With 200 employees, 500 represented talents, and a clear separation between talent management and brand services, Dulcedo Management has established itself as a specialized player in the creator economy. 

Founded in 2008 as a modeling agency in Montreal, the company expanded into influencer representation in 2014, becoming Canada’s first dedicated influencer management agency. 

Today, their roster spans fashion models, Olympic-level athletes, entertainment celebrities, e-sports stars, and top-tier social media creators, with offices in Montreal and Toronto and new locations opening in Los Angeles, New York, and Miami.

“Our entire focus is at taking a talent who’s already earning a million dollars a year or more and to elevate them to much more earnings in a way that’s very aligned with their brand,” explains Karim Leduc, founder and CEO, who has been building online communities for the past 27 years. 

This specialized strategy addresses a conflict in the creator economy, where many agencies attempt to represent talent while simultaneously offering campaign services to brands, raising an inherent question of where loyalty ultimately lies.

Building a Business Around Talent Loyalty

Karim’s solution was structural and definitive: completely separate these functions. This approach was seen in action when Dulcedo acquired Sunday Creative Agency in 2023.

“For ethical reasons, it was better to delineate the service, give our full loyalty and allegiance to our talents, and let the Sunday creative team have their full loyalty and allegiance to the brands,” he explains.

This separation allows Dulcedo’s agents to negotiate more aggressively on behalf of talent without concerns about damaging brand relationships. This commitment to talent interests extends beyond the agency structure into their entire service approach, which Karim describes as “really a white-glove service” customized to each creator’s specific needs.

Dulcedo’s value proposition for creators, however, transcends basic representation. It offers a career development strategy that tackles the hurdles established digital talent face.

“If they’re known for one trick, we want to get new tricks on the table and to develop different angles of their career and potential,” Karim explains, adding that this strategy helps established creators avoid being pigeonholeed in a single content category.

Equally important is their focus on mitigating platform risk. In a field where algorithm changes or platform instability can damage a creator’s business overnight, Dulcedo strategically works to “de-risk their online community by diversifying the number of platforms they’re present in,” according to Karim.

The company also emphasizes long-term financial security through equity building. Karim describes their approach as “helping them with merchandising, developing partnerships with strategic partners, and securing equity so that, if they ever retire, they can transition their careers into investing and entrepreneurship.”

Completing this approach is production infrastructure support. “We can help them assemble a team around them, whether it’s content creator help, production services, or that kind of thing; we can hire people for that,” Karim notes.

Maintaining Quality Through Growth

Despite the creator economy’s growth—with “almost 100% growth year-over-year in terms of the industry size in Canada and globally and 35 to 50% increases year after year for the past five years,” according to Karim—Dulcedo has taken a measured path to expansion.

“We have almost to pump the brakes because it would be very easy for us to hire 100 more people, and there’d still be room for more after that, but we would rather keep the quality high and our standards high,” Karim explains. This discipline, he notes, addresses a core issue in scaling talent management: balancing personalized service with business growth.

To address this challenge, Dulcedo has invested in operational infrastructure. “We’ve invested tremendously in our operations and standard processes, and we have a full-time operations manager who does nothing but constantly put out standard operation procedures,” Karim details.

The company has also developed practical training systems tailored to its predominantly young workforce. “We’ve invested in learning management software for the team so that they can have learning material that feels like scrolling on TikTok. So it’s a very Gen Z and millennial-friendly way of learning,” explains Karim.

This investment in training supports their goal: “We want to teach the career of agent and account manager to people by becoming what you could call the best academy in the world. Our goal is to be the best at teaching this career to people who have never done this kind of work in this industry.”

What’s Next for Dulcedo?

Dulcedo’s growth strategy combines organic expansion with selective acquisitions. The company recently inaugurated a new 12,000-square-foot office in downtown Toronto and has signed leases in Los Angeles, with locations planned in New York and Miami.

In addition to physical expansion, Karim notes that they have “a very big appetite for acquisitions. Over the next few years, we aim to attract other communities to join ours and expand through potential mergers with them. So we’re looking for like-minded entrepreneurs who have similar visions and values to us and welcome them into our community.”

Dulcedo is also entering new talent categories. Having started with traditional modeling and expanded into social media influencer marketing, the company has recently entered the gaming space. “Gaming has been very good to us. We’ve been doing very good numbers in the gaming space, and we’re continuing to double down on it,” Karim shares. 

The company is also preparing to enter the Hollywood acting space with a new talent agency for actors.

As the creator economy continues to grow, with social media increasing in importance and creators becoming “the next rock stars of the world,” as Karim predicts, the value of dedicated, talent-focused representation will likely increase. Dulcedo suggests that amid these changes, clarity of purpose and alignment of incentives may be more valuable than attempting to serve all sides of the marketplace.

When it comes to Dulcedo’s potential motto, Karim’s answer is simple but revealing: “We elevate people.”