How I became an Influencer Talent Manager and built an agency

Hi, it’s lovely to meet you and I’m excited to share my story about how I became an Influencer Talent Manager. In the years since I established my Talent Management Agency, I’ve won awards, closed over $6M worth of brand deals and managed a diverse, amazing  roster of creators, whom I’m obsessed with!

My commitment to intentionally supporting creators from all walks of life has allowed me to elevate both established and emerging influencers, helping them secure partnerships that align with their values and grow their careers.

I’ve been in the business long enough to know what it takes to thrive, whether negotiating contracts, scaling content strategies, or fostering long-term brand relationships. My approach combines expertise, authenticity, and a passion for helping creators succeed in a competitive industry. 

I don’t just talk about influencer marketing – I live and breathe it, working alongside my creators to make sure they reach their full potential while also delivering results for the brands they partner with. If you know me, or are a friend of mine, I go from zero to 100 mph when chatting about Influencers. Love building brands and supporting other people to make their dreams happen.

My Background 

I didn’t set out to have an Influencer Talent Agency. No, that’s not how this business came about. I joke now that the Universe wanted me to be an Influencer Talent Agent. The Universe was metaphorically hitting me with 2×4” until I finally got the clue. 

Now that I have an Influencer Talent Management Agency, there’s nothing else I’d rather be doing. 

I’ll keep it short but the backstory is relevant. I get asked all the time how I started my Influencer talent agency.

In January 2011, I was living in Barcelona and desperately needed to make money. I had recently traveled around the world backpacking for a year and now set up shop in Barcelona. I was teaching English but truthfully hated it. I was looking for an opportunity to use my brain, contribute to the greater good and earn more.

So I became a nutrition coach for women running half marathons. I would schedule all my clients for a Saturday, at a friend’s house who had better internet than I did. During the work I’d create online programs and market myself. 

And with that, I became an entrepreneur without intending or planning to. I honestly just needed to make more money. 

That chapter of my life transitioned me to doing Fractional COO + strategy work with small, service based online businesses. Companies would hire me part time for a set amount of hours each week to help them run their business. In this chapter I had a bunch of clients on retainer and business was doing well. 

All of this operations and strategy work for other small businesses was a lot of fun for me. My brain is really wired well to help people see their dreams and then figure out how to make them into a daily, weekly and monthly plan to achieve them. 

Most people go into business to do the “art” of their business be it financial planning, life coaching or building an online community. Not many people want to really get into the nuts and bolts of running their business. 

But I love getting into the behind the scenes of people’s business. Nothing makes me happier than figuring out a plan, working the plan and getting them all organized. 

I also had a 2 day strategy session intensive. In those 2 days, I would do a deep dive into someone’s business and be another set of eyes and ears on it. This was designed for people who needed a quick injection of business insight and help. 

My first influencer client 

A woman named Lorraine Ladish reached out to me & scheduled a strategy session intensive in May of 2017. I flew down to Florida and spent a couple days with her. 

Truthfully it was my first time meeting an Influencer and speaking with her about her business. Influencers weren’t nearly as ubiquitous as they are now. I hadn’t even thought about how their business would work. 

During her strategy session, we spoke about how her business operated, what she charged for, what her rates were etc. At that time, brand collaborations consisted of blog articles, facebook posts and twitter chats! Yes, I realize I’ve completely dated myself.

While I was down there, 2 brand opportunities reached out to her to partner. In response, she asked me to moonlight as her manager and answer them. So I did, asking for about 3x more than she would have (we had just gone over her rates that day so in my mind, it was just math). 

Both of those campaign opportunities said yes. That set us on a path to work together as Influencer & manager. When I left our session to return to Colorado, she asked me to be her manager and I said yes. We got business married! More on that later.  

Turns out it wasn’t just an impactful experience for the trajectory of my life but on Lorraine’s as well which you can read about here.

