Building a 36-Course Voiceover Curriculum with David H. Lawrence XVII

David H. Lawrence XVII's voiceover teaching career began almost by accident. At an acting class in Los Angeles, he ducked into a corner during a break to record an audition on his new iPhone and send it to his agent. Another actor asked what he was doing, and that conversation snowballed into his first live classes. Over time, those classes moved online — well before the pandemic — because voiceover work has been remote for decades. "One of the dirty little secrets of voiceover is that during the pandemic, it was among our more successful years," he says, "because we were already well suited and well equipped to do this kind of work." Today, VO Heroes is a 36-course curriculum covering everything from equipment setup to performance categories to building a voiceover business and cultivating the right mindset. He also created a free course during the early pandemic months called "Teach Your Stuff Online" for the 1,300 teachers who suddenly had to figure out remote instruction with no training.

A large segment of David's students come from radio, where they were rewarded for years — sometimes decades — for being an announcer with a big voice. "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail," he says. The hardest part of teaching voiceover is not adding new skills but giving people permission to stop performing and start being themselves. He describes a recent workout with a brand-new student who came straight from the radio studio. David helped the student reset who they were speaking to — an audience of one rather than thousands — and adjust the imagined distance to that person. Then he turned the copy on its head: "What if you were complaining about this, instead of promoting this?" The choices multiplied immediately. "Just seeing the choices begin to multiply for my students is so lovely," he says. The technical skill in voiceover, it turns out, is largely about getting out of your own way.

David uses the performing arts term "workouts" for his monthly coaching sessions — a deliberate choice of professional language. Once a month, students choose from a team of eight coaches, each with their own specialty. They join via Zoom with cameras off (to preserve audio bandwidth), bring three pieces of copy, and receive live coaching on performance and direction. Alongside the workouts, there is an accountability session David runs for all students on business and mindset. In the self-paced coursework, he uses LearnDash with gamification to keep students progressing through a specific sequence — equipment first, then performance, then business. He uses open loops from one course to the next and leapfrogging techniques to maintain engagement. He also gives every new student the same microphone he uses himself: the Audio-Technica AT2020USB+, about $150 on Amazon. He calls himself "the frugal voiceover talent" and is on a mission to keep students from throwing money at problems they do not need to solve.

The conversation closes with David's core mission: helping creative professionals embrace marketing. Many actors, he observes, tell themselves a story that if they embrace a productive relationship with money, they are selling out. David pushes back hard: "You're the original entrepreneurs. Performers have been running around the countryside with little suitcases filled with costumes, putting on plays for the villages for millennia." He dedicates podcast episodes to the topic and tries to reframe marketing as a joy rather than a necessary evil. In the debrief, Abe highlights the theme of authenticity — both in the coaching (helping people sound like themselves rather than an announcer) and in the business (treating marketing as an authentic expression of your work). Danny adds the importance of being overt about priorities: David structures his entire business so that it can pause if he gets booked for an acting role, and both he and his students share that understanding without drama.