Show notes
Join BOSS Anne Ganguzza, alongside guest co-host, Lau Lapides, as they explore the landscape of female entrepreneurship, including in the voiceover industry. Listen in as they discuss the historical and contemporary hurdles women have faced, from the 1950s through modern times. Lau shares her experiences in juggling motherhood and a professional career, providing a real-life perspective on the intricate dance of working from home with children. Anne discusses her non-traditional path to business success in the tech and VO industries. This conversation celebrates the resilience and creativity of women who are redefining success in their entrepreneurial journeys. 00:01 - Intro (Announcement) It's time to take your business to the next level, the boss level. These are the premier business owner strategies and successes being utilized by the industry's top talent today. Rock your business like a boss, a V-O boss. Now let's welcome your host, Anne Ganguzza. 00:20 - Anne (Host) Hey everyone, welcome to the V-O Boss podcast and the Boss Superpower series. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzza, and I'm here with my special, awfully lovely boss guest, co-host Law Lapides. 00:32 - Lau (Co-host) Oh, thank you, Annie, hey Lau. Thank you, hey. I'm excited about our topic today. 00:38 - Anne (Host) Well, yeah, so Law, I've been watching Lessons in Chemistry and that is on Apple Plus for those of you who have not seen it. But basically it takes place in the 1950s and the main character who is Elizabeth Zott? She has a dream of being a scientist and works in a lab, but she is constantly challenged by a society that says women belong in the domestic sphere. And I just watched the episode and I don't want to give away too many spoilers, but I'm going to give away one spoiler here. So, guys, if you want to watch it and you don't want to have a spoiler, just turn this down right now for sure. 01:14 So basically, she gets fired because she's pregnant. So now that I'm going to date myself. But I said to my husband, jerry, that doesn't make sense, they can't fire her for being pregnant. And he goes oh my gosh, back in that day they absolutely could. And I was like whoa, that just blew my mind and I thought, gosh, I think women have it hard now these days. And that's what I want to talk to you about Law, because I just want to talk about what it's like to be a female entrepreneur. And I want to talk to you because you're one of the best entrepreneurs I know. I mean, you run a studio, you're a talent agent, I'm a demo producer things that aren't typically prevalent, I guess, even now in today's day, for women to do so I thought we should talk about that today. 01:58 - Lau (Co-host) I love the leading lady subject. I just think it's one of my favorites Absolutely. And you're right about that Jerry's right about that Because I remember my mom talking a lot about that that even into the 80s, 90s and 2000s in corporate America there was something called the mommy track. So anyone who was training for financial advisor, accountant and such was very careful about what they said about getting married or having children, because they didn't want to be rerouted into the mommy track, meaning they're capped in every way. 02:33 - Anne (Host) They're capped on promotion, they're capped on salary, they're capped on all of this, they won't get their job when they come back. And it's funny because, now that you mentioned that, I do remember that in the 2000s and it's incredible to me. So here we are entrepreneurs, bosses, out there, you're entrepreneurs as well, and I don't think that this needs to be. This is certainly not a discussion where we're just going to be bitter and complaining. 02:55 However, I think we need to talk about some of the hardships of being an entrepreneur. First of all, being an entrepreneur is a hard thing. What sort of hardships have you encountered yourself, Law, and how have you overcome them? Because I think that we can learn a lot from that, from your story. 03:12 - Lau (Co-host) Such a great question, that's such a huge, open-ended question and the first vision Annie that came to my mind was a client that I work with, a coach on Zoom, and she's a mom and she has a couple younger ones, meaning under the age of like 12, a couple young kids, and when I'm coaching her as a voice over talent, the kids are running in and out of her studio, in and out of her booth, in and out of her curtain and one side of it she's a great mom, like she's really patient, she never yells, she's just great. But one side of me I have to be honest with you. I'm going to be honest with your people because they deserve it. One side of me thinks it's awesome because she can work from home, she can multitask, she can save money, she can still be a mom and be a good role model to them so they can see her working and being impassioned. The other side of me is irked, irked to death, because I'm thinking to myself you're not going to do that with a client, right? You're not going to do that if I represent you and send you out, and then your little kid is pulling down the curtain in the booth right, and I lose trust in that situation. I'm going to be honest. Maybe it's a non-PC thing to say, but that's how people think when it comes to running something. So is a fine line, I think, and I was one of those. 