When I started my voice acting career, I thought I knew exactly what agents were about and what role they’d play in my career. Boy, was I wrong.
The dream we’re still selling is thirty years out of date
One of the things we’re constantly fighting against at LVA is a view of this industry that’s thirty or forty years old — the one where somebody spends their entire savings to move to Hollywood and waits to get discovered by an agent who’s going to make their career.
It’s unfortunate that this is still the dream we sell to voice acting students, when it actually makes up such a small percentage of the industry. Voice acting in 2026 does not look like voice acting in 1995, or even 2000. Too much has changed. And when we sell people the idea that they can build a career the same way, we do the whole industry a huge disservice.
One of the biggest places I see that disservice show up is in how people think about voice acting agents. When I was starting out, I had the same misconceptions — about what agents do, how they fit into your career, honestly about all of it. So let me reframe a few things for you, using both broader industry data and tens of thousands of data points from my own career.
Reframe #1: “An Agent is going to make me rich”
First, a warning: be careful when you go looking for this information, because it’s easy to get lost in the exceptions. Are there agents out there who’ll suddenly land you a job that sets you up for life? Sure. Does it happen often? Almost never.
In a survey from the National Association of Voice Actors, and a separate one from Voices.com — admittedly two pretty different subsets of the voice acting population — the data showed that 70% of working voice actors said less than 20% of their total income comes from their agents.
Let me say that again, because it’s such a staggering statistic. 70% of voice actors say less than 20% of their income comes from their agents. Out of close to 3,000 people surveyed between those two studies, fewer than 30% are dependent on their agent for their income.
Which means 80% of the work is still yours. You need to be finding your own jobs — direct marketing, casting websites, making yourself available to the huge variety of work that’s out there. Not just the 0.01% that are the most visible games, animation, and anime coming out of the big cities and the big agents. This industry is enormous.
Now, is that agent-driven 20% potentially more efficient from a return-on-investment standpoint? Absolutely. I can’t say I’ve ever booked a six-figure job from someone who wasn’t my agent. And while I’ve booked plenty of high-profile AAA games and anime outside of my agents, most of them came through my agents too. There’s a subset of work in this business that’s higher quality on the whole, and it tends to come from your agents.
But again: 70% of voice actors say less than 20% of their income comes from their agents. You have to liberate yourself from the idea that a single person or entity is going to shepherd you through your career. You are in control of your career.
Reframe #2: No one cares about your career as much as you do
I love my agents to death. Not just as people — as business people. They’ve handed me great opportunities, and the relationship I’ve built with my current agent over the last eight years is one of my favorites in the business.
But I’m one person on a roster of hundreds. It is not proportionally possible for them to care about my career as much as I do. That would be insane — they have to spread their time and attention across an entire roster of people.
Another voice actor and I were laughing about this over drinks once. He’d made a coffee mug for his agent that said nothing except: “What did I do for Billy Smith today?” A fun, tongue-in-cheek way to remember that you’re not their only talent.
There’s an old adage in this business: your agent only gets 10% commission on the jobs they book you — which means you’re responsible for the other 90%. Sitting around waiting for opportunities to come to you is a great way to die in this career.
Quick aside: if you want more straight talk about the business side of this career — the part that’s actually 90% of the job — get it in your inbox.
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Reframe #3: The right agent beats the powerful agent
This one’s really important — and also really hard to pin down.
The most important thing about a voice acting agent has nothing to do with how powerful they are, how long they’ve been in the business, or how many auditions they can send you. What matters is how much they view you as part of their team — and how much you view them as part of yours.
I would much rather have an agent who’s small but is my champion in the coliseum that is this industry than a high-powered agent who barely knows what I look like.
Just because you send your auditions to your agent doesn’t mean your agent is sending them on to the client. This ties right into reframe #2 — they have more talent than they have time. So when a casting director says “send me your best five people,” if you’re not at the top of their mind, you’re not reaching the end client anyway.
I’ve been in agencies where I felt lost in a sea of talent, where I just couldn’t make the relationship into what I wanted it to be. And every single time, I made the call to leave — until I found an agency where I really felt at home. Where I knew that agent was out there pitching me and fighting on my behalf.
I don’t want an agent. I want a champion. And that comes from years of building my career, building my reputation, figuring out what I actually want, and finding an agent who wants the same thing.
You‘re the one in control
So I hope I’ve taken a moment to reframe what an agent’s purpose really is in your career. Agents are incredible, and this business couldn’t run without them. They’ve remained — and will remain
— a hallmark of this industry for decades to come. Their role has shifted over the last thirty years and will keep shifting. But so has the role of the actor.
Most of all, I hope you walk away from this feeling empowered. You are in control of your career. You don’t have to hand the throne of your life to somebody who might barely remember your name. And even while you’re still hunting for the right champion, there are a lot of ways to keep moving this career forward on your own.
If you want to learn how to actually do that 90% — the direct marketing, the relationship-building, the real business of running a voice acting career — I run a free masterclass that lays out the whole picture. No experience required, and it’s completely free. Â
