need some help my audio file

Hello, so I'm very new to using this software and figured I'd give a shot to audio book narrating. I completed recording and editing a book I was offered a contract for. The submission requirements say that there has to be between 0.5-1 second of room tone before the narration begins and I have less than 1 second on the audio track, but when I save the playlist as an audio file and play it back there is always like 2-3 seconds of space at the start of the file and quality control team is not accepting it. Is there something in my settings that would be causing it to save that way? I feel like I've tried everything and removed ALL of the space at the start of that track, but nothing seems to be working. I would appreciate any assistance in this!