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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

SPOTLIGHT: Yes, They Can Hear You Now

SPOTLIGHT: Yes, They Can Hear You Now Oak Park Dialect Coach builds business by helping actors and non-native English speakers communicate clearly. By MICHAEL HART Staff Reporter It isn’t just those radio commercials for Hooked on Phonics that make the point that what you say can mean a difference in your life. Joel Goldes makes the same point. Goldes is a dialect coach. In fact, he is The Dialect Coach, a one-person business run out of the spare room next to his daughter’s bedroom in Oak Park that is connected, via phone, to clients as far away as Australia and acting schools in Hollywood, and as close as the leasing office of an apartment complex in nearby Thousand Oaks. Goldes helps non-native English speakers make themselves better understood. He works with actors who either need to learn the elements of an accent for a role they’re playing or to get rid of a native accent or dialect that turns out to be a handicap once they hit Hollywood. “I don’t really take accents away,” Goldes said. “It’s teaching them to produce sounds they’ve never learned to make before.” The Dialect Coach officially became a business when the Southern California native and one-time actor returned to the West Coast from New York two years ago. But informally he had been interested in the speech aspect of his theatrical career ever since he graduated from UC Irvine more than a decade ago. “From junior high on,” Goldes said, “I was always interested in Monty Python and English humor and the way they talked.” Consequently, between his own acting assignments during eight years in New York he found time to coach colleagues. Then one day he was approached by a Reuters news writer who, despite his heavy Brooklyn accent, suddenly and unexpectedly had a new assignment: take over news reading responsibilities on Reuters’ private global TV network. “This was a guy who needed to do very well very quickly,” Goldes said. Goldes helped him out and the former newsroom rat was promoted to on-air announcer in Reuters’ London bureau. That was Goldes’ first experience with a client outside of the entertainment industry, and it gave him the idea he could expand his potential clientele when he and his wife returned to Southern California recently. “On the entertainment side, I knew there’d be a much bigger client base,” he said. And he suspected, given the global nature of the Los Angeles workforce, there would also be more people looking for help with their communication skills. At any given moment, Goldes said, he is working with between 12 and 20 clients. He charges $75 to $95 a session, depending on whether the clients visit him or he goes to them. Most clients can resolve whatever problems they have in six to 24 weekly sessions. “It all depends on how many sounds they’re changing,” Goldes said. Goldes figures he grossed about $45,000 in his first year in business and $80,000 the second. He is the first to admit marketing a relatively obscure service like his during an economic downturn is a struggle. He struggles to crack the invisible wall around the studios, advertises in local foreign-language newspapers and hits every meeting he can on the Toastmasters club circuit (“That’s been a very natural fit,” Goldes said.). He runs ads in the show business trades and cold-calls corporate human resources departments. “Still, I most often hear people say, ‘I never met anybody who does what you do,'” Goldes said. Nevertheless, he believes his business is gradually growing by way of referrals, given all the tax preparers from Australia, computer experts from India, leasing agents from Guatemala and actors from East Texas he has helped with their communication skills. Mercedes Woodward meets with him twice a week. The Guatemalan-born leasing agent at a Thousand Oaks apartment complex learned about him from one of her colleagues who had heard his pitch at a local chamber of commerce meeting. Woodward speaks fluent English, reads and writes well, but still had problems making herself understood in her adopted language. “I got promoted to outside sales and that’s when I knew I had to contact Joel,” she said. “The trouble was that mostly I just couldn’t hear what I was saying. He has taught me how to position my tongue, how to relax my facial muscles. Really, he’s been teaching me how to talk. “My accent won’t go away because it’s part of me, but people can understand me better.” When another client, actor Brett Moses, arrived in town four years ago, he could hardly open his mouth without making it clear he had grown up in Southeast Texas. The accent he brought with him made auditions difficult and he believes he lost parts because of it. “Absolutely,” Moses said. “That was particularly frustrating. I had no control over it.” He began working with Goldes a year ago and still consults with him about once a month by phone. “He was able to help me break it all down,” Moses said. Moses now has a small recurring role on “Passions,” an NBC-TV soap opera, and he’s found a way to manipulate his native Texas accent, as evidenced by the Picante Hot Sauce commercial he recently shot. The Dialect Coach Core Business: Dialect and accent coaching Revenues in 2000: $45,000 Revenues in 2001: $80,000 Employees in 2000: 1 Employees in 2001: 1 Goal: To expand client base in both the corporate world and the film and TV industry Driving Force: The need for foreign-born English speakers to communicate clearly in the workplace

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