Growing my roster 

I left Florida after that visit with Lorraine as an Influencer Talent Manager. Other than helping her (and figuring out as I went along), I had no intentions of expanding this area of my business. 

But thanks to Lorraine, who has an amazing network and always talked about what she was up to, word about me spread. 

To be clear, it wasn’t people clamoring to know about me, Johanna Voss. It was people wanting to know more about this Influencer Talent Manager Lorraine referenced.  At that time in 2017, the Influencers who had managers were really big YouTube stars. Lorraine had about 19k followers on Instagram then, which I thought, and still do, was a HUGE following!

So Lorraine’s network led to another Influencer that I brought on board who led to another Influencer and so it unfolded. After a while I had established an amazing roster, all of women of color at the time. Today you can see my current, most up to date Influencer Talent roster here. 

What I love is that each person on my roster, I can follow the trail of breadcrumbs of how they came into my world. Yvette Marquez of Muy Bueno was in line at school pickup and happened upon a Facebook live that Lorraine Ladish of Viva Fifty was doing. Lorraine mentioned me as her influencer manager. 

Yvette was bored, googled my name, saw I live in Denver where she lives which prompted her to reach out to me. I even posted about this on Instagram!

I realize now, years later, how lucky I am that I’ve built my successful roster and Influencer Talent Management Agency all via word of mouth. I thank my lucky stars for the people on my roster. They have been instrumental in my success. It is teamwork for sure. A manager is only as good as the talent they’re representing. I hit the jackpot with this crew.

Making great, wise decisions about who you add to your Influencer Roster can have a huge impact, positive or negative on your success as an Agency and you as an Influencer Talent Manager. 

Having a really deep understanding of how your roster choices can make or break you as an Influencer Talent Manager is something I’m really passionate about. I’ve spoken about it multiple times on different podcast and webinars. It’s also a key theme in my 8 week Influencer Talent Manager Coaching Mentorship Program. 

I strongly believe in the law of attraction as a key part of how I’ve built an amazing roster. My digital footprint conveys what I’m all about as an Influencer Talent Manager. People love how much I cheerlead my own talent, how I support up and coming people in the industry and don’t gatekeep information about negotiation, rates or hosting an Influencer Management Agency retreat.  I do a lot of education about this industry, host webinars and participate in panels to pull back as much of the curtain as I can.

Across Instagram, Threads, Linkedin, my website, my newsletter and Substack, I’m an open book about all things related to my Agency. Influencers see that and want to be a part of it. Talent Managers want to learn from me exactly how I did it.

Starting an influencer talent agency 

Starting an Influencer Talent Agency was NOT on my bingo card, that’s for sure. But now that I have one, I can’t imagine life without my clients and negotiating deals 24/7. 

I mentioned earlier about how every client who is on my roster has left a trail of breadcrumbs in their wake. What I mean by this is nobody came into my world randomly, it was all through a connection of sorts.

My roster is currently, and the majority always has been, people of color. As I didn’t plan to build an Influencer Talent Agency I can’t say that was intentional. What I do recognize is that it happened by default. Now it’s 100% absolutely by design to work with diverse Influencers with varied backgrounds and different perspectives. 

I’m here to lift up other’s voices. That I know for sure. I’m an enthusiastic cheerleader with my personality (who is also really good at asking for things!) so a talent manager is a perfect career for me. By nature I’m always rooting for others. 

Even as I unintentionally built my Influencer Talent Agency, I always knew that I got to choose who I worked with. This was my business. I work for myself and the work could look like whatever I wanted it to look like! 

This meant, not only did it matter to me the type of business people were doing or what content they were creating, but how they showed up as humans. If I was going to surround myself with people, they had to be amazing. That much is still true. 

Starting an Influencer Talent Agency is risky. You’re taking a risk saying yes to managing someone you might not know well. You’re starting a new business which is always risky. Lucky for me, I was able to balance that risk by maintaining my fractional COO and Strategy work. 

