Why Good Advice is Invaluable to Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs face any number of ups and downs as they try to put the building blocks of their business together the right way. Sometimes, you may be brimming with excitement about what you’ve accomplished and what the future holds. Other times, you may feel lost and questioning your tactics. There is no exact science to entrepreneurship and we all know that nobody can sell you a formula for guaranteed success.

If there is one thing you can rely on, it’s advice from those who are more experienced than you. What experience offers is influence on how those building blocks should be organized, stacked and sometimes even rearranged. It’s up to you to put the advice into practice. For us, those sage words came from organizations like the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC), the Canadian Entrepreneurs of New England (CENE), and many others.

What follows is how my company, Voices.com, took that advice and became the leader of the voice over industry.

Our Journey

My wife and co-founder, Stephanie, and I met while I operated a small recording studio in London, Ontario, Canada. As a classically trained singer, she was looking for work and stumbled on a feature in the newspaper about me. At the same time, local businesses found out about the studio and contacted me for help with commercials to promote their services. We quickly realized the opportunity at hand, built a website, and began fielding calls from clients and voice actors who needed each other for projects and work.

We established Voices.com a decade ago with just a handful of clients and voice actors to keep track of on a whiteboard. We now have over 500,000 registered users, serve clients in 160 countries, offer more than 100 languages, and have completed more than 250,000 transactions on the platform to date.

How Advice Shaped Our Company

Our success has long been the result of a disruptive idea, a talented team, laserlike focus on our objectives, and a wealth of good advice from the people we’ve surrounded ourselves with.

We partnered with the BDC early on in our history and have reaped the benefits of our continued relationship. The past two years have been particularly fruitful. Through the BDC, we’ve sharpened our business plan, developed a funding strategy, and gained the confidence that we had much of what was required to take our company to the next level.

In July 2017, we received a USD $18 million investment from Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital. Since then, we’ve acquired an industry competitor, built out our technology infrastructure, expanded our sales, marketing, and product teams, all while establishing ourselves as a leader in the century-old sound recording industry.

We also received an invitation to participate in a mentorship program through CENE. With ties to MIT and the regional tech community, I knew it was an opportunity we couldn’t pass up. I was eager to have outsiders look at how we can best capitalize on the $4.4-billion voice industry.

Participating in the CENE-BDC partnership lead to a game-changing strategic opportunity. Takeaways from the mentoring session were incredibly helpful and we’ve benefitted immensely from the new connections.

The CENE mentor team suggested we leverage the massive amounts of internal data we collect about job postings and the hiring process to inform future product decisions. In essence, we should be building a platform that becomes smarter over time as we are able to learn from our customers. This means learning from what is being said verbally about the platform, but also how clients use the site to complete projects as varied as narrating a YouTube video or voicing a skill for the latest smart speakers like Amazon Echo or Google Home.

CENE mentors encouraged me to focus on an untapped opportunity and ultimately we were accepted to the prestigious and highly selective Analytics Lab (A-Lab) at MIT. We’re now learning from the world’s brightest and best.

Adjacent Possibilities are Everywhere

Ultimately, it’s opportunities like these that help shape and guide your business. It’s being able to take a step back and view your work from a different perspective. An alternate viewpoint may reveal that you’ve been focused on stacking your building blocks one way, but doing so in another manner would be more effective, sturdy, and could lead to more success.

You never know where business endeavours may take you. As I’ve already said, entrepreneurs face plenty of ups and downs while we try to figure out how to navigate our respective industries. However, when you surround yourself with smart and experienced people, good things are bound to happen.