Anyone else spending more time on brand deal admin than actually making content? Question

Honestly I just wanted to vent and also genuinely ask if anyone's figured out a better way to do this.

For the past year and a bit I've been handling every single brand deal myself. No manager, no agent, no assistant. Just me, Gmail, a notes app, and an increasingly chaotic folder of PDFs I've labelled things like "contract FINAL v3 USE THIS ONE."

At first it felt empowering. I'm in control, I know exactly what I've agreed to, no one's taking 20% of my deals. Fine. Cool. Grown woman running her own business.

But slowly, quietly, it started eating everything.

It starts small. A follow-up email you keep pushing to tomorrow. A contract you skim instead of actually reading because it's 14 pages and you've already got three other tabs open. A call where a brand says something vague about exclusivity and you think "I'll sort the details in the contract" and then the contract arrives and you're too tired to fight it so you just… sign.

Then you're chasing invoices manually. Sending the same "just following up on payment 👋" email for the third time, to three different brands, in the same week. Copy-pasting your own media kit into a pitch email you've written from scratch again because you can't find the last version. Realising mid-filming that you missed a deadline for a deliverable you'd genuinely forgotten existed because it was buried in a thread from six weeks ago.

The weekend that broke me: I had a free Sunday in London, first one in a while. Woke up with actual energy. Was going to film, edit, get ahead for once.

Instead I spent six hours in my inbox.

Missed a payment follow-up entirely. Let an exclusivity clause through that I only noticed two weeks later when another brand reached out same category, locked out for 90 days, completely my fault for not reading properly. Didn't pitch a single brand I'd been meaning to reach out to for weeks. Just… triaged emails until it got dark outside and I felt that specific kind of tired that has nothing to do with being physically exhausted.

And here's the thing that really got me: I don't even have that many deals. I'm not a huge creator. I'm not juggling 30 partnerships at once. This is a manageable number of deals being managed incredibly badly, purely because there's no system just me reacting to whatever landed in my inbox most recently.

I cannot imagine how creators doing serious volume handle this. Are they all just suffering quietly? Have they all got managers I can't afford? Am I missing something obvious?

There has to be a better way than this. Because right now the admin is the job, and the content is the thing I fit in around it. And that's completely backwards.

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Independent-Ant-7230•3 months ago•1

Yeah this is exactly the point where it stops being “content creator” and starts being “operator.”

The problem isn’t volume, it’s no system. Even a few deals feel overwhelming if everything lives in inbox threads. Most people either build a simple structure or it just keeps getting worse.

What usually helps is separating things, one place for deals, one for deadlines, one for payments. Even a basic tracker for brand, deliverables, due dates, payment status makes a huge difference.

I’ve seen people also standardize assets, like one media kit, one pitch template, one place for contracts. I’ve run my docs and deal assets through Runable just to keep things cleaner and easier to reuse.

You don’t need a manager yet, you just need a system.

wilzerjeanbaptiste•3 months ago•1

Oh man, this one hits close. I've talked to so many creators dealing with this exact thing and it's always the same pattern. The admin starts as "just emails" and then quietly becomes a full second job.

A few things that seem to help the people I've seen manage this well:

Templates for everything. Contract template, rate card template, decline email, follow-up email, invoice reminder. Ten templates written once saves maybe 5 hours a week forever. Notion or Google Docs is fine for this, no fancy tool needed.

A single source of truth for deals. One spreadsheet with brand, contact, rate, deliverables, deadline, status, payment status. Sounds obvious but most creators have this spread across Gmail, iMessage, DMs, and their head. When it's in one place you stop dropping things.

Pre-set rates. The second someone asks "what are your rates?" you should have a PDF ready with 3 package options. Back and forth on pricing is the single biggest admin killer I see.

If you ever do get to a point where you want help, a fractional creator ops person (not a manager) is often cheaper and more useful than an agent. They handle the admin, you keep your deals and your percentage. But honestly, if you tighten the templates and the spreadsheet first, a lot of the chaos goes away on its own.

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