What Directing Don LaFontaine Taught Me About Voice-Over Success

During a recent conversation with one of my business and marketing coaching clients, I remembered a story I had not thought about in quite a while. We were talking about the difference between chasing any available work and deliberately building a business around the work you want to do. That conversation brought me back to an experience I didn’t fully appreciate until much later in my life.

At the time, I was working for a radio station in Southern California. My primary title was imaging director, but like many people in radio, I wore several hats. I was also a morning-show host, creative director, producer, and whatever else the station needed me to be on a particular day. It was a demanding environment, but it gave me the opportunity to work with some remarkably talented people and see how creative businesses operated at very different levels.

During that time, I had the opportunity to direct Don LaFontaine in several voice-over sessions. Yes, that Don LaFontaine—the voice behind thousands of movie trailers and one of the most recognizable voices in the history of the industry.

If you don’t recognize the name Don LaFontaine, you would almost certainly recognize his voice. He was the deep, commanding movie-trailer narrator most closely associated with the phrase “In a world…” Over his remarkable career, he voiced nearly 5,000 movie trailers and hundreds of thousands of commercials and promotional spots. Known as “The Voice of God” and “The King of Movie Trailers,” his delivery helped establish the sound generations of audiences came to associate with Hollywood movie previews.

At the time, I knew he was important. I knew he was extraordinarily good. What I didn’t yet understand was how much I could learn from the way he had built his business.

Directing someone who needed almost no direction

Don was exactly what you would expect from someone at that level. He was consistently excellent, easy to work with, and genuinely nice. He understood the copy immediately, delivered what was needed, and required very little direction. Occasionally, I might ask him to give me one more read in a slightly different way, but there was no struggle to pull a performance out of him.

That part of the story is impressive, but it is not the most important part.

What stayed with me was that Don knew exactly how he wanted to work. The scripts had to be prepared a particular way: Word documents, 14-point type, double-spaced. The amount of copy was clearly defined. The scheduling happened within his availability. His agent handled the financial negotiation.

I remember the engagement involving a substantial professional fee—roughly five figures, as I remember it—for a tightly limited amount of copy. I won’t pretend that I remember the exact amount, cadence, or terms after all these years. The precise number isn’t the lesson anyway. The lesson is that the client was not inventing Don’s working arrangement for him. Don had already established the arrangement, and the client was choosing to enter it.

He had reached a point where he could say, in effect, “This is the service I provide. This is what it includes. This is how the material needs to be delivered. This is when I work. This is what it costs.”

That is a very different business from simply waiting for someone to offer you a job.

Hustle can help you—but it cannot be the entire plan

Many voice-over artists begin by competing on online platforms, submitting auditions, and taking whatever opportunities they can find. Some people are doing 20 or 30 auditions a day while also working another job. That takes discipline, and I am not criticizing it. Hustle can create experience, relationships, momentum, and income. If you stick with it long enough and continue improving, it can absolutely pay off.

But hustle is not the destination. It is one possible stage of the journey.

When you are beginning, you are often pursuing the work that is available. As your business matures, you begin attracting work that is suitable for you. You become more selective about the people you serve, the problems you solve, the projects you accept, and the conditions under which you do your best work.

That doesn’t mean an accomplished voice-over artist never auditions or never compromises. It means the artist is no longer building an entire business around someone else’s definition of the opportunity. The artist has developed a clear identity, a clear offer, and a clear way of working.

This is an important marketing distinction. Early in a business, the message is often, “I can do this too. Please consider me.” A mature business communicates something more specific: “This is the result I create, this is who I create it for, and this is how you can buy it.” The second message gives a prospective client something concrete to understand, remember, and recommend.

That was what I saw in Don LaFontaine.

Define the business before you arrive there

I know what some of you may be thinking: “Lenny, I can’t choose my ideal clients. I don’t have enough clients yet.”

