Voiceovers – Why have I not struggled to develop a global presence and yet locally it has been a battle?

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.