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

  Posted by Deep-Juggernaut9106 on April 20, 2026 at 10:23 pm

  

  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.

  Deep-Juggernaut9106 replied 2 hours, 37 minutes ago

  

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