When I left Gleam, I had the opportunity to take creators with me

Wow... this heatwave is really not joking around 😅 I hope everyone is surviving.

We’ve got our Q3 strategy day today with Alice Benham, which is honestly one of my favourite days of the quarter. We spend the day going through our company goals, everyone shares where they’re up to, we realign on the vision, talk about what’s working, what’s not, and where we’re heading next.

I’ve always found it really important to bring the team into the direction of the business. I don’t ever want people to feel like they’re just turning up and doing tasks. I want everyone to understand where we’re trying to get to, why we’re making certain decisions, and to feel like they’re helping shape the future of tbh. I’m incredibly lucky to have a team who care deeply about what we’re building and who constantly make the business better.

One thing that’s become really clear this year is that my role has changed too. The team are doing such a brilliant job managing our creators that my time is now much more focused on getting out into the industry, meeting people, building relationships and finding opportunities that might support our clients, or even the wider business.

I read a really interesting article from Talent Times last week about talent poaching in the creator economy, and it got me thinking.

It’s obviously something that happens across the whole industry. Sometimes creators leave smaller boutique agencies for larger ones. Sometimes they leave larger agencies because they want a more personal service and don’t want to feel like one of hundreds on a roster. It goes both ways, and I’d imagine almost every agency has experienced it at some point.

But I realised my opinion on it is actually pretty simple.

For me, there is a huge difference between someone deciding they want a new manager, and another agency actively trying to convince them they should leave.

When I left Gleam to start tbh, I actually had creators ask if they could come with me.

And I said no.

Looking back, it definitely made building the business harder. Starting with no roster is scary, and it would’ve been a much quicker route if I’d taken people with me.

Those relationships had been introduced to me through Gleam. They’d trusted me to manage those creators whilst I worked there, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that leaving with them would’ve felt like a betrayal. Ofc it was also a breach of contract, but mostly a decision I made because it aligned with how I wanted to build my business. I wanted to build my own roster. My own relationships. I wanted tbh to stand on its own two feet.

That’s still how we operate today… which comes back to my take on poaching.

I give my team strict instructions not to approach creators who are already under management. If someone reaches out to us because they’re looking for a change, of course we’ll have that conversation, because ultimately if someone is already looking elsewhere then that relationship is probably coming to a natural end anyway. But you’ll never find us in someone’s DMs trying to convince them to leave their manager. Maybe that’s old fashioned. Maybe it’s slower. But it’s the way I want to do business.

I also don’t think movement between agencies is necessarily a bad thing. Careers evolve. Agencies evolve. Sometimes people outgrow each other, and that’s okay.

I think where it becomes difficult is when relationships are ended because somebody else has spent months planting seeds that the grass might be greener somewhere else.

Ironically, taking the longer route ended up giving me something I value far more. Every creator we’ve signed has chosen to be here, every relationship has been built from scratch, and nobody can ever say we built tbh on somebody else’s work.

That was worth waiting for.

Verity x