I joined LinkedIn in 2015 the way most people join LinkedIn: because someone told me I should. I didn't take it seriously until 2016, when I landed a job as a commercial manager at a company dealing in cosmetic raw materials, packaging, and machinery. Not exactly the stuff of dramatic career origin stories. But it's where I actually started using the platform like it meant something.
By then I already had a few years of real voiceover work behind me, and I mean real work, not just enthusiasm. A handful of commercials that aired on GEM TV. Some OHSEC training courses. A few gigs picked up on Freelancer.com. It sat in the back of my head alongside music as the thing I actually wanted to be doing, the dream running quietly underneath the day job (one I've written about before).
Over the next few years, LinkedIn messages started trickling in. People looking for voiceover work, the occasional agency. We'd exchange a few lines, I'd send samples, and then, more often than not, silence. Nobody was rude, exactly. But nobody was particularly professional either. No real etiquette. No follow-through. Just "hey, we need a voice, can you do it," and then nothing. If you've ever tried to build something on hope and radio silence, you know exactly how that wears you down.
So I got cold feet. Not the dramatic kind, just the slow, quiet kind that asks the same question on a loop: maybe there's no real market here. Maybe I'm not actually good enough. Maybe this was never going to be more than a nice idea.
Then came 2018. Ten days after my birthday, a message landed in my inbox from a man named Mony Raanan.
He introduced himself properly. Told me about his company, Voice Crafters. Invited me to join his roster. It sounds like a small thing to write down now, but at the time it was the first message in years that actually read like it came from someone who respected the work.
What I didn't fully appreciate then was exactly who I was talking to. Mony's been in audio for over 25 years, twelve of them as a working musician and sound designer in Los Angeles before he ever founded Voice Crafters back in 2009. He built the kind of company that's now one of the more recognized names in the voiceover world, and one that's been genuinely vocal about protecting fair compensation for voice actors, especially now, with AI reshaping the industry in ways a lot of companies would rather quietly ignore. To this day, he still replies to emails within minutes. I don't know how he manages that. I've never managed that.
Projects started coming in, voiceover work, translation work, and every step of it stayed exactly as warm and professional as that first message. It reminded me, all at once, why I'd wanted this in the first place. The passion I thought I'd maybe imagined came right back, because it turned out I hadn't been wrong about the work. I'd just been meeting the wrong version of the industry.
Not long after, other names started finding me the same way, Voquent, GoLocalise, Agnew Multilingual, just to name a few. And I started doing the reaching myself too, emailing studios and agencies directly instead of just waiting to be found.
I still believe passion matters. I still believe the work matters. But I've learned that neither one is quite enough on its own. Sometimes you need to meet the right person at the right moment, someone who treats the thing you love the way it actually deserves to be treated, before you can fully believe in it again yourself.