04:35 I raised two children. I was one of those moms where I raised them out of my studio. I actually homeschooled them as crazy as that sound. We had a whole village of people working with them and it was out of my studio and I was constantly multitasking the noise level. I'm killing each other, legos everywhere, them under the desk, and there was a beauty to the whole thing that there was this bonding that you could go through with them. And then there was a horror show as well, because it was embarrassing and there were clients there and some clients love the kids and others hate kids. 05:10 So it's like there are all these levels and layers to that kind of parental mindset, at least from my perspective, that you have to go through step by step, year by year, age by age, and it changes, and it changes often dramatically. It never stays the same Absolutely. And women, no matter how progressive the male is, whether they're a husband, a partner, a friend, whoever maybe they're working from home, maybe they're whatever I find more often than not with all my friends, all my female colleagues, it falls on them, the heavy falls on them. There is still this mindset in 2024, that I got to go to work, I got things to do, I got priority tasks, but because you're a female, you're so good, you can handle it all, you can do it. You take the reins while you're trying to run your business. 06:05 - Anne (Host) Sure, that's the thing, and I think that also there are many, I would say, women pioneers of many different things, and I am of the belief that, yes, women sometimes have to work three or four times harder in order to get any type of credit, and a lot of times there are women who pioneer things who never get credit and ultimately that is very frustrating and I find it even today, as progressive as we've become, I mean, there's still a long way to go, I think. 06:34 For number one, just to be an entrepreneur, I think it's looked upon in terms of, like gosh, when I was trying to get a loan when I worked for myself full time, I felt like I suffered a little bit of, I don't know, discrimination. It was very difficult to assure things like loans, where I feel as though a male counterpart would be able to get a loan a heck of a lot easier if they were an entrepreneur. Also, just getting ahead, I'm going to say that right now there's not a ton of demo producers that are females out there in the industry and I feel like it's tough trying to get noticed out there because there's not many of us out there, and then ultimately, it would be nice if there was recognition, maybe more recognition for the female demo producers out there and I'm just talking about demo producers, but just female, any entrepreneur out there and it wasn't that long ago, really, that women couldn't even get loans. 07:30 - Lau (Co-host) They couldn't even open a bank account without permission from their husband. It wasn't that long ago. So, when you think about just the freedom of being able to have credit go into debt, who would call that a freedom? But I mean the point is, it's like it's an independence as a business owner to be able to say, okay, here's what I'm investing in, here's what I'm incurring for debt, here are the accounts I'm going to do, here's my investments for retirement. And, as a woman, there's a tremendous freedom in independence, in being able to do that. It's not to say that you shouldn't have a team or a partner people helping you and working with you. It is to say, though, that you should take that right, and you should run with that ball and enjoy the right of being able to do these things that we could not do even 30 years ago some of those. 08:24 - Anne (Host) Well, I've spoken to people about this. We even had a podcast episode where we talked about what we did prior to our businesses today, and I was a female engineer in the late 1980s. That was kind of a tough road. And then I went into technology as a female and that was also a tough road, and so being a female entrepreneur is even tougher. Sometimes I'm finding certain things are difficult difficult for us to achieve, difficult for us to get recognition, difficult and, like you said, with the loans and all of that, it's just so interesting. So, la, what do you do to progress and move your business forward as a female? 