How To Know If You're Ready For A Manager & How To Find a Good Fit
Finding management can be an intimidating process — do you really need a manager? Do you want to risk giving a cut of your income to someone you don’t know well yet? Will they be able to bring you more money or would you do a better job and charge more on your own? Will they squelch your creativity and sell you out? Or will they actually give you amazing tools to build your business like never before?
A manager is someone you will likely talk to every day, so you’ll want it to be a good fit. But how do you know when you’re ready and how do you find a good fit? Here are our suggestions, including some background on what we look for when accepting new clients to our roster.
How to know if you’re ready
The short answer is: you’re ready for management when you have so much working coming in that you need help managing it all.
Though managers can definitely bring you some work and they can coach you in how to grow and strategize, they’re not agents who’s primary role is to book work for you and they’re counting on you to be the growth expert — you are the one with the followers, after all. They are managers. They manage! They manage the details, negotiating rates, negotiating contracts, they help you keep track of requirements on the creative brief, due dates, keeping up with emails and maintaining a good relationship with the brand, they can play bad cop so you can always be the good guy, etc. Managers are here to be the organized one so that you can focus on being creative.
If you’re looking for someone to help you bring in more brand deals, you’re looking for an agency, not a management company. Managers can definitely bring you some work by nature of the job, their experience and the fact that they typically have a roster of several people that offer connections that can be shared among them all, but most of the work that goes into booking brand deals isn’t something that a manager can do for you. Even an agency typically won’t exist solely around social media brand deals, because so much of that is really up to the creator themselves to create great content, keep engagement up, maintain relationships with brands on social media, network, do work for free, etc.
If you’re feeling a little overwhelmed, but you don’t have a lot of work coming in yet, you might be looking for an assistant.
What management companies are looking for
Management companies are essentially looking for good business partners. Just like you have to be able to trust them, they have to be able to trust you to bring in enough income, to get things done well and on time, to have a positive attitude, to be the expert on your own audience, and to maintain an image that is brand-friendly. You should be ready to pitch yourself in an interview with your potential management company, sharing what brand deals you have coming up and giving them an idea of how much income you generally bring in. They’ll want to make sure that taking only 15-20% of that income will be worth their time.
If you’re difficult to work with or if you’re not bringing in any money, chances are you will end up feeling like a low priority client or ultimately being dropped from their roster. (Here at MPS we make sure to wrap up a contract if it’s not working out, so that no one ever feels low priority.) Managers want to be able to work with clients long term, so they’ll be trying to gauge these two things when they meet with you for the first time!
If an influencer takes more than 24 hours to get back to us just to set up an interview, that’s already a red flag that they will not complete their work on time and make our jobs difficult. Set a great first impression by responding quickly!
how to find a good fit
You should be picky when it comes to management! Treat it almost like dating and let your potential managers know you’re going on other dates, and looking for the right fit. You want someone who gets your personality, shares your values, genuinely loves your content, and maybe even specializes in your niche. You also want someone who is extremely organized, a great written communicator (well-written emails are everything as a manager), someone with clear boundaries so you know when to expect them to respond quickly and so you can count on them to be honest with you. You want someone who seems excited to grow with you and motivated to charge fair, high rates.
Some perks you could look for that not everyone offers:
Non exclusive contract: This allows you to also have other agents or managers for other areas, and it means you can always do brand deals on your own if you’re not satisfied with how your new manager is handling them
Take a percentage only of what they help with: Some managers take a percentage of literally everything you do, while others will take only a percentage in the area they manage.
Trial period and/or a contract that can be ended at any time with notice: This way if it’s not a good fit, you can always leave, and you’re not stuck with a terrible manager for a whole year.
Regular meetings: It can be super helpful to connect with your manager to get their input on your upcoming content, have someone to help you think out loud etc.
Keep in mind there are lots of ways to work with a manager, from applying at a huge management company, to looking for a boutique company, to asking a friend to work as your manager. While the larger management companies might have more connections, the smaller management companies (or friends) tend to give great personalized attention, are less likely to push you to sell out, and will probably make sure you’re always a priority. There are pros to both kinds!
Hope this was helpful and as usual, feel free to leave any questions on Instagram or via email and we’d love to answer with another blog post.