Sharing Pays

If I'm ever gonna get more freelance work, I really have to overcome my repulsion of talking about money.

I don't have a problem taking care of my money, but I have a problem talking about it. I feel slightly vulgar in speaking about it, because I feel that people will think I'm money-hungry (?) when I pride myself as someone who doesn't judge people on how much money they have.

Whenever I'm confronted with a situation where people ask me to quote how much money I charge, I cringe and give a mumbling response like, "it depends on your budget," or "well what do you think is fair?"

Last Saturday night, I took Thomas to one of my sideline jobs: doing voice-overs for audio-visual presentations, video games, and cartoons. Thomas was so impressed by my work and said that I'm worth much more than the P 700 pesos they paid me for an hour's worth of work, since the script consisted of five pages of dialogue, and pointed out that the boss was willing to give me P 1000. He said that he knew a guy in Germany, who was an actor in the German translation of Finding Nemo. He never charged less than 150 euros for an hour's work. He warned me that I might end up as the smartest guy in a team being milked by a slightly less-smart but more business-savvy boss for all I'm worth.

He's not the only one who has told me that I keep on undercharging my services. Maybe this boils down to not knowing how much I'm worth, how much I should demand for my services.

I try to be assertive in knowing the freelance rate for my writing or voice-over work but it seems that people never want to share their rates, especially for a noob like me. For this particular episode, I asked one of my voice-over friends (she is a regular voice actress in ABS-CBN) how much I should charge for this particular job. She replied by asking how much dialogue was involved, and who was in-charge of the studio I was dubbing for this time. I gave her my answer, and she never answered back! That just struck me as weird, because we were not in competition! Duh, they hired me already, no use in trying to find this person and usurp the job from me!

I understand that there are some career secrets that deserve secrecy, but this, in my eyes, is definitely not one of those times.

In my experience, it always pays to share what you have and what you know.The mark of true talent is when a person is able to be generous enough to share what they have, because they know there is more where it came from! Selfish people are merely digging a hole for themselves because people will eventually learn that you have no talent and people never want to work with you.

For example, My friend Leslie is now working on a job I passed on because I felt that the job reinforced Filipino colonial mentality (yes, yes, how Über-righteous of me), but since Leslie had no problem with it, she took the job, and is now very happy with her work. How did it pay for me? Well, let's just say that I get invited to very fun parties because of her! (Remember Joey? ;D)

As for Ms. Dubber, I guess its fair to say that I'll won't work with her ever, and will never recommend her to other people from now on, unless circumstance throws us seperately in the same voice job. Lesson for her: Never cut off an opportunity! Lesson for me: I need to learn the monetary value of what I do.



NikkiAlfar
Tobie Abad
Gabby Lee
Andre Mischa Cleofe