The history of VOHeroes.com

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VOHeroes wasn’t always called VOHeroes. After 10 years under one name, it was time for a change.

How it started

When I first started teaching voice over, I did so because someone asked who did my demo.

I said, “I did. Doesn’t everybody produce their own demo?”

I didn’t know what the marketplace was calling for, but clearly, when my first few weeks of classes (which were classes on how to voice commercials – that was it!) sold out, I figured maybe there was a demand for it.

So I added two more classes, on documentary narration and on IVR. Those sold out as well.

What was up with that name?

When that same actor asked about my demos, he also asked if I could produce one for him. I did, and I started doing that for other actors. And I called my company Demos2Go.

Then, when I started teaching classes, I renamed my small little enterprise to cover both demo production and the classes…as VO2GoGo. (VO2Go wasn’t available, and the go-go thing was for speed and agility.)

Over the next decade, we went from 3 classes to 36. When my schedule wouldn’t handle teaching weekly, we went to monthly classes at various locations around Los Angeles.

And we added coaches to the team as well.

Then, we flipped the classroom.

The move to online classes

Again, my acting and performance schedule was getting hectic, and I wasn’t able to set aside time each week to teach the classes live.

And it was around this time that I found out about the “flipped classroom.”

When we were kids, we studied in class, we went home to do homework, we turned it in and we were graded on it. That, along with our test scores, determined our grades.

Flipping the classroom does just what it sounds like. Instead of the teacher teaching the class by simply speaking the words, in the classroom, the students watch richly produced video classes, that the teachers can update when they need to.

Then, the time in the classroom is used to dive deeper into the course content, discuss issues, explore the subject matter, ask questions and get answers, and give the students an opportunity to feed back the information they’ve been learning in the video classes to the teachers and their fellow students.

Flipping my classes meant I could free up my schedule (and my coaches’ schedules, who were also teaching the classes live, from my notes), produce nicely formatted and visually/aurally appealing videos, and use the precious time we had together to explore, work out on mic and do all the things that helped deepen the engagement in voice over.

Yeah, but the name.

So at some point, I just got tired of explaining to people how to spell “VO2GoGo”, that it was 2 “go”s and that there was a number in there…sigh.

I also wanted a much easier to say, and much more descriptive name that simply and clearly illustrated what my mission was: turning MY clients into go-to talent for THEIR clients.

And one day, it struck me…I help build voice over heroes.

I went through some branding exercises, and I came out at the other side with VOHeroes.com.

And that’s where we are today: me, and my team of coaches, helping you become heroes to your VO clients.

Hope that helps.