At that time, doing Influencer Talent Management was something I did on the side. Again, I wasn’t looking to grow my roster. It just happened. It grew and grew until it was taking up enough of my work time that I knew I needed to Influencer Talent Management full time. 

I’m big on trusting my intuition. And that voice was telling me to wrap up my COO clients and dive head first into Talent Management. I also knew at that point, that regardless of the direction I went with work, I was betting on myself. When I do that, it never goes wrong. 

As it takes awhile to get up and running with consistent brand collabs for Influencers, I’m glad I had financial cover to pay my bills & my salary. For anyone looking to start a new business, I highly recommend sticking with what’s making money while you grow something new. 

Why influencer talent management works for me 

Honestly, I didn’t know exactly what the role of an Influencer Talent Manager entailed when I said yes to Lorraine. At a very high level I understood the concept of a manager. More so related to a sports star or an actor. 

Managers or agents negotiate deals and help one with their brand/business as another set of eyes and ears. This is no different than what an Influencer Talent Manager does. But I didn’t really know that yet.

At my core, I’m a cheerleader (enneagram 7 anyone?) & have always been a big advocate for others. Influencers were a new thing to me and I love being challenged to expand my knowledge. That was very appealing. 

It wasn’t that I specifically wanted to be an Influencer Talent Manager per se. What I understood the role to be, were skill sets that I had. It was something new to me at the time, which was appealing. 

What you don’t know about me yet but is relevant to the success I’ve had in this role, is this. At this point of partnering up with Lorraine in 2017, I had a career working on political campaigns for 8 years under my belt. 

For my first 8 years out of college, I worked on political campaigns. I worked on 2 presidential campaigns along with every political position in between – Congress, Governor, State Legislators, School Board, City Council and yes, even dog catcher. 

I had lived abroad three times in Spain while also backpacking around the world for a year.  In 2017, I’d also been running my own business for 6+ years. Where am I going with this? 

By this point, I had a set of skills that served me very well & set me up to be a successful Influencer Talent Agent.  I had years under my belt of having to think quickly on my feet when traveling, how to navigate tricky situations when I don’t speak the language and I’m used to asking for things. Be it knocking on doors asking for people’s vote or money, I’m quite comfortable asking for things and communicating with others. I’m very versed in staying organized when there’s a lot of logistics and keeping all the trains on the track, so to speak.

Helping you get started 

The above is just a glimpse at how my Influencer Talent Management Agency came to be. What I didn’t get into is firing clients, figuring out which Influencers to say yes to (I say no to over 100 Influencers each year who want a manager), setting rates,  learning how to ask for money and counter when a brand reaches out, managing multiple personalities of clients who are all really busy and keeping all their projects organized.  More here on how to start an Influencer Talent Agency.

I know firsthand the challenges, triumphs, and learning curves that come with building a successful influencer talent agency. If you’re reading this because you’re at the beginning stages of being an Influencer Talent Manager thinking, ‘I want to build my own successful Talent Management Agency,’ then you’re in the right place.

Through my 8-week Influencer Talent Manager Coaching Program, I teach everything I’ve learned from closing over $6M in brand deals, building an agency from scratch, and staying ahead in an ever-changing industry. 

You won’t just learn theory—you’ll gain actionable strategies and insider knowledge that took me years to master. You meet with me for an hour each week discussing what step to take, &  how to take it. I’ll coach you what you need to do to create your award winning Influencer Talent Management Agency. 

Whether you’re struggling to attract influencers, negotiate better deals, or build your agency’s identity, this program is designed to walk you through every step of the journey. I’ll be there to guide you, giving you the confidence to grow your business and land those game-changing deals. 

Ready to take the next step and start building your own successful agency? Join me in my exclusive 8-week Influencer Talent Manager Coaching Program, where you’ll gain the tools and strategies to succeed. Spots are limited, so don’t wait—apply today and let’s turn your dream into a reality.