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.
At some point, every creator with a few brand deals under their belt gets The DM. A manager "loves what you're building" and wants to "hop on a quick call."
Cue the spiral. Do I actually need a management? Am I behind? Is 20% highway robbery?
This week: Piper Phillips, who built a six-figure creator business solo and turned down management for a full year before finally saying yes. We turned her decision into a four-question framework you can run against your own DM: the Four-Stop Test.
Let’s get into it.
Creators are starting to influence what AI recommends
When someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini, or another AI tool what product to buy, which brand to trust, or what’s best in a category, the answer isn’t only being shaped by a brand’s own website.
It’s also being shaped by the broader internet: creators, communities, reviews, earned media, and the conversations happening around that brand.
That’s the idea behind Later’s new Creator AEO approach. They’re helping brands understand how they show up across AI search, what sources are shaping those answers, and how creator campaigns can be built not just for reach and engagement, but for greater visibility in AI-generated recommendations too.
For anyone working in creator marketing, it’s an interesting new layer to pay attention to as AI increasingly becomes a discovery engine. Later is leading the way on this.
The Four-Stop Test: how to know you're ready for management
Piper Phillips was never the "please, someone save me from my inbox" type.
She pitched her own brand deals. Negotiated her own contracts. Sent her own invoices. And for the most part, she enjoyed it.
So why hand someone 20% of that? For a long time, she didn't see the point. She knew how to pitch, negotiate, build relationships, and sell creative ideas to brands. A manager didn't seem like an obvious upgrade.
"I was so anti-management," she says. "I didn't want to give up control. I have a business background. I'm really good at networking, relationship-building, pitching, and sales. So I was like, why would I have someone else do this?"
Then the business started eating into what she actually wanted to do.
Piper had rediscovered her passion for music and wanted to get back to working with producers and writing songs. Managing brand partnerships was becoming a distraction from the next chapter she wanted to build.
So a few weeks ago, after a full year of conversations (slow burn!), she signed with The Drive Agency.
Her decision comes down to four questions.
Do you have a business worth managing?
Is your time becoming the bottleneck?
Can management make you more than it costs?
Do you trust them with your reputation (and your business)?
Let’s walk through it.
1. Do you have a business worth managing?
Piper's biggest advantage was that she understood what she'd built before asking someone else to help run it.
She started out making marketing and career content for women in marketing, then expanded into lifestyle: her life in New York and her work as a musician.
Her first big brand deal came from her own pitch. One of her videos went viral, she pitched Starbucks an idea, they liked it, and that one partnership turned into three more.
"That was my first experience realizing, oh wow, brands are receptive to creative ideas," she says. "I can treat this the same way I used to treat my marketing job. Now I'm just doing marketing for myself and for my own brand."
That mindset is what let Piper build a business instead of waiting for sponsorships to arrive. She also learned that creator value isn't just about follower count. At one point, she made more than $100,000 in a year with fewer than 100,000 followers across platforms.
"It is more than follower count or engagement," she says. "It's also about your brand identity and the credibility that brands think you have and view you as a thought leader in a space."
Before you take the call, you should be able to answer these without breaking a sweat:
What value do you bring to brands?
What types of partnerships fit your business?
What can you negotiate?
What are your rates, deal terms, and usage fees?
Where do your current opportunities come from?
🔒 Don't fuhgeddaboudit: You want management courting you for a year while you play hard to get. If you're hoping a manager builds the business for you, keep building.
Stop 2: Is your time becoming the bottleneck?
The annoying thing about being good at everything is that you end up doing everything.
You build the audience, land the deal, make the content, negotiate the contract, send the invoice, and follow up when the payment's late. Then follow up again. It works, until it doesn't. (And yes, follow-ups are how deals actually close. We wrote a whole issue on the nudge.)
That's what happened to Piper. She liked the business side of being a creator. She liked pitching and building relationships with brands. But she was also trying to build a music career.
