IN CONVERSATION: A RECENT PROFILE OF TOBY RICKETTS 

— by local writer, Daphne

My usual conversations with Toby Ricketts tend to get long and meandering, but this one’s different; it’s about the one topic he could never veer off of. When I start by asking the brands he’s worked with, he relaxes into professionalism.

“The United Nations, the World Health Organization, Samsung, Microsoft, Facebook, Panasonic. Who else? It’s tons. BMW, Audi, Tesla.”

“Oh, I didn’t know about that one.”

“Yeah, I’m their on hold message guy in New Zealand.”

“Maybe they’ll give you a free cybertruck?!”

He laughs through the screen, from his self-built Hempcrete recording studio in the deep jungle of rural Northland. Toby Ricketts is a voice over artist. He spends his work days reading through scripts, auditioning for jobs, bringing voiceovers and characters to life and earning his living speaking into a microphone. He’s excitable over films, sound engineering, and radio, and the screen doesn’t mar his blatant confidence, ease, and satisfaction with life, all contributing to a face so friendly you can’t help but trust it.

Growing up in the vibrant beachside town of Brighton in the UK, he discovered his affinity to sound. At six years old he extended the cord of a baby monitor off a balcony and created an “enforced radio show” for passers-by. At eight, he had a sound engineering studio in his bedroom. At ten, his friend, Simon Hardwick (now working at the BBC), joined him in public places to create ‘broadcasts’ (that were really tape recordings), and at 12 he had a low-power, ‘pirate’ radio station running from his house. He Chuckles, “Yeah, my mum used to get really grumpy about it blocking BBC Radio 4!”

Voice acting was never his end goal; it was sound engineering that “I was always a bit obsessed with.” After moving to New Zealand at 14 and completing schooling, he worked at a company in video editing.  “I actually wanted to switch tracks and do that instead,” Toby says. “I was like - this is great! The catering is better. They put on lunch. I was sold!”
However, he was denied entry into the TV course after already being accepted into the radio stream. “If they’d have let me change, [my life] would have been substantially different.”
While studying for his degree in Broadcasting Communications, he moonlighted as the ‘cart-boy’ at a local radio station - using reel to reel machines to copy radio ads from national feeds onto the ‘carts’ for use in the studio.

After graduating, he started working in radio and the production department where promotions, ads, and the imaging for radio stations are created, Toby would be collaborating with voice artists regularly. “On really hard days when there was no one around and I had all this work I needed voiced, I was like, well, I’ll just do it.”
His voice training had begun…

Toby left the radio industry for a while to set up his own studio called ‘The Voice Booth’ which specialsed in voice recordings and sound design for advertising agencies who didn’t need the services of a full recording studio. But this venture soon morphed into being the largest recording studio in town. This new company - Tandem Studios - was one of the pioneers in Podcasting (which in 2003 was the earliest whisper of what was to come), and video-on-demand. Toby’s company developed an embedded video player for websites and developed the technology in 2006 … at exactly the same moment as Google bought YouTube (which was then a tiny startup in San Francisco).

Then, some years later, the devastating Christchurch earthquake hit, shaking the city to its core.
“It was one of those moments where you realise everything you haven’t done,” Ricketts says, before deciding to move out of Christchurch and relocating to Auckland. “The earthquake really was an opportunity to reassess and completely rethink how I was living my life, and all the possible avenues that had gone unexplored.”

Shortly after moving to Auckland, Toby found work at a legendary electronic dance music station called ‘George FM’. “I had a production studio, I had lots of time. I started to experiment with new ideas in sound. I rekindled the NZ Voice Academy [a voiceover training school that had run during his time at Tandem Studios], and I also found out about this strange new area of ‘online voiceovers’”.

After months with it on the side, Toby realised he could go full-time into voice-over. This career change is what would shape the rest of his life, what he would become known for, what would skyrocket him to international fame in his sector. But this would mean letting go of the day job. This would mean abandoning paid employment, secure living. This would mean leaping over an abyss of doubt and fear; a jump he didn’t know if he could make. “I gave myself six months to do it, not knowing if it was going to work. And it did work.” He resigned and moved to the middle of nowhere in the far North, building a studio and an online business from nothing. 

Toby advises to anyone starting out that success leads to success; reinvesting back into the business is essential, be that getting more training, more access to voice job marketplaces, or improving the quality of your equipment. Above all, to keep at it, even when there may be no results. “It takes time to sow the seeds, and it’s even longer before you can harvest them.”

After that, voice over, it seems, became Toby’s bread and butter. It’s a funny thing talking to him about his career. At once, you see how it lights his eyes with fervour and passion, when asked a question about the craft. “People get into it sort of like, ‘I need to be making this much money within X years’, and you can’t go into it with that attitude. There’s so much rejection in the early days and you haven’t learned to love the craft. You need to be doing it not for any other reason than you love doing it. Even if I wasn’t paid for this, I would still do this job. It 100% needs to give you energy.”

The next milestone culminated in the UKs annual ‘One Voice Awards’, celebrating British voice over talent from animation to advertisements. Toby struggles to remember how he came across it, but recalls in 2018 entering seven of the competition categories. “I got a call from the organisers saying, ‘You gotta come to the awards’, and I was like, ‘I don’t know, it’s in England, I’m in New Zealand; that’s a long way’; and they were like, ‘We just think you should come’, and I said, ‘Did I win something?’ and they were like, ‘We just think you should come.’” Phenomenally, for a debut entrant, Toby swept up six trophies from almost every category he was nominated for, including Male Voice Over of the Year, from over 1,500 entries across the world. When he smiles, his eyes crinkle. “That was a real turning point, because I suddenly thought, hang on, if I’m winning awards in England, I must be doing something right.” This proved true; the following year Toby received another five awards, once again taking home Male Voice Over of the Year. “It’s one of those branches of life that you have no idea of the significance of when it’s happening. But then you look back and go, if I hadn’t seen that ad for those awards, who knows?” In fact, he was so successful, one of the organisers of the awards, Gravy for The Brain, co-owned by the voice of the X Factor’s Peter Dickson, invited Toby to join the company as head of the Oceania division. Because he works for the company, he isn’t allowed to re-enter the competition. Perhaps a strategic ploy from the producers to let others have a go? He only laughs.

I begin to wrap up the conversation. Are there any downsides? He sighs. “It’s not just about being able to do funny voices, or silly voices, or nice voices. Most of it is sound engineering, running a voiceover business, finding the work, invoicing; boring stuff. A lot of people think it’s just me walking into the studio with my golden voice and that’s totally not what it is anymore. There’s three pillars of voice over, which is the voice craft, the audio engineering, and the business skills. Without one of those pillars, you don’t have a career in voiceover.” 

Currently, he’s working with Outback Steakhouse which has 1400 restaurants across the United States, the Sauber Formula 1 team on a short documentary series, and the OUTThinking Investor Podcast by global finance giant, PGIM. He still runs the New Zealand Voice Academy, and the Oceania division of Gravy for the Brain - the British-based voiceover training company.

What’s the secret? “I’m a perfectionist to a point,” he says, “but I know when to let go of something, which I think is important.Voiceover, for whatever reason, still just gives me a lot of energy… It doesn't feel like a job. It feels like I’m just playing - just doing a really good job of something that I know I’m fairly good at gives me a lot of satisfaction.”