When Nicholas Blake reviewed investment opportunities in and around the Influencer Marketing space from a private equity desk, he concluded that the most interesting investment wasn’t the agencies themselves. It was the talent those agencies depended on.

That thesis brought him to The Bloom Network, a boutique creator talent management firm with one manager, a growing roster, and a back office built on spreadsheets. By early 2026, he was the CEO of what is now TBN Talent, applying a private equity firm’s investment & value creation framework to a business the Creator Economy largely treats as a lifestyle venture.

“The Creator Economy is growing,” Nick says. “When the primary investment opportunity becomes competitive, I was taught to look for derivative ideas that still benefit from industry tailwinds. What’s a derivative of Influencer Marketing agencies? It’s the talent themselves.”

TBN Talent manages more than 40 creators across lifestyle, fashion, beauty, and parenting verticals, with a collective reach exceeding 10 million. The company reports more than 6,000 campaigns and relationships with over 200 brand partners. Nick formally took the CEO role in February 2025, then expanded his involvement in early 2026. He raised additional capital, grew the team from three to eight, and shifted from a largely hands-off investment to a full operational build. The agency runs a commission-only model, collecting fees only when its creators earn.

The Investment Thesis That Built the Agency

Nick’s path to talent management runs through investment banking and private equity, not social media. At Canaccord Genuity, he worked on the sell side of commerce and marketing agency M&A, as his firm was known for representing some of the most prominent agencies in the space, including Acorn Influence, Power Digital, and WPromote. At ZMC, a media and entertainment-focused private equity firm, he built out a commerce-enablement thesis and evaluated many agencies as potential targets, including commerce, marketing, and traditional talent management.

When he began looking for a direct investment opportunity on his own, brand-side marketing agencies were too competitive and capital-intensive to offer compelling entry points. Talent management firms were fragmented and operationally underleveraged.

Nick says he evaluates businesses by identifying specific levers before committing. “Kate Shaw had built a great and growing business; she knew what she was doing,” Nick says. “Let me take some of these other things and let her focus on what she does best.”

Those levers: no affiliate platform strategy, below-market pricing strategy, and manual-only back-office processes. He invested and began pulling on them, stepping into a fuller operational role when the window opened. The market has since caught up to his thesis. “There are a lot of people who want to go and roll up talent management businesses for creators,” Nick notes. “An old ZMC colleague and I joke that I kind of had that idea first.” 

Rather than pursue an acquisition-based roll-up, he says TBN shifted to organic growth for now.

Making the Brand an Asset, Not an Obstacle

Earlier this year, the agency dropped “The Bloom Network” name and condensed to TBN Talent. Nick frames the decision in functional terms.

The previous visual identity had accumulated signals tied to parenting and motherhood content. “This would be great if we wanted to solely focus on these verticals, but we’d like to expand our reach,” said Nick.  When TBN’s team reached out to fashion or beauty brands, or to creators in those verticals, the mismatch was immediate.

“If we reached out to a high fashion creator and we had parenting brands primarily on our website, it’s a little bit like, ‘Will they really be able to help me?'” Nick says. “I felt like we needed to make a quick shift to something that allowed our teammates to reach out to brands, to reach out to talent, to not be met with friction.”

The updated website, social presence, and category-neutral visual identity were designed to remove one friction point from outreach. The agency’s stated “culture first” positioning also functions similarly in Nick’s telling: staying current on trends to better advise talent, not a philosophical reorientation. The practical test is whether a gaming creator and a fashion creator can see themselves on the same roster without the brand sending contradictory signals to either.

Affiliate Platforms as TBN’s First Unlocked Revenue Lever

One of Nick’s first operational moves was hiring Stephanie Witt as TBN’s inaugural Director of Affiliate, recruited from the brand side of platforms including ShopMy and LTK.