"I feel like I'm literally having two careers at once now," she says.
Every post had a lot of jobs to do: serve her audience, attract brands, make money, and still leave room for her creative life.
"As a creator, you're always serving two masters in a way," she says. "You are posting for potential brand opportunities for income, and you're also posting to keep your audience happy or to attract a new audience. And then yourself, of course."
Three stakeholders. One very full inbox.
"I was like, why am I writing 100 emails back and forth about this campaign when I could be outsourcing this to someone else and use that creative energy to do things that are actually going to make me happy or are going to make me more money?"
Stop 3: Can management make you more than it costs?
Let's be real: 20% stings, especially when you know you could handle it yourself.
That’s why you should treat this question as an ROI question.
I broke down the full management math here. The short version is to pull these numbers first:
Current partnership revenue
Time spent on pitching, negotiating, and campaign management
Conversion rate from pitch to signed deal
Average deal size and repeat partnership rate
Then weigh them against what a manager could actually add, and what they could take off your plate.
The management ROI cheat sheet
Question | What to measure |
What will management cost? | Commission, fees, lock-in, and lost control |
What could it generate? | New opportunities, larger deals, better terms |
What could it remove? | Emails, contracts, invoices, follow-ups |
What could you build instead? | Music, products, content, community, consulting |
How will you know it is working? | Revenue, time saved, deal quality, or strategic progress |
For Piper, the math mattered. But the real driver was what she'd do with the time and creative energy she got back.
Stop 4: Do you trust them with your reputation?
Piper evaluated potential managers through instinct and evidence.
A manager's name gets stapled to yours. How they write emails, how they communicate, how professional they are: brands experience all of it as you.
By the time Piper signed with Drive, the trust was already there. They'd been in touch for about a year. She'd crossed paths with the team at events and through brand relationships, and she knew people who'd worked with them.
Drive kept things warm without getting pushy. Basically the opposite of a bad Hinge match.
🔒 Don't fuhgeddaboudit: You're not just hiring someone to negotiate deals. You're handing them the keys to your reputation. Vet accordingly.
Steal this playbook
Run the Four-Stop Test on yourself:
Management might make sense if:
You're already generating consistent revenue
You know your value and can negotiate on your own
You've got more opportunities, or admin, than you can handle
Your time could make more money or more magic somewhere else
You know exactly what you want a manager to own
You trust the person and their reputation
Pump the brakes if:
You're hoping management will build your business for you
You haven't learned the basics of pitching and negotiating yet
Your revenue isn't consistent yet
You can't explain what a manager would do beyond "find opportunities"
You're signing because everyone else seems to have one (they're not all happy about it, trust)
If you're stuck on "pump the brakes," you're in good company. Piper stayed there for a year. Keep building until the DM stops being a temptation and starts being an obvious yes.
The NYC Minute
Piper's decision came down to numbers and trust, but ask any creator based here and the city is part of the math too. Here's how she put it.
"What makes New York so special is it's such a mix of ambitious people in different ways. You have the business ambition and there's a great community of B2B business creators, but then you also have people who come here as artists, people who want to make it as actors or musicians or writers."
She added:
"I also just think being here is an investment into your career in general. The cost of living here is atrocious, but I would not be earning as much as I am earning if I was not in New York City. I think it is a strategic career decision to be here, especially for content creators."
Closing out the year with our biggest ones yet
While there is nothing on the calendar to RSVP to this week, and I know y’all are busy with all that’s happening in the fall, our final events of the year are in the works, and we'll have details soon.
Thank you for an amazing year. The rooms, the panels, the mixers: none of it happens without you showing up.
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.
Thanks for reading. Before you answer the next manager DM, or search for one yourself, pull your own numbers: what they'd bring in, what they'd take off your plate, and what you'd actually do with the time back.
Piper ran hers for a year before she said yes. You don't need a year. You need the numbers.
F*ck It, Create It,
Brett and Taylor