As a legacy producer running a legacy-focused production company, I’m constantly asking a simple question:
Where do we actually have leverage in the creator economy?
In a recent conversation, RJ Larese, who runs one of the top creator management firms, Sixteenth, told me something both surprising and inevitable. Because studios and platforms are aggressively pursuing creator talent, he has opened a division dedicated solely to packaging and selling projects into the traditional system. They already have projects set up at streamers.
This will not be an isolated move.
The simple reaction from legacy producers is to chase one-off deals with individual creators. Attach one to a show. Adapt a channel. Test a collaboration.
But there may be a larger structural play.
The most future-proof production companies won’t behave like mini-studios.
They’ll behave like creator management agencies, run by producers who already possess the core skills required to build them: packaging talent, developing formats, structuring deals, protecting ownership, allocating capital, scaling production, and thinking in franchises instead of one-offs.
Because creators are no longer just talent.
They are vertically integrated IP. In many cases, they are the franchise, the distribution channel, and the marketing engine, all anchored to a direct audience relationship.
Building durable value around that requires more than sponsorship revenue. It requires formalizing the asset around attention, structuring ownership correctly, systematizing production, extending into adjacent businesses, and managing long-term value creation.
That is not a new discipline. It is producer logic applied at a different entry point.
In traditional media, we build the asset and then search for an audience.
In the creator economy, the audience often exists first. The opportunity is to formalize the asset around that attention, protect it, and expand it across platforms and businesses.
The producer function has not disappeared. It has moved upstream, closer to distribution and ownership.
So I asked Mitch Camarda to dissect six creator management companies operating with distinct theses. What they are actually building. How they structure ownership and revenue. And what their models suggest about where this infrastructure layer is heading.
If you are a legacy producer or executive trying to determine where you fit in this shift, this may be one of the more practical bridges.
Take it away Mitch…
A Shift In Perspective
When I started in the music business, one lesson stuck. If you want to understand how a career actually moves, follow the managers. Agents negotiate deals. Managers shape trajectory across touring, partnerships, release timing, merchandise, and brand. They see the whole board.
For a while, I assumed creator management was a lighter version of that role: Sponsorships, contract protection and basic business hygiene.
I had been watching the space without fully connecting the dots. It was only when I sat down to systematically break these firms apart, to examine how they are structured and what they actually build, that the pattern became clear.
Every creator business feels bespoke from the outside. But beneath that surface, these management companies tend to fall into a handful of recognizable models.
Underscore Talent: The Institutional Builder
The team behind one of the first major creator networks came back and built it again, this time with corporate architecture from day one.
Underscore is a large-scale creator management company organized into formal divisions: gaming, beauty, culinary, comedy, and public personalities transitioning into digital. Beyond digital-native creators, they also represent established stand-ups, writers, actors, and directors. Rather than running a single flat roster, they operate each vertical with its own leadership, strategy, and brand partnerships. They also run Shorthand Studios, a production and distribution arm that handles content strategy, editing, and cross-platform publishing for their creators.
They represent major digital-native franchises like Vlad & Niki and structure licensing deals, toy lines, publishing, podcasting, and film packaging. Cross-roster collaborations are intentional. In the case of the Brooklyn Coffee Shop collective, they treat the group as expandable scripted IP rather than just viral sketches. The goal is not just content volume. It’s about format ownership for their clients.
After TheSoul Publishing acquired a majority stake, Underscore gained global capital and production infrastructure. TheSoul operates one of the largest content networks in the world, giving Underscore a distribution backend most management firms do not have.
Clients: Vlad & Niki, Alan Chikin Chow, Bailey Sarian, Noah Beck, Kareem Rahma, Elyse Myers, CelinaSpookyBoo, Pooja Tripathi, Dylan Carlino, David Sidorov, Dylan Guerra and others across comedy, beauty, culinary, gaming, kids, and lifestyle.
Legacy crossover: Division structure, cross-roster packaging, consumer licensing, production development, corporate transaction management.
Underscore represents institutionalization.
Flywheel: The Franchise Builder
Most creator managers broker deals. Eyal Baumel builds franchises.
Flywheel is a boutique management company that helps creators turn their brands into multi-format businesses. Think licensing, live experiences, consumer products, and international distribution, all built around a single creator’s identity.
Baumel got here by running Yoola, a YouTube network with thousands of channels. That experience showed him that scale without ownership does not compound. The inflection point came working closely with Like Nastya, one of the largest children’s brands on YouTube. Instead of spreading attention across volume, he focused on a single global IP and built outward from there.
It starts on a whiteboard. The creator sits in the middle, and the team works outward like they’re diagramming a company. Not just videos, but characters, products, licensing lanes, live extensions and international rollout. The assumption isn’t that the channel is the business. The assumption is that the channel is the ignition point.. All of it enters the conversation early. Longer bets are structured as joint ventures with creators maintaining meaningful ownership.
This is studio-style franchise planning applied to a human IP.
Clients: Like Nastya, Rebecca Zamolo, Jordan and Salish Matter, The Royalty Family. Baumel has worked with MrBeast on expansion and strategy as part of his broader creator work.
Legacy crossover: Franchise mapping, licensing strategy, equity structuring international expansion, long-term asset development.
Flywheel treats creators as franchises from the beginning.
Fixated: The Vertically Integrated Engine
What happens when the former president of FaZe Clan teams up with the architect of a TikTok creator house and then raises $50 million from the investor behind A24 and the Los Angeles Dodgers?
You get Fixated.
Fixated is a management company that runs content production and distribution in-house for its creators. Where most firms outsource or leave creators to figure out production on their own, Fixated built an internal engine that handles the entire pipeline.