I understand. You may not be able to choose every client today, but you can decide what your ideal client looks like. You can define the kinds of projects you want to become known for. You can determine what you want your business to look like when you are no longer saying yes to everything.

Do you want to record commercials, narration, audiobooks, explainers, promos, character work, or something else? Do you want short, fast-turnaround projects or long-form work? What style of performance fits you best? What kind of client values that performance? How will clients deliver their scripts? How many revisions will you include? What turnaround can you reliably promise? What will you charge, and what conditions will allow you to do excellent work without resenting the job?

These are not questions that only successful people are allowed to answer. They are questions that help you become successful.

If you never define the business you are trying to build, every opportunity looks equally important. Every request becomes something you have to consider. Every client gets to design a different version of your service. You may stay busy, but busy is not the same as moving in a direction.

The moment you define your destination, you gain a way to evaluate the road in front of you.

Your future standards can guide today’s decisions

Maybe your ideal business still feels far away. That is fine. The goal is not to pretend you already have Don LaFontaine’s career, reputation, demand, or negotiating power. The goal is to begin thinking like the owner of the business you want to create.

Write down who your ideal clients are. Describe the work you want them to hire you for. Define the experience you want them to have, from the first inquiry through final delivery. Decide what you will include, what you will charge, where your boundaries are, and how you want your working week to feel.

What I am asking you to create is really a beginner business plan. It does not need to be a complicated document full of projections, charts, and language you would never normally use. It needs to answer the basic questions that make a business a business: Who do you serve? What do you sell? What problem does it solve? How do clients work with you? What does it cost? What will you do—and what will you not do?

If you cannot answer those questions yet, you may have talent, equipment, auditions, and occasional income, but you do not really have a defined business. You have activity. There is nothing wrong with beginning there, but you have to recognize the difference. If you continue treating voice-over as a side hustle that happens to make money, it will probably continue behaving like a side hustle. To create a business, you have to start seeing it, planning it, and operating it as a business.

You may not be able to enforce every standard immediately. Some of those standards will develop as your skills, reputation, and client base grow. Still, defining them now gives you something powerful: a filter. You can recognize the opportunities that move you closer to your future business and the ones that keep you running in circles.

There is also a practical benefit. When you can clearly explain what you do, who it is for, and how it works, you make it easier for the right client to hire you. Clarity is useful to you, but it is also useful to the buyer. A well-defined service feels more credible than a vague promise to do almost anything.

That is part of what makes a service feel premium. It is not simply attaching a larger price to the same vague offer. A premium service reduces uncertainty. The client understands the outcome, the process, the boundaries, and what is expected from both sides. Those standards can sound restrictive when you are afraid of losing work, but to the right client they communicate experience and make the engagement easier to buy.

You may know me primarily as an audio engineer, because I work with many voice-over artists and creators to improve the technical quality of their recordings. But audio quality is often only the first step. I also help people with the business and marketing side of their work: defining what they offer, identifying the people they are best equipped to serve, and learning how to cultivate, retain, and grow an audience of ideal customers. A great recording gives you a professional product; a clear business helps the right people understand why they should buy it.

The real lesson

When I look back on those sessions, of course I remember the voice. How could I not? Don LaFontaine had an extraordinary instrument, incredible command of his craft, and the ability to deliver again and again.

But the business lesson is what became more valuable to me over time. His talent was supported by structure. He knew his value, he knew his process, and he had defined the conditions under which clients could access his work. The agent, the price, the page limits, the formatting requirements, and the schedule were not incidental details. Together, they formed a business.

You may be in the hustle stage right now. Keep learning. Keep auditioning. Keep developing your performance and improving the quality of your audio. Just don’t become so focused on winning the next opportunity that you never define the larger thing you are trying to build.

You cannot reach your destination until you know what that destination is. So describe it. Visualize it. Write it down in enough detail that you can begin making decisions from it today.

You may not be working like Don LaFontaine yet, but you can start defining what “this is how I work” will eventually mean for you.