Ever  since  I started on this journey of becoming a voice actor, I always had a feeling that my voice would be heard on a global level. I recalled that after developing my demo reels for the corporate, commercial and e-learning markets, I decided to market my services within the UK market and interestingly, I got the odd voice over job, but nothing that I would consider of real value. Even though I had managed to get voice over agents in London, often I would be emailing or ringing the agents that I had at the time and telling them about the jobs that I had found and the response would be ‘well I am not sure why your not getting work Kenny, because you are clearly talented enough for the UK market’.  At this point, I decided that I had to re-focus my efforts and try promoting my voice outside of the UK and interestingly, one of my very first international clients from India, found me via LinkedIn. This lead to 5 years of repeat e-learning voice over work. At the same time, being of African origin,  I also decided to develop a culturally specific African-English demo reel, that led to corporate work for clients in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Libya and Morocco.  Further work on the back of my e-learning and corporate reel led to developing clients in India, Switzerland, Spain, USA Canada and Dubai.  My efforts in developing more of a global footprint, have resulted in formulating a deeper understanding of  the cultural differences of each of the markets. Contrast this with the UK, where it has been a struggle to  establish my presence, but as my voice coach pointed out ‘sometimes you have to go where you will feel more valued’ and if that means developing more of a global presence, then I will continue to do so, whilst continuing on some level, to develop links, networks and ultimately clients within the UK.

I remember having a meeting about 2 years ago with my business mentor and he mentioned that an aspect to consider when growing my business, was to develop external partnerships. As a result of that discussion, I decided to develop a strategy for targeting local universities, in order to identify what internship graduate schemes, that I could participate in. It turned out that one university in the East Midlands, ran a 6 week graduate internship programme, that involved having an intern with your business for 18.5 hours per week. I thought that this would benefit my voice over business, by providing an external perspective to an aspect of my business that I had neglected. At the time, this was to develop part of my social media strategy. After interviewing the graduate I clearly observed that not only did they grasp very quickly the nature of my business, but also brought ideas that I had not even considered, which was a breath of fresh air!!!

Due to the success of that initial internship, I have since gone back to hire another intern, to build on my social media strategy and the enthusiasm that the intern has already demonstrated, during our conversations and face to face meetings, means that I have not only benefited from having graduates that will enhance my business, but also developed an invaluable partnership with a global focused institution. So for those voice actors, who may not have considered partnering with a local college or University, I urge you to consider this as an option, given the limitations of time that we all have, when trying to balance the various aspects of running a voice over business.

Well this is the question I probably get asked the most, whenever I attend a networking event, or meet new people for the first time, or bump into old friends who ask me how I am getting on, who did not know that I was a voice actor. I actually fell into voice acting by chance really, whilst I was studying at the University of Manchester in the late 1990’s. I was actually passing through the student refectory one day, when I recall seeing a small message on the notice board in big capital letters, asking for ‘Narrators required for a Health Awareness Project, please apply urgently’!!! At that precise moment, I always remembered what my Mum used to say to me about seizing opportunities as they arose.  So without hesitation, I quickly contacted the Project Manager, who was a fellow Nigerian academic, auditioned for the role, which they liked and I was told that I had got the part.  I was over the moon, at landing such a gig, especially when I had very little experience at the time in voice over work.

What perhaps was the most interesting aspect about this role, was that I had no idea at the time, that my voice would be heard globally across 20 countries. From that moment onwards, I had a strong feeling that voice over would in some way shape the rest of my life, but not to the extent that I would be voicing diverse projects for clients across the globe, as I am today.