09:04 - Lau (Co-host) entrepreneur. Yeah, it's a hard thing to answer. I mean, there's one technique that I found myself doing just kind of like, in an autonomic kind of way. It wasn't a planned thing, but I noticed there have been situations where I've been with many men or all male like. Let's say, I'm in a conference room or I'm online and I'm in a meeting and there happens to be very male heavy, which I adore, and I have, like you do, many, many male colleagues which I absolutely love working with. 09:30 But I find there's a different dynamic that happens in the way I communicate versus the way this kind of energy communicates, and oftentimes I find that I start to role play, or I'm either seen in a certain light or I start to role play, and usually it's like the role play of the mother, the wife, the sister, the whatever that I know. To some degree they're seeing me in just because of the qualities that I exude, sure, and I kind of role play with that meaning. You know, I don't play a character, but I role play in the sense that I know that they're looking at these qualities and I also know that there are times where they just bulldoze right over me like they literally won't hear what I'm saying because they're in the middle of their communication and I let that happen. I let that ride. I feel actually empowered by that because I know I have no problem. 10:24 This is a technique we always taught live presenters. I've no problem interrupting them culturally, doesn't matter to me whether it's appropriate or not. I have no problem talking right over them. And I found that in order to redirect energy, sometimes you have to be culturally rude as a woman, because you have to have your voice heard Absolutely. And you have to have that without and here's the thing we were talking about in the last podcast without ruining or stomping on their spirit, without making them feel like I'm at them or I'm hurting them or a threat. I think that there's a fine line, there's a strategy in that, like how you strategize, like being heard, inserting what you need to insert into listening attentively, but making sure you're not the daisy on the wall. You're not forgotten Absolutely. 11:15 And that's on us. I mean, it really is, that's on us. I could easily sit back and get really angry at that and say I can't even get a word in edgewise. Are they not listening to what I just said? Or whatever. Instead, I go in and I correct it. I go in and I redirect it. I go in and I do whatever action verb I can come up with, because I always view it as a teaching moment. Sure, it's a teaching moment where I can teach my audience how to communicate with me. 11:40 - Anne (Host) I love the redirection of it. Yeah, like you said, rather than getting angry or stomping on someone's ego, which it really is a lot of ego anyways, I know in the corporate world that's really what it played out to be. It was a lot of ego and a lot of times, if I was in the boardroom and I was the only female, or maybe one of two females first of all, they always wanted me to take notes or be the secretary. People would always say, well, yeah, you can be the secretary. 12:06 You can be the secretary of the board and I'm like actually I'll be the president. 12:10 - Lau (Co-host) I like that. 12:11 - Anne (Host) Right, and that's really how it worked. I was the president of a board and ultimately, they wanted me initially to be the secretary, and I said, well, yeah, no, no, I'm actually not a really good note taker, so I redirected the energy to say, you know, I'm just no. 12:26 I'm not fast. I'd love to be fast, but I'm not. I'm not fast at all. I type with four fingers. That's great, I love that and that's basically what happened. And so I love how you say to redirect it, because, yeah, I mean I don't necessarily want to stomp on anybody because, again, you take that risk of being looked upon as being the difficult one, the difficult one, the angry one, the witchy one, and honestly, you're darned if you do and you're darned if you don't. 12:50 Sometimes with that, that's right. But I like how you say you don't have any problems interrupting and redirecting. I think that's a great tactic. It's a good thing. 12:57 - Lau (Co-host) It's a good thing to learn how to do that. I also think another option for you and again I try to look at it take a step back and look at a strategy, a choice redefine the role. If someone says I want you to play this role in this moment and I'm like I don't want to play that role, or that's a typical role that they'd ask their mother to play, right, I might say yes to that, and the reason I'd say that yes to that is because I can do it. It's not a difficult thing for me to do. I want to be helpful. But then I'm going to redefine what the role is so the role does not become a passive role of like, in your case, a no-take or a stereotypical role, or get me a coffee, or I don't know whatever 13:34 that stereotypical thing is. I would want to play it as many of the female leaders political female leaders in the world, where they don't mind cooking for their colleagues, or maybe they'd get them a coffee, but then they're going to tell them exactly what the strategy is for the company or for the war or for the whatever. So if you do become that omnidynamic kind of person I don't know if you saw a Barbie you know the billion-dollar Barbie movie, right? But Barbie was always known as, at least in our time, was like. Barbie kept re-envisioning and redefining what a woman could be and evolving. 14:12 And…
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