The Creator Economy is projected to reach $480 billion in value by 2027, yet most of the people running it still manage business income through personal bank accounts and file taxes as individuals rather than companies. Justin McBryan, founder of the New York-based wealth and business management firm Affluence, sees that disconnect not as an oversight, but as a structural failure the industry has been unwilling to confront.

“Content creators don’t initially start with a business in mind,” Justin says. “It transitions organically. And as a result, there’s quite a lot of fear and financial illiteracy around that.”

Justin founded Affluence with his partners in 2025 after six years in asset and wealth management, most recently at Alpha FMC, a financial management consultancy, where he served as Chief of Staff through an acquisition. The pivot to creator services came not from market analysis but from proximity. His wife is a content creator, her siblings are creators, and a substantial portion of their social circle was building audiences on social platforms. The questions they kept asking, about entity structure, S Corps, quarterly tax estimates, and investment vehicles, were the same ones his clients in traditional finance were asking. Nobody was answering them specifically for creators.

Affluence operates as a combination of a business management firm and a registered investment advisor, regulated to manage and invest on behalf of clients. Its services cover entity formation, tax coordination, bookkeeping, financial planning, cash flow management, and investment portfolio construction. The firm works with state-specific tax partners to handle differences in requirements across jurisdictions. From the client’s perspective, the experience is designed to feel like a single provider.

“A content creator is no different from somebody who opens up a restaurant, a cafe, a clothing brand,” Justin says. “It’s a business in its own right.”

When the Hobby Becomes a Business Nobody Planned

The problem Justin encounters most consistently is not ignorance of financial concepts, but timing. By the time most creators recognize they need structured help, they are already a year or two into running a business without the infrastructure to support it.

“They’ve never set themselves up accordingly,” he says. “We go back to the beginning and set them up like a proper business.”

That backdating creates friction. Creators who have been mixing personal and business expenses for two years are not simply behind on paperwork. They have what Justin calls “dirty books,” financial records so entangled that determining actual business profit becomes difficult, complicating tax filing, investment planning, and any future attempt to formalize the operation.

A 2025 Visa creator report reflects the scale of the problem. According to the research, 86% of creators finance their operations through personal funds, and 62% manage business income through personal bank accounts, while just 19% use dedicated business financial products. Creator confidence drops sharply as topics shift from content to finance: while 80% report confidence in social media management, just 53% feel equally confident in financial management, and 38% in tax and legal compliance.

A One-Stop Shop for a Market That Never Had One

The conventional approach to creator financial services involves multiple separate providers: an accountant for taxes, an attorney for entity structure, an advisor for investments, and an agent for deal management. Justin’s critique of that model is direct.

“You have, like, five people supporting you across one business,” he says. “Ultimately, that’s really difficult for the creator to manage.”

Affluence consolidates business management functions under a single relationship and works directly with talent agents, so creators don’t have to quarterback communication. The Affluence team handles coordination, business planning, entity structure, insurance, and investment management directly. Tax partners handle state-specific filings and bookkeeping. The firm also offers private market investment access, opportunities that clients would not typically reach through standard retail financial channels.

Intake is controlled. The company limits client volume to ensure high service standards are met and that the clients that are onboarded are a good fit for the services we offer. 

“We will never take on a client where the net balance is a loss for the client”. Justin says. “We will always make sure that the net value we provide the client exceeds the ongoing costs. It is so important to us that prospects and clients alike recognize we have their best interests at heart.”

As Creators Scale, the Financial Services Gap Widens

Justin’s market thesis rests on a structural shift in how the Creator Economy generates income. Several years ago, meaningful earnings from content creation were concentrated among a relatively small number of large accounts. That distribution has changed.

“Instead of maybe a couple of hundred really big influencers making a lot of money, we’re now seeing thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of creators earning a living through the content creator industry,” he says.

That shift, he adds, creates a different kind of demand. When high-earning creators needed financial services, they could access infrastructure historically designed for athletes and entertainers, expensive but available. As full-time income creation becomes viable on a smaller scale, the population of creators who need business management services and cannot access traditional providers has grown significantly.

“There’s just a massive amount of demand for additional services that are currently not available to them,” Justin says.

Photo: Justin hosting a street interview

The S Corp Myth and the Cost of Bad Advice

Justin is direct about the financial misinformation circulating in the Creator Economy. The most recurring example he cites involves S Corporation elections, a tax filing status that can reduce self-employment tax obligations under specific conditions.

“There’s this myth that everybody in this industry should be an S Corp election,” he says. “When that’s totally not the case.”

The S Corp structure requires creators to behave like a formal business: paying themselves a documented salary through payroll, maintaining separate accounts, and keeping clean financial records. Creators who pursue the election without meeting those behavioral requirements end up with tax filings that cannot accurately reflect their profitability, according to Justin.

The broader pattern, he argues, is exploitation. Financial illiteracy creates an environment where providers charge high fees for services that, when explained properly, are not complex.

“People quite often use that as an ability to charge extremely high prices for a service that could more easily be explained to them,” he says.

Affluence’s response includes free educational content via a Substack newsletter and an Instagram series designed to make financial concepts accessible to creators who have never thought of themselves as business owners.

The Compounding Case for Starting Simple

Justin’s core advice for creators comes down to four steps, regardless of whether they work with Affluence: set up a proper business entity, separate personal and business expenses, file and pay quarterly taxes, and invest a portion of income each month.

S&P 500 annualized returns have historically averaged around 10% over a 30-year period. Justin frames this in terms a creator can apply: $300,000 invested at age 30 could grow to approximately $5.5 million by retirement, a compounding effect most creators currently have no formal structure to pursue.

“There is nobody there to put money aside for you in the future, the way they would if you worked at a big corporation,” he says. “So you need to develop that habit.”

He is equally cautious about the narrative that creators should be launching product spinoffs. “For every MrBeast and Logan Paul that have created business entities, one in two businesses in the U.S. fail within the first five years,” he notes. “We are a big advocate of doing the simple things right.”

Building the Employer, Self-Employed Creators Don’t Have

As Affluence approaches its first year, Justin identifies the most persistent challenge not as persuading creators they need the services, but persuading them to confront the financial reality that makes those services work.

“The biggest challenge has been convincing creators that they are willing to do the work to set themselves up for the future,” he says.

His five-year vision centers on what he calls peace of mind. By his estimate, business management currently consumes 40 to 50% of a creator’s mental bandwidth. Eliminating that friction, he argues, is the actual performance unlock, allowing creators to focus entirely on content without the operational drag of running an unmanaged business.

“We are, what I like to also say, the employer to the self-employed,” Justin concludes. “We are looking out for your interests in the long term.”

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