin' right now, who's callin'"

AAAAAARRRRRGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!! Die Die Die you horrible little person! You're killing the English language. You're the icon of everything I hate about the world. 

Have you been there? I bet you have. Now I don't mind so much when I'm phoning to order a pizza from Domino's but these are people answering the phones in City firms - the sorts of places where a certain standard is expected and yet is clearly being overlooked.

Then there's my other favourite - the expression "Is it", used almost completely without any sense at all. I was delayed in a restaurant recently. I won't name names but suffice is to say that thanking the lord that it was Friday was not going to make any real difference.

He asked me if I was going anywhere after the meal. I told him that I was supposed to be somewhere 20 minutes ago but their errors were holding me up, to which he responds "Is it?" 

IS WHAT MORON? You've actually asked me nothing at all, but in that slow drawn out way that is supposed to relay empathy but actually just makes me want to reach for the nearest bottle of ketchup and throw it at your head!

And last but by no means least, the use of OMG. Seriously, how much of a rush do you need to be in to abbreviate words with one syllable. More importantly, if the person you're speaking with doesn't know what OMG means (there are some who still don't - don't be angry with them, they're just better than you) and so you're going to have to explain it, thus making your abbreviation UTTERLY REDUNDANT.

Language evolves, I get that. I mean why do you think Shakespeare is so bloody difficult? But it seems to be happening at an incredible rate. These days, describing something as 'sick' is a compliment. Well when did that happen? Did I miss a meeting?

As a voice artist, I'm happy to speak in character and mash up this beautiful language with all the enthusiasm as a nerd at a Star Trek convention, but every once in a while, it is just so lovely to speak The Queen's English.

Laters.

There's no such thing as a courtesy call

You know, the world of voice over is a joy for me. I get to ‘become’ a vast spectrum of people - from the simple narration of a radio commercial about a local garage to the voice of a talking carpet, my days can get pretty interesting.

One thing my skills as a talker has helped me with is a career in sales. To be fair, really good sales people listen much more than they talk, but when the chance to speak does present itself, it’s important that they think just as much about what they say, as how they’re saying it. The problem I find with a lot of telesales people is that they don’t possess this skill - they’re usually reading from a script and are poised for one of the two responses that you can give them - either that you are interested, or some reason that you’re not. Either way, if there’s one thing that aggravates more even more than having my evening kebab interrupted, it’s people that flat out LIE.

Best example? “Good evening Mr Rose, I’m calling from insert faceless call centre here and it’s just a quick courtesy call to...........” Now the dots aren’t there to act as an ‘etc’ or an ‘and so on’, no, they’re there because once I hear the words ‘courtesy call’ then all I hear after that is white noise. Give me an extra couple of seconds and my brain will actually start playing reruns of iconic TV shows from the eighties just to stop me lapsing into a coma. It’s sad really, because on reflection, Knight Rider really was rather weak.

Let’s take a look at why this happens, ideally without the use of an MRI to understand my brain. It happens because I don’t understand how any company with whom I have never done business would want to call me simply out of courtesy. It would make a nice world wouldn’t it? “Good afternoon Mr Rose, just calling to say hello and see how you are, no other agenda whatsoever”. Wake up genius, it’s not going to happen.

Courtesy calls are only real when you’ve recently given someone some business and they’re calling to thank you and ask you how you rated the service. Even then, they’re not so much courtesy calls as they are survey calls, but we let them slide because if we were happy, then we’ve no reason to shut them out and if we weren’t, well we all love a good moan don’t we?

All these other courtesy calls are sales calls, so why not just be honest about it? Don’t call to tell me I’ve won a prize in a competition I didn’t even enter. Don’t tell me that my home has been selected for a free conservatory before you’ve established that I live in a flat on the first floor (I don’t any more, that that actually happened), and don’t tell me that you’ve got ‘people in my area’ when we both know that they’ll be in my area just as soon as I agree to an appointment.

What I just don’t get is why all these telesales people are trained in believing that their target customers are all complete idiots. It’s like they just don’t even want to try any more - a cheery disposition and a slick script is only going to work on the thinnest slice of the population, so why bother using it?

Just level with people - “Good evening Mr Rose, I’m calling on behalf of XYZ and I wanted to take a few moments of your time to see if we can be of any help to you with regard to life insurance”. Crisp, polite and to the point, that person will not get the phone slammed down. They will get told that I already have an insurance broker, but I will not feel as though my time was robbed from me by some liar in a call centre.

If you don’t think that the truth works, then I encourage you to watch the Dudley Moore film ‘Crazy People’. Yes it is a work of fiction, but it’s always touched a nerve with me, and if you know the film, I’m sure by now you will be able to see why.

Have a good and honest day.