I'll never forget the first year of my business. It was downright painful. 

I don't mean listening to my work was painful, although it might have been, but physically, it was painful. 

Every single day, I would get up at 6 am, go to work, come home around 6 pm, pick up the kids, get dinner ready, spend time with them, put them to bed, spend a few moments with my wife, and put her to bed around 10 pm.

After she got in bed, I would go outside and get my super-sized army style duffle bag and drag it into the house, being as quiet as possible, so I didn't wake the kids.

Once I got to the office space, which happened to be on the other side of my little dwelling, out would come the PVC pipes and packing blankets. 

I constructed my PVC pipe Hobo Fort, as I called it, based on a number code marked on each tube so I would remember where it all went. After it was up, I had to move the desk and computer so it would fit together and finally attach the...

As you are thinking about your voice over business in 2020, I want to put something in your mind ...

I believe that planning for the future can have such a massive impact on your business that if you’re not planning for success, meaning that you’re not taking it seriously to plan out each day to get to where you want to go, you’re going to lose out in 2020.

I’ve always had issues with planning and working with to-do lists. They can be taxing, and it’s often hard to narrow down the exact things that you need to accomplish.

In voice over, we run across all sorts of challenging things like technical work, marketing, or dealing with customers or working with the website, etc.

The key to planning is taking all those things that we have to do and create systems and processes so that we can make it easier for us and increase success through efficiency.

In this video, I talk about systems, tips, and tricks on how you can plan for voiceover...

Editing breaths in my voice overs used to plague me all the time. I literally would spend hours taking out breaths because I thought they sounded horrible and made the voice over seem amateurish. 

But I quickly realized that it wasn't the breaths I needed to be paying attention to, but the type of voice over I was doing.

Let me explain ... Was I narrating an audiobook or doing a car commercial? 

Both are voice overs but have a defined style of narration. There are always exceptions to the rule, but one (audiobook) should have breaths and one (car commercial) should not. 

As I grew as a practitioner of audio, I learned how to differentiate between the two. 

So ... there are times, especially during long form narration, elearning, conversational reads in longer form, etc. that should have breaths. It is natural to breath while talking and will actually sound quite odd if excluded. 

But, shorter spots, quick reads, commercials, etc. should...

I am excited to talk to you about the people sleeping right now. And you might be like, Anthony, what the heck are you talking about ... everyone sleeps?

I'm talking about all the people who are not working hard enough to get what they want. There are people making excuses. There are people failing to simply start. 

"Courage is crossing the starting line" Amby Burfoot

All of those people choosing to "not start", choosing to not take chances, choosing to sleep when there is plenty time to do more, are going to lose. 

And that is a huge opportunity for you and me. 

You see, when I started out in voice over years ago, I didn't have the fancy equipment I have right now. I didn't have a studio or Whisper Room or super expensive mics. All I had was a crazy desire to work and prove myself. 

There is not a day that goes by I don't thank my lucky stars that I worked so hard in the beginning. 

I remember people asking me about my successes...

 A Guide for the Beginning Voice Over Artist

Check out the podcast here - A VO's JOURNEY PODCAST Ep. 1

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Hello and welcome to episode one of a VOs Journey.

My name is Anthony Pica and I am your host, and we're going to get this thing kicked off for the first episode.

I'm going to be talking about what I plan on doing with the show and hopefully I can offer a lot of help to a lot of voice over artists.

The point of this show is to give all of the advice that I have to help VO's make it from beginning to end, to a place where they can become full time artists.

The hope is that by this time next year, two years, five years down the road, you'll be able to go full time at this. So that is the goal and that is the point of this podcast.

So I want to start off telling you a little bit about myself.

I've been acting, teaching and doing voice...