Protecting your investment in voiceover

What do you do to ensure you don’t provide voice-over work for free, unintentionally? You’ve worked hard to achieve your current professional status as a voice talent, you've made some hard decisions about the rates you will charge, you are striving to make a living, and you don’t want to give your work away except by your own choice. Most people who hire us are honest, and until recently, I’ve always gone into voice-over work relationships with nothing more than a virtual handshake unless my client has asked me to sign a contract or release form. These documents, by the way, are invariably created to protect the client, not to protect me.

A few things can go wrong when we’re working with people we’ve never met and are unlikely ever to see. One is that they can skip the step of paying you, or they can take months to pay. Another is that they pay you for one thing, but end up using your work for other applications. I’ve been in business as a voice talent for only 3 years, so I definitely have not seen everything, and would like to come up with effective ways to protect my work while not becoming paranoid and suspicious. So I’d like to review the possibilities, and would greatly appreciate input from colleagues about how to start a work relationship on the right foot.

I get most of my work from clients I’ve found by searching on my own for companies that might need the services of a voiceover professional, and from online freelance job postings. If the potential client has a website, that’s where I get my first impression of the company. If the site looks professional, that’s a good sign. If they are members of a civic organisation such as an ad club or chamber of commerce, that also speaks well for them – anyone in the habit of shady dealing is unlikely to want associations that raise their public profile and is unlikely to “waste” money joining such organisations. Membership in the Better Business Bureau is also a very positive sign; many businesses that are perfectly legitimate are not members, but it may be informative to look up the company on the BBB website since complaints can be filed about any business, not just members. So looking up the company at the BBB is an excellent way to do some preliminary checking on a potential client.

Your first communication about a voice-over job may be a request for an audition (Phase I). If I receive a very long script from someone with whom I’ve never worked and am asked for an audition, I just read a few choice paragraphs - possibly the intro and the outro and one paragraph from the middle - depending on the script I will look for a paragraph with technical terms so the client can see how I handle the complexities of the script. This way, they have a read that is long enough to tell them if I’m right for the job, but not the entire script. I prefer this to watermarking (adding music or a sound to make the recording unusable) because it lets the client hear what I do with their script without distraction, while still not doing the entire job.

If I’m hired, then it’s time for Phase II. As I said, I never used to do anything to protect myself from unscrupulous consumers of voice-over – starting from the premise that everybody is honest. Now, after a few negative experiences, it’s time to change that. I have a lot of colleagues who commonly request a 50% deposit via PayPal before starting work, and the rest upon completion. This is a great idea and I’ve recently started to implement it myself. It worked wonderfully well last month when I was looking forward to a quiet week during which I would finally have time to prepare for the holidays. Instead, I suddenly had an influx of work from new clients. I was hustling to get it all done and really did not want the stress of wondering whether all these people that I didn’t know were going to pay me. So, I asked them all for that 50% deposit unless they were referred to me by someone I knew, or in one case, I admit, I just had a good feeling about them and skipped that step (my instinct was good – they paid immediately). For some reason, many of us are uncomfortable about the money side of the business. If you’re new to this sort of procedure, as I am, I recommend writing out your payment policy and practise saying it, so that you can do it fluently and without flinching (or if your communication is by email, no problem – you’ve got the words at your fingertips). It's common practise to request a deposit on a service prior to delivery, particularly when the parties are conducting business remotely, so we all need to learn to do it. By the way, PayPal does charge a fee to the funds recipient (you). You can either consider this part of the cost of doing business and add the fees to your year's business expenses, or you can include them in your bill. Use this calculator to figure out in advance what the PayPal fee will be (thank-you Brian Hart for this link).

The policy of requiring a downpayment will take care of much of the potential problem of non-payment, unless you’re working with a client in another country that is unable to use Paypal. For such cases, you may be able to use Western Union instead of Paypal. For direct bank-to-bank wires, your bank may charge a fee for incoming transfers, as mine does – I solved that by shopping for a local bank that doesn’t, and opened an account there just for receiving wire transfers from overseas clients.

As for the clients who didn’t pay me – there have been two. The first one simply never paid and does not respond to my emails. The second one sent a check that bounced. Since my bank charges a fee in such cases, I actually had to pay to do that particular voice-over job, which I considered a pretty outrageous insult on top of the injury. I wrote to the client, who apologised profusely, said their bookkeeper had embezzled thousands and had been arrested, and he promised he would “make it up to me” right away. Six months later, he hasn’t. I submitted a complaint to the Better Business Bureau, who recently contacted me to tell me they had not received any response from the company. A review of the company on the BBB site reveals that they have a rating of “F” for not responding to complaints, of which there have been several. If I had done my homework I would have seen this and saved myself a headache, but I hope I have learned my lesson. I have no further plans to pursue payment for the work I did – it isn’t worth the exasperation.

Will I do the internet research, the BBB background check, and require the 50% deposit for all new clients from now on? Actually, probably not. For many of the jobs I get, I already know enough about the company to feel safe with them, either because they were referred to me by someone I trust, or because I was the one who made the initial contact and had already done my homework. And sometimes I just have a good feeling about them and decide to trust my instincts. If I have responded to an online job posting, however, and don’t actually know the name of the company until they contact me, that’s when I plan to require the deposit. Especially if their first effort to contact me is by phone, it’s important to be ready to explain that policy up front, before I do any work.

Another problem that can come up to threaten your investment in your voice and career is that of overexposure. This is something I had never really thought about until recently. A read I did for a TV commercial in a major market was later used for radio, so my voice was on the air waves a lot. It was a non-union job and I had signed a standard release. The reason this could be a problem was summed up well by Kara Edwards in a discussion at VoiceoverSavvy. She wrote:

I recently had to negotiate a contract with a company. We really hit a cross-roads with the rates I proposed for extra usage of the original audio. When I explained that it was less about money, and more about exposure...they totally agreed with me.

I'll explain: Let's say I sign a contract with company A to do a VO. I don't add anything into the contract about usage, and I give company A full legal right to do what they will with my audio. Company A takes the audio, puts it online, on TV, animates it, makes a talking doll with it, etc. Suddenly, my voice is being heard everywhere and I haven't made much money. Company B (a major corporation) creates a job I would be perfect for...but they are hesitant because my voice is already heard everywhere with company A (for little money), so they go with another actor. Now I am stuck.... (quoted with permission)

Kara further noted that

When I am contacted directly, I always repeat back to them what they've proposed...

"You need a :30 VO for a 13 week run in Louisiana, correct? The fee for this voice over will be $---.--. If you choose to use the audio in any additional manner, I've included my rate sheet for your convenience." (quoted with permission)

So in your preliminary negotiations with your clients, it's important to give some thought to how you will deal with usage fees, buy-outs (an additional fee to give your client unlimited use of the recording for a certain time period), interest on late payments, and other contingencies. You will find some very helpful templates that deal with these matters at Voices.com.

My thanks to Kara Edwards both for her wise words and for giving me permission to quote them. You can expect a blog post on this topic in the next few weeks by Kara herself at her own blog.

I welcome your comments about your own experiences with client agreements, contracts, non-payment and all that other bad stuff! What else should we be doing to minimise the bad stuff and maximise the good?