Hey! Welcome back to the Creator Economy NYC newsletter, your weekly hit of insights and strategies to help you build, monetize, and scale as a creator.
This week we’re covering one of the biggest challenges successful creators face: how to actually bring in help when you need it and what that hire should look like.
We asked 3 CENYC creators to share their advice:
P. S. this is part 1 of a new series on hiring. In Part 2, we’ll get into the who and the how behind hiring, the kinds of help to actually bring in for each category and the math on whether a hire is worth it.
Let's get into it.
Oh, and be sure to check out our event next week where we’re doing our first edition of Creator Jeopardy. RSVP here.
Brand partnerships aren't won in a spreadsheet.
They're won through relationships, and relationships require context, follow-up, and staying organized across a lot of moving pieces.
If you're managing sponsorships, brand deals, or any kind of partnership pipeline, you already know how fast things get scattered.
Multiple contacts at the same company. Conversations across email, Slack, and DMs. Follow-ups that live nowhere.
Attio is built for exactly that.
Relationship-first, not process-first.
Records that auto-update from emails and meetings. Slack connected so your whole team has context in real time. And Ask Attio for bulk actions that would otherwise eat your afternoon.
Less time chasing context. More time building the relationships that actually close those brand deals.
How to hire as a creator (Part 1)
This week, we're tackling the hardest part: figuring out what to actually hire for. Most creators try to skip straight to "I need a manager" or "I need an editor" without doing the work to figure out where the highest-leverage hire actually is.
The result = money down the drain and chaos multiplied.
To avoid this, you need to do the work before the work.
First, run the audit.
Natalie (you know her as Corporate Natalie) has spent a lot of time thinking about this problem – first as a creator hiring her own team and now as the founder ExpandVA, where she watches creators do this daily.
“The smartest thing a creator can do is audit where their time is going and, separately, how much they actually enjoy spending it there.”
To figure out where to bring in help, she recommends a two-part audit. For one week track both the time every task takes you and your enjoyment of it.
Time: every task you do and roughly how long it takes. Be specific as possible: “triaged 15 brand emails (45 minutes) over “admin (1 hour).” You want to know exactly where your time is going.
Enjoyment: tag every task with how much you actually enjoyed it. You can rate it 1-5 or even just energizes / drains / neutral. This helps you see what tasks you want to stay close to and where you could potentially hand some off to someone else.
Now find your high time + low enjoyment tasks and turn this into your outsourcing list.
What does this actually look like? For most creators we talked to, the list ends up looking something like:
Brand deal briefings, contract reviews, and back-and-forth negotiations
Repurposing long-form content into reels, shorts, and platform-specific cuts
Cold outreach to brands and partnership pipeline management
Inbox triage, calendar coordination, and scheduling logistics
Raw footage editing and the volume of videos needed to keep platforms fed
Invoicing, expense tracking, and quarterly tax prep
Brandon talks about this same exercise through a different lens, which he calls “finding your zone of genius.” The tasks that pull you away from the things that fire you up are the ones to start moving off your plate first.
Think in skills, not roles.
This principle comes from Ali Abdaal.
Don’t start by asking whether you need “an editor” or “a social media manager.” Start by asking which exact tasks are slowing your business down, which are repeatable, and which still require your judgment, your taste, or your face.
Some examples:
I need someone to repurpose three reels per week from my long-form content and write captions in my voice
I need someone to triage my inbox every morning, flag the brand deals worth a reply, and handle scheduling for everything else
I need someone to take my raw footage and deliver a rough cut that matches three reference videos
I need someone to handle inbound brand inquiries, negotiate rates, and run contracts past me
Hire help for: the chaos, the craft, or the business.
If we had to sum up the best places to start when hiring, here are 3 buckets:
The chaos. Email, calendar coordination, logistics & scheduling - the operational pile of tasks that keeps growing.
The craft. The actual production work, whether that’s podcast production, editing reels, or posting the content.
The business. The revenue and logistics that keeps things moving - from taxes to sales and partnerships.
You’ll likely need help in all these areas as your business grows. But your biggest challenge upfront is deciding which category will bring you the highest leverage right now.
If you want to outsource the chaos → start with a VA.
This is where most creators feel the pain first; the volume of email, scheduling pings, contract reviews, and brand-deal back-and-forth that can easily eat up your free time.
“It’s really helpful to have a buffer between yourself and your mailbox, and other parties. For someone like me that can kind of get avoidant on certain tasks, this was huge for me, and candidly my reputation.”
And Brandon added:
“I was spending too much time in my email and I really couldn’t focus on creating content the way I wanted to.”
If you want to outsource the craft → hire an editor.
Dara's first hire was a video editor, and for a YouTube creator, that math made sense. Editing was the bottleneck between her ideas and the volume YouTube demands.
This is the right move when:
The volume of content you need to produce is choking your strategy time
You want to focus on planning, scripting, or going deeper on one specific platform
You have clear creative direction and reference videos a freelancer can match against
One important warning: this is also the category where the risk is highest, because the work is closer to your creative output. This is something several creators we talked to mentioned.
If you want to outsource the business growth → hire a manager or agent.
This can be tricky for creators to navigate. By the time most creators in this community get here, they’ve already left real money on the table from under-priced deals, missed tax planning, or partnerships negotiated half-asleep at midnight.
Natalie went straight at it. Instead of signing with an agency, she hired a Brand Manager — Annie — whose only focus was growing her brand, i.e. things like agreements, invoices, deals, scheduling.
(Before Annie, Natalie was running a fake email alias pretending to be her own assistant in brand deal threads.)
Hiring a manager = more time for the creative work.
“Creative time is the job. Protecting it is how you grow without flaming out, and it’s the difference between a career that lasts ten years and one that lasts two.”
And Brandon added, saying:
“Time is money. If I can spend $100 to get an hour back, and that hour I can do a brand partnership that’s worth $1,000, I’m coming out positive. I’m a creator, but I’m a businessman first. I saw my main role as CEO of this creator enterprise as cash flow.”
And here's the thing every creator who's done this well will tell you… even when you bring in a manager, you can't fully step out:
"I have to be at the helm overseeing all of those things, because I set the vision."
Stay tuned for part 2 next week.
May 19th: Creator Jeopardy & Mixer!
We’re bringing together our community of creators, marketers and founders, for our next mixer where we're putting a creator economy spin on the iconic game show format with our first ever Creator Jeopardy LIVE in NYC.
Expect questions around: content creation, NYC culture, internet & pop culture…and whatever chaos unfolds in the moment.
Meet our contestants: @alberta.tech, @king_bashel and @urbanistariel
Big shoutout to our partners at Adobe Express, Jobstream™, B&H Creators and Siftsy for helping make this one happen.
Two free tools top creators use to keep themselves moving
The Creator Goal Setting Guide (FREE): A simple but powerful document to help you declare who you want to BECOME in 2026. Get it here.
The Creator Accountability System (FREE): Your visual companion for consistent creation in 2026. Get it here.
That’s all for this week! Hope this has given you the nudge to start thinking about where a little help could actually move the needle in your creator business.
F*ck it, create it,
Brett
With research and editorial support by Taylor Cromwell