The two platforms serve different creator profiles in TBN’s framework. LTK suits creators whose strength is reel-based content, pursuing higher-value brand campaigns. ShopMy works better for creators with engaged story audiences monetizing through direct link-sharing. Both platforms also pay out faster than traditional brand deals, where Nick says timelines have stretched from 30 days to as long as 120 in some cases.

An education component runs through TBN’s affiliate strategy. Nick cites a specific example: ShopMy operates a tiered system that unlocks direct brand-messaging capability at a certain threshold, and many creators on the platform are unaware it exists. “We give them case studies of our existing talent and help them understand what they may be missing out on,” Nick says. “If they still continue to make the decision that they don’t want to be on it. That’s completely okay. But at least we did our job.”

Why Fashion & Beauty Called for a Different Kind of Hire

The vertical TBN is now pushing into is fashion & beauty, a category that operates on tighter relationship networks than lifestyle or parenting content.

Sydney Palmer, brought in from other agencies with fashion & beauty experience, has laid the initial foundation. Off of those tailwinds, TBN has hired Marissa Muscari, whose background was in creator-like deals at conventional talent management firms, where she had worked with clients including Jordyn Woods, Brooks Nader, and Barbie Ferreira, among others.

“I do see an opportunity here to take someone who understands an entire market of people, brands, network, in the traditional sense, and apply it to our playbook,” Nick says. “We all know the high fashion industry. You’ve got to know people to be in that category.”

Beyond her industry relationships, what drew Nick to Marissa was a capability TBN had been building toward: identifying early-stage talent, adjusting their positioning, and developing them toward brand-readiness before they arrive at a negotiating table. “I know how to scout talent,” Nick quotes her saying. “With a few tweaks here and there, we can better position them for brand deals.”

Brand Power, Creator Value, and Where the Leverage Sits

Nick does not frame creator management as a business where talent holds the upper hand. For most of TBN’s roster, brands retain clear pricing authority.

“Brands will tell you, ‘If you don’t take this, I’m going to go find someone just like you,’” he says. Nick believes the balance will shift as more brand budgets move toward the Creator Economy, but he is direct that it hasn’t shifted for most creators yet.

One structural mismatch he identifies: analytics frameworks that brands rely on can miss meaningful commercial signals. A creator with 20,000 followers generating 200,000 views per video may be priced against follower count alone, leaving both parties worse off.

Nick also sees value in escaping through contract rigidity. According to him, brands that treat creator deals as vendor transactions typically forfeit organic content and unpaid product mentions in regular videos that generate impressions beyond what paid placements deliver. A creator who genuinely uses a brand’s product will feature it voluntarily; one working against a tight deliverable spec usually won’t.

His finance background, he says, surfaces a different set of contract issues. Standard agreements often build in easy exit clauses for brands without corresponding protections for creators. “If there’s an easy out for a brand, there should be an easy out for a creator,” Nick says. “If there’s a make-good for a brand, there should be a make-good for a creator.”

TBN’s commission-only structure creates its own alignment test. If a creator’s deal volume doesn’t justify TBN’s involvement, Nick says the agency will recommend they operate independently. “We may be having a conversation with you in two months when we feel like it’s just best for you to do this on your own,” Nick says. “We’re just taking value from you, and that’s unfair.”

Building the Standard

Nick expects the market to move toward equity-style and revenue-share structures between brands and creators, particularly as economic conditions pressure marketing budgets. Short-term paid campaigns, he argues, don’t capture the full value of genuine product affinity, and different deal architecture may be needed to sustain the organic behavior that produces the most valuable content. “It’s unpredictable what kind of ideas come out,” he says. “What really moves it is what the biggest brands or the biggest creators start to do.”

For TBN, the near-term priorities are deepening the fashion & beauty build-out and expanding affiliate revenue opportunities for its existing creators. The five-year goal is stated plainly.

“I want TBN to be recognized as the independent agency that creators trust because we’re transparent, invested in their success, and focused on building long-term partnerships,” Nick says. “If that also raises the standard for how agencies support creators across the industry, that would be something we’re incredibly proud of.”

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