David Ciccarelli makes his living hearing voices ? high ones, low ones, comical, serious, male and female. In English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese and Arabic, to name a few. With his wife, Stephanie, Ciccarelli, founded Voices.com in London, Ont., an online market where voiceover professionals are connected with companies that are hiring. It is an astronomical site with more than 75,000 registered voiceover clients and 85,000 clients globally. Although 90% of clients are from the U.S. Ciccarelli notes that increasingly they?d like the talent to speak other languages.
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Like the languages, the jobs are also diverse: the voice in a car?s GPS; audio books; telephone auto-attendants for corporate directories; radio and television commercials; video games; game trailers; and educational podcasts.
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Ciccarelli, a finalist in the TELUS and Globe and Mail challenge contest for small businesses, spoke to TELUS Talks Business, about his goal of operating a global website that allows customers to switch to their local language. But first?
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What do you regard as your biggest failure and what did you learn?
Our initial advertising campaign to kick-start the company. [The idea was] to launch a direct mail campaign and send giant postcards [to ad agencies in New York City and L.A.] We worked with a highly skilled direct mail agency.
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We took out a loan to run this campaign. Thirty thousand dollars later, way more money than we had as a start-up [and] more than we made in the first two years of business, this is what happened... It wasn?t just a one off, every two weeks we were sending a postcard with a call-to-action where we were giving away the first generation iPod. The response rate out of 15,000 postcards that got mailed was two people.
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What were the lessons learned? One: our service is online. We were trying to change the channel; we were trying to move someone from getting a physical piece of paper in the form of a postcard and to move onto the Internet. That?s a really hard transition to get someone to make.
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If you?re going to advertise, advertise in the medium where your product is. It?s tying the medium to your call-to-action and we totally blundered that one.
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The takeaway was this: the agency did all these cool art-deco graphics and cartoons to formulate what our brand would look like. So we got a mascot out of it. We call them Voice Guy and Voice Girl. They?re on our homepage and in all our videos. That fun and friendly image defines the look and feel of Voices.com rather than the common image of a microphone.
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Your greatest success?
Getting the name Voices.com in 2007. We started off as InteractiveVoices.com and I wanted to change the name but Voices.com was registered to a medical journal. The owner wanted $50,000 for the name and we didn?t have the cash.
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We went to every bank to get a loan and they asked, ?What are you building? A website?? And I said ?No, I?m buying a name.? And they?d say, ?Couldn?t you just go to GoDaddy and get it for $9.99?? They all said no. We went back to the owner and said we?ll give you $30,000 and cash-flow it. We sent him $5,000 every three months so we could use the name immediately with the thought that maybe the brand would benefit from it. And that?s exactly what happened. That was the single best decision by far. It?s one word. It?s memorable. It sums up what we do.
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In 2012, how did technology play a role in growing your business?
We hired a mobile application designer who built the iPhone app that got 10,000 downloads and we also have the iPad app and he is half-done the Android app. I?ve been watching the statistics in Google Analytics to see where our customers are accessing the website from ? last year 10-15% of traffic was from mobile devices.
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Voice talent is recording their auditions. They get a notification on their iPhone app and an invitation to audition. And they can record using the built in microphone on the iPhone. So people have done recordings in the Tim Horton?s drive-through; when they are waiting to pick up their kid; and we had somebody from the States say they were on break from jury duty doing recordings. It?s part of their life.
If you were starting a new business, given today?s environment and your experience, what are some things you?d keep top of mind?
Focus on three things: people, product, process.
People: hire the best people and the smartest people you can. This is your team, your family away from your family. You?ll spend eight or nine hours a day with them so you better really like them and they better really like you or you are in for a life of conflict. I still spend a lot of time personally doing the interviews. It may not work forever. And spend time to create a good culture. Some people may not appreciate things like a cool couch or a foosball table or having coffee on in the kitchen. But people enjoy it and it?s [about] having respect for your team members.
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Product: listen to your customers. Don?t go in and build every single feature you can dream up. Build something small whether it?s a software product or a toy. Get something very early into the hands of your customers and get them to use it and break it and then make it better.
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Process: We?re up to 250,000 contacts in our system who are interested and have worked with us. The only way we can manage them is through a very smart system. Map it out. Too many small businesses scramble and don?t take the time to create a visual flow chart. With Google Draw you can literally drag and drop the flow chart and share it with people and move things around.
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We have an amazing CRM system, SalesForce.com, which is the backbone of the business, everything from managing sales leads up front; new people who are entering into a relationship with us right through to sending out quotes and closing the sale. As well as everything on the back end of customer service and support through a variety of channels, whether it?s email, live chat, the phone, or web form, all those are queued up and answered in salesforces.com cases.
What are your business goals for 2013?
We have thematic goals: to become a global company. Do better serving our clients abroad who speak languages other than English. We?re working on the translation project to expand our footprint worldwide.
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Next is mobile: the goal is to have Voices.com be available on any mobile device anywhere in the world and have that same functionality. Parts of the website still use Flash but it?s completely invisible on the iPhone and the iPad. As an entrepreneur I see that as a problem that needs a solution.
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In terms of social media engagement, we have 150,000 fans on Facebook right now [and] we want to have a million fans in 2013. It isn?t an ego thing it?s about influence in the industry.
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Amber Nasrulla is an ex-pat Canadian writer based in L.A. who specializes in profiles from business leaders and scientists to Hollywood celebrities. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including the L.A. Times, The Globe and Mail, Los Angeles Magazine, ELLE Canada, Chatelaine and Reader?s Digest Canada.
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