In June, Reign Maker Group, the Los Angeles-based Creator Economy holding company co-founded by Jonathan Chanti and Brad Morris, announced a majority stake acquisition in Hyphen HQ, a talent management firm founded by creator industry veterans Victoria Bachan and Alicia Rose to represent creators across beauty, fashion, lifestyle, wellness, sports, and finance. The Hyphen deal arrived centered around “HyphenShare,” a proprietary profit-sharing and options program that plans to extend equity stakes to both Hyphen’s talent managers and the creators they represent, linking the financial upside of building the agency to the people doing the building.

The acquisition aims to address one of creator management’s oldest problems: retention. Managers build client relationships, develop institutional knowledge, and accumulate leverage, only to leave for competing firms, often taking much of that value with them. Non-compete clauses have long been the industry’s standard response, but Reign Maker argues ownership creates a stronger incentive to stay than contractual restrictions ever could. 

Damian Skoczylas, a veteran talent executive with prior roles at Viral Nation, Studio71, and AwesomenessTV, oversees Reign Maker Group’s portfolio of five talent management companies as President. He frames the “Hyphen Group” investment as the natural extension of a thesis he and Chanti began developing years earlier. 

“We identified the entrepreneurial nature of the representation space,” Damian says. “The barrier to entry to do it is quite low. You need a laptop, really good talent, an email address, and you can be up and running.” That low barrier is precisely the problem: when replication is easy, the most durable retention mechanism is something a better offer at a rival firm cannot simply replicate.

Why Non-Competes Don’t Solve What Ownership Can

The mechanics of manager movement in creator talent management follow a consistent pattern. “You build something for a couple of years, and then you don’t feel that you have real ownership over it,” Damian says. “You become a cog in a machine of sorts, and then you go to another company and start the whole process over again.”

A non-compete restricts departure. It does not change the incentive to leave. “The best way to get people bought in is some form of ownership, because that’s something that is durable,” Damian says. “It creates a better drive.” 

The same logic applies to talent. Creators shift between management companies for similar reasons, and “HyphenShare,” as designed by Victoria and Alicia, is intended to create a compounding financial incentive on both sides of that relationship to stay and build rather than exit and restart. 

‘HyphenShare’: Vesting, Profit-Sharing, and Early-Stage Candor

The architecture follows a vesting model, with profit-sharing. The structural objective is to shift the frame from earning a commission on a deal to building something whose value compounds with sustained contribution. Standard management arrangements do not include creator participation in agency equity.

“HyphenShare” hopes to attract creators to the Hyphen roster, opening the door to potentially participants in Hyphen’s upside rather than sole generators of it.

Shared Deal Flow as the Holding Company’s Structural Advantage

Reign Maker Group holds five talent management companies in its portfolio. The holding company model, in Damian’s framing, creates an internal advantage that equity alone cannot deliver: a compensation structure that redirects energy from desk-level competition toward shared outcomes.

“Brand deals that come in and other opportunities are shared across the board,” Damian says. “People aren’t competing with each other; they’re working together. And the ones that benefit the most will be the talent.” A manager specialized in tech creators who receives a lifestyle brand inquiry routes it to a colleague in that vertical, with both participating in the result.

When Reign Maker Group acquires or backs a company, it functions as an infrastructure provider and strategic backer without dissolving the acquired entity into an undifferentiated whole. Back-office operations, tech systems, and network access come in; distinct identities remain. 

In the Hyphen deal, Victoria and Alicia retain operational and visionary leadership while Reign Maker Group supplies the scaffolding. 

Hollywood Access Through Partnership, Not Internal Build-Out

As creators develop ambitions in film, television, live touring, and stand-up comedy, their management requirements expand beyond what a digital-first firm is built to deliver. Rather than attempt to build those capabilities in-house, Reign Maker Group has pursued formal partnerships with firms that already have them.

The most developed example is an arrangement with Paradigm, the talent agency with established infrastructure across traditional Hollywood verticals. “There are a lot of creators in our space who have desires to cross over into Hollywood,” Damian says. “Rather than us trying to build that internally, we partner with industry experts.”

The exchange runs in both directions. Reign Maker Group provides social channel development and brand deal access for some of Paradigm’s existing celebrity clients; Paradigm provides Hollywood infrastructure for Reign Maker’s digital-native talent. 

Business-Minded Creators as the Priority

The infrastructure Reign Maker Group has built around collaboration, partnership, and ownership alignment is calibrated for a specific creator profile. “The creators who are most exciting for us are business-minded creators,” Damian says. “People who want to build businesses.”

The management teams function as consultants of sorts, connecting creators to adjacent opportunities in ventures, merchandising, licensing, and podcasting based on where their ambitions point. The orientation begins with identifying the destination. “What’s your summit? And then how do we work backwards to get to that summit?” Damian says. “In order to get up to the summit of Mount Everest, you have to go to Base Camp One, Base Camp Two.”

Creators whose primary objective is brand deal volume are also served. But Hyphen, the Paradigm arrangement, and the holding company’s collaboration design represent a structural bet on the cohort that wants to build past that baseline. 

The Five-Year Vision: Owners, Not Employees

Beyond Hyphen, Reign Maker Group is tracking two adjacent opportunities Damian describes as still underserved. The first is education infrastructure for what he identifies as an incoming generation of creators and industry professionals, specifically Gen Alpha and those seeking entry to the representation side of the business. “There’s a whole class of people that haven’t entered the market yet,” he says.

The second is a potential broker network that would extend Reign Maker Group’s tools and systems to independent operators without requiring full portfolio integration, giving aspiring managers access to infrastructure they would otherwise have to build or go without.

In five years, the version of the firm Damian describes is defined less by scale than by a particular organizational quality: people who stayed, built, and experienced the difference between a commission check and a stake in what they helped build. 

“If you have ownership in what you’re doing, it really changes how one thinks,” he says. “We believe almost everyone is an entrepreneur, regardless of what sort of role you sit in. If you have a piece of something, it’s going to be a lot more valuable, and you’re going to feel a lot more fulfilled.” 

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