Welcome to the final week of lessons, we do have those bonus ones coming up after that, but those are just like fun, right? This is the content and you've made it pretty much to the end. And so I think you deserve a pat on the back. This content is good and solid and takes a little bit of discipline to follow all the way through. And that same discipline is what will help you be a working voiceover actor and be somebody that maintains your business. Which brings us to the lesson that we are talking about today, maintaining your business, the day that I stopped looking at myself as this talent.

I'm the talent I come to the job and I am just this talented person that everybody bows down to. No, it doesn't really work like that anymore. You are a small business and your product is your voice, a talented voice? Sure. But in order to keep business coming to that product, you got to do a little bit of work to maintain that business. Think about it like a small business, right?

What if you're a restaurant? If there's a moment where it's slow, what is that saying if you can lean you can clean. But seriously, if the restaurant is slow, that doesn't mean everybody just gets to stand around and sit around. There's all kinds of things that you could be doing while you're waiting for the customers to come rolling in the door. You could be polishing the silverware, you could be restocking, you could be cleaning out the fridge. The same exact concept applies with voiceover work.

There's a lot of stuff you could be doing while you're waiting around to book a job. Number one, work on your demos, if you just booked a job say to teach a doctor how to work Run this machine that checks for tumors, then that would create a great demo for you in the medical pharmaceutical field. So take a chunk of that job, turn it into a 32nd demo file and get it up on your profiles to be able to book more of those jobs. Number two, work on your online profiles. There's also a lot of agencies that keep an online profile about you that people can sift through so it's not just for the online pay to play websites, your profile on your agency's sites, your profile anywhere. Sometimes I'm just like sifting through those things.

When I'm watching TV at night I just on the commercial breaks, I look at them. I'm like okay, what is outdated? What can be changed what looks like it doesn't really represent me very well anymore. What would be cool? What can I add, always be looking and changing and updating your online profiles. Number three, another really good tip when you Book a job, first do a little dance, then, unless it's a rush job, get in there, find three more jobs that would be great and audition for them before you begin the job that you booked that way, maybe at least you have a better chance of another job coming down the pike when this job that you're working on is over, which can keep your business maintained and running smoothly, or at least your income, right?

Okay, so number four, set up filters with your email, I am telling you, this should really be required. I'm not recommending this, I'm telling you, you have to do this for success because there's so many jobs that are like, it's Friday at six o'clock, they saw you, they're ready to cast you and they send you a message and if they don't hear back from you in 30 minutes, they're going to move on to the next person. Well, Friday at six o'clock. A lot of times I'm not sitting there at my computer anymore, but if I didn't know that someone was trying to hire Me, you're darn right I would be. So it doesn't matter what email you use, you know, Yahoo set up filters, it doesn't matter if you use Yahoo, Gmail, Thunderbird outlook, it doesn't matter. There's always a filter section or rule section you can go into.

And for me, after it came about that there was an audition and they were waiting to hear from me and I just hadn't checked my email in a minute. I have it set up where if my agent emails me, if my if any of my agents email me, if a certain type of job offer comes in from any of my online profiles, they have a specific wordage in the subject line, like so and so via voice 123. So I put that part in quotations, meaning if someone wants to hire me, it forwards to a text message to my phone. So no matter where I'm at, I'm like, oh, Someone is offering me a job, but they need a response back from me right away. That way you can never miss a job. That's huge set up filters on your email not just to dump into some special box, which is helpful, because when you're looking at your whole inbox, sometimes it's hard to differentiate what's for work.

But definitely set up that filter to forward to your cell phone. Number five, gear and studio setup. There's almost always something you can be doing to upgrade your gear and studio setup gear. In studio. You know, maybe you have a little bit of like a noise floor in your recordings, and it's getting you by but if you've got some downtime, maybe you should go onto some online forums and see what could be causing that. Maybe you all have your wires are running to parallel with each other and you need Have them criss cross over one another so that there's no pickup happening, no interference.

Maybe you have a little area, a little corner like we talked about way back in the first lesson to have good sound quality, but sometimes sound leaks in that you can fix by just putting a little bit more soundproofing material up on the walls or whatever, just look at the situation, see how you can improve it and spend the time on making your recording area or your gear or your audio a little bit better. You know, how can you upgrade it? How can you make it more efficient? How can you better the workflow, right? Number six, take classes, read online forums, this stuff because I have always said things are changing all the time and read forums. Um even no matter what I'm saying to you today, it could change and be different tomorrow.

So At moments where you have a little bit of downtime, see what's out there, see what's changing, see what's next, see where people are having success all of a sudden, see if it's something that you can try. Get involved in the online forums make it be a discussion that sometimes really helps for networking. Number seven, the last one, this is a really important one, and that is maintaining good health, especially in your lungs. Because if you have, let's say, a long piece of text from bad writing, it happens all the time. Unfortunately, where this sentence is not humanly possible to finish in one breath, yes, you can analyze it and figure out where you can take a pause and where you can take a breath. But if you've better lung health and better lung capacity, it isn't even an issue and you can say a lot more sentences all the way through without having to gasp for air.

I'm not telling you to quit smoking. If you're a smoker. I'm not telling you you should be smoking. If you're smoker, but the lung health that I'm actually talking about is more like lung strength. So rather I mean, yes, okay, if you smoke, maybe you should quit, whatever. But that's not what I'm here to tell you about.

I'm saying like cardiovascular exercise, things that strengthen your lungs, deep breathing, yoga, holding your breath, and then exhaling it all out and holding your breath and then inhaling it all in and then holding your breath, things that are going to stretch and compact your lungs and actually make that organ stronger is really important. Really, really, really important for maintaining your product and for maintaining your business, maintain health especially long cool