Business Superpowers with Lau Lapides

The hardest boss you’ll ever work for is yourself. In this episode, Anne & Lau jump into Business Superpowers by recounting Lau’s many interesting jobs and career shifts. She has been an actor, a voice talent, a manager, a professor, but most importantly, she is fierce in the face of fear. If you feel nervous, excited, or scared about a new opportunity, run towards it. What’s the worst that could happen? Failures and mistakes teach you more than success ever will, and with every overnight success comes years of unnoticed hard work. If that’s not enough motivation for you, tune in for the full career deep dive with your favorite self-employed Bosses!

Transcript

>> It’s time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere Business Owner Strategies and Successes being utilized by the industry’s top talent today. Rock your business like a BOSS, a VO BOSS! Now let’s welcome your host, Anne Ganguzza.

Anne: Hey everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS podcast. I'm your host Anne Ganguzza, and today I am excited to start another brand new series, Business Superpowers with special guest Lau Lapides. Lau is founder and president of Lau Lapides Company, a boutique coaching, training, and production company for voice talent and actors headquartered in Boston with satellites in New York City, Miami, and LA. Her programs include hybrid online and in-person workshops, seminars, and one-on-one personalized coaching as well as showcases in New York City, LA, and online. Lau's media and broadcasting career coaches all currently work in television, film, radio, and theater, and their voices can be heard around the world. Lau, it is so much fun to have you here today. Thank you so much for joining me.

Lau: I'm so excited to be here. Like I can't believe it. We finally met each other, got together, east meets west.

Anne: Here we go.

Lau: Here we go. .

Anne: I'm just so excited that you agreed to do this. And I'm so excited about our series, the Business Superpowers, because we've got a lot to talk about. So let's start with you so that our BOSSes can get to know you a little bit better. Let's talk a little bit about your history, how you got started, and how you became such a BOSS in this industry.

Lau: Wow. Thank you for that introduction. I appreciate it. I always feel like BOSS term in regards to me and personally has been like the overnight success. You know, when someone comes to you, Anne, and says, I wanna have it overnight, I wanna get that dream. Let's go. And I say, yeah, you can be an overnight success. Absolutely. A 40-year overnight success.

Anne: Yeah, I always say my overnight success happened 12 years later. Sorry. Or at least you've gotta start with that.

Lau: That's right.

Anne: It's true.

Lau: I always feel that way that it, it really has been such a lifelong process, such an amazing journey. The path splits off in so many directions. It's hard to even think about what the origins really were, but I'll tell you I was a dancer. Believe it or not. I was a dancer.

Anne: And I was an engineer, so, wow. That's pretty cool. There you go.

Lau: There you go. Same thing in a lot of ways, right? Walking, choreography.

Anne: Right. But you don't always think, well, you'd end up with your own company in voice acting and, and acting, so.

Lau: No, no. If someone were to tell me that I would do this 30, 40 years later, I would've laughed. I would've fell off my chair. I would not have believed it. So I started off as a dancer who really didn't speak at all. And then I went into an acting career. I had a whole acting career for a good 20 years, went through top level graduate program at UC Irvine in California. And that really changed my life, your neck of the woods.

Anne: East and west. Here we go. So .

Lau: East and west, east and west. And so after having this extensive theater background, I did a lot of repertory, a lot of regional, a lot of stock, became Equity, became an Equity actor, yada yada, so on and so forth. I ended up at grad school in California. That was really a turn for me. I started getting into a lot of media driven entertainment, started doing more TV/film, started my voiceover as a voiceover talent as a performer, really mid to late 20s. It was kind of later for me and then just kind of launched in that direction. And once I got my master's degree, I became a professor. I became a college and university professor and one of my specialties was to create curriculum . So I made my way back to New York. I lived in New York and I started creating curriculum all while I was acting and directing, 'cause I had also become a director and producer.

Anne: I was gonna say, acting curriculum?

Lau: Acting curriculum but it was interesting, Anne. The twist is, and this is where the whole BOSS in business situation starts to