Founded by Zach Katz and Jason Wilhelm, the firm runs ideation sessions, shapes recurring formats, manages production crews, oversees editors and thumbnail teams, and optimizes distribution in real time. Every creator on their roster gets treated like a media company, not a talent booking.
Then comes amplification. A network of more than 25,000 micro-creators clips and redistributes content across their own feeds, turning one viral moment into a coordinated surge. When they applied this to podcast host Cono from Craft Culture, his YouTube revenue moved from roughly $5,000 a month to multiples of that number in weeks.
Fixated has begun acquiring other firms. In January 2026, it acquired gaming-focused agency Ellify. This is not traditional representation. It is infrastructure paired with capital and consolidation.
Clients: Sketch, The Botez Sisters, Zach Justice, Sofie Dossi, Cono, among others.
Legacy crossover: Development pipelines, production oversight, creative iteration, distribution strategy, capital deployment.
Fixated resembles a media studio built inside the algorithm.
G&B Digital Management: The Hollywood Bridge
Kyle Hjelmeseth founded G&B Digital Management in 2015, when representing bloggers and social creators still felt peripheral to much of Hollywood. He recognized early that audience-native talent needed long-term positioning, not just campaign negotiation.
G&B is a full-service management company for digital creators. They handle career strategy, brand partnerships, product development, editorial placements, and content across podcasting and television. What sets them apart is the depth of the operation and where their leadership comes from.
Today G&B represents more than 100 creators and has driven over $80 million earned for talent. They have appeared on the Inc. 5000 list twice. They negotiate multi-year partnerships with Dior and Nike, structure capsule collections, and launch direct-to-consumer brands. Seventy-five percent of their roster growth has come through referrals.
Leadership includes executives with deep legacy television experience. That background shows up in how they architect careers across multiple years and formats.
On top of that core business, they built College of Influence. Flipping the Script runs masterclasses at Soho Works for Academy and guild members trying to understand creator economics. The sessions filled quickly. Business Insider published their deck. The education layer works because the management business underneath it is real and profitable.
Clients: David Suh, Léanne Ansar, Noelle Downing, Cogey Marx, Eva Amurri, and others across fashion, beauty, lifestyle, food, and design.
Legacy crossover: Long-term talent positioning, brand architecture, complex deal negotiation, cross-platform packaging, industry fluency.
G&B looks like traditional management recalibrated for audience-owned IP.
Genflow: The Manufacturer
Every management company talks about building brands. Genflow builds and sells the actual products.
Genflow is a creator management company that also operates as a manufacturer. They do not just help creators land brand deals. They design products, make them in-house, sell them through their own e-commerce platforms, and ship them globally from five distribution centers. Their team sources sustainable textiles from Portugal, develops supplements, designs packaging, and builds proprietary fitness and membership apps.
One of those apps, Shreddy, reached #1 globally in the App Store. Across their portfolio, they have launched more than 50 DTC brands and generated over $100 million in lifetime revenue. Shan Hanif has publicly stated that this includes roughly $23 million in 2024 alone.
Their model is simple: Own the margin.
Genflow began by helping creators sell digital fitness programs. Hanif realized that the real leverage was not in brokering deals between creators and brands. It was in owning the brand, the product, and the supply chain.
If this section reads less like Hollywood and more like a direct-to-consumer playbook, that is the point.
Clients: Grace Beverley, Mike Thurston, Ali Abdaal, Iman Gadzhi and others across product and operational buildouts.
Legacy crossover: Vertical integration, operational oversight, margin discipline, capital allocation, long-term brand construction.
Genflow represents the own-the-stack thesis.
Nine Four / Skybound: The IP Incubator
Nine Four is a creator management firm that focuses on building businesses around creators, not just managing their deals. The firm co-founded creator-owned brands like Eamon & Bec’s tea company Habit, Jacksfilms’ newsletter Credit the Creators, and Markiplier’s clothing line Cloak. It structured equity-driven growth rather than one-off monetization.
In 2025, Skybound Entertainment acquired Nine Four. Skybound is the studio behind The Walking Dead and Invincible. They did not buy Nine Four for the roster. They bought it for the model. Skybound already runs a franchise doctrine across comics, television, games, and merchandise. Nine Four brought creator-native business infrastructure into that system.
The timing of this deal was important. The same week Skybound closed that deal, Propagate acquired Parker Management in an eight-figure transaction. Two legacy studios buying creator management firms within days of each other signals something structural. Infrastructure is being consolidated.
Clients: Jacksfilms, I’m Dontai, Jennelle Eliana, Eamon & Bec.
Legacy crossover: IP incubation, franchise expansion, strategic acquisition, integration planning, long-term brand compounding
Nine Four signals that legacy now sees creator management as strategic infrastructure rather than talent brokerage.
Building the Machine
Across these six companies, the models differ. But the underlying logic is familiar. It’s franchise planning, production oversight, licensing strategy, capital allocation, long-term talent stewardship. None of that is foreign to legacy producers. The creator economy didn’t invent those muscles. It simply moved them closer to distribution and closer to the audience itself.
Where legacy tends to struggle is on the digital side: understanding algorithmic distribution, optimizing natively for platforms, running direct-to-consumer businesses, managing supply chains, building community at scale, and using real-time data to inform creative decisions. Those aren’t Hollywood reflexes. They’re digital ones.
This infrastructure layer is no longer experimental. It is already influencing how capital flows, how IP is valued, and who controls long-tail revenue.
The choice is not whether to participate. It is how. Legacy producers can build these new capabilities internally or bring in operators who already have them. Either way, this is not a lateral move. It is a structural shift.
And for those looking for leverage, the blueprint is visible.