What’s Up With That Multi-Tool?

I want to share the story of how my logo was created.   It starts with two words.  Personal Branding.  It wasn’t something initially thought about when starting my voiceover business.  That is the absolute truth.  If you work for yourself, you slowly realize that the actual talent or skill that you have that makes you money becomes a smaller and smaller part of all the things that you have to do to succeed.  Saying that makes me stare down at the stack of documents I have to enter into Quickbooks later today.  Yay!  Personal branding was never a priority.  I thought… why?  As long as I focus on learning everything I could about killing it in the booth, I’ll be good right?  Uh, no.   It’s something I struggle with to this day.  Selling yourself is an incredibly difficult thing to do.  But in this very competitive field, it has to be done.

When I finally realized that this would help me, I tried to tackle it myself.  I was looking for a symbol that wasn’t a microphone, audio waveform, headphones or any of the other completely overused images that voice actors use all over the world.   I wanted something different.  Standing out was important.  This “symbol” needed to represent my “tagline”, without having an actual tagline.  I wanted it to scream rugged, reliable, versatile, classic, and I thought… I got it!  A pair of jeans!  And… EW.

After a Google search and downloading some dumb free logo design programs, I realized I was on the right track, but something didn’t seem quite right.

I then thought to ask Zach Ditmars for some help. Zach designed my first logo and is an incredibly talented designer, musician, and fisherman (definitely my kind of dude)!  Within a couple of days, he came up with the multi-tool.

It was a “HELL YEAH” moment for sure.  It checked all the boxes for me.  It was unique, which is the one thing I wanted the most, but it also represented everything that I would like my business to be.  Rugged.  Reliable.  Versatile.  Durable.  I like to think of my services as a tool that’s easily accessible in your glove box, or a random drawer that’s always close by, and gets the job done when you need it most.

The collaboration with Zach taught me a pretty important lesson. Even though I’m in business for myself, I can’t do everything by myself. Since then I’ve learned to lean on other crazy talented self providers a lot more.  It’s truly worth the investment to get another pair of experienced hands to help push you down the road to winning.