Confidential Buyer Briefing

Stellamont is representing Project FastBreak, a Florida-based digital-first sports and creator management business. The company originates opportunities with brands and agencies, then fulfills those mandates through represented talent across athletes, creators, sports, and culture.

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Building on Last Week’s Framework

Last week, we outlined five strategic pillars that make a creator business sellable: own a commercial niche, build brand-direct revenue, create repeatable services, ensure roster durability, and institutionalize operations.

That’s the what. This is the how.

If you’re running a creator-focused agency or service business, knowing what to build is only half the battle. The other half is executing it operationally. This post dives into the specific systems, team structures, revenue models, and processes that transform strategic intentions into buyer-ready assets.

Introduction

Influencer marketing is entering its next phase.

The winning model is no longer a one-off post, a large impression count, or a celebrity endorsement that is difficult to connect to revenue. Brands increasingly want creator partnerships that can produce content, test messaging, support paid media, and generate measurable customer acquisition.

That shift is visible in the way performance-focused agencies are building their offerings. Creator-generated content can be reused across paid social. Whitelisted campaigns allow brands to amplify content through a creator’s account. Ongoing creator relationships create a repeatable testing engine rather than a single campaign moment.

The result is a creator system with three connected functions:

• content production;

• customer acquisition; and

• performance learning.

Why This Matters for Business Valuations

This shift changes how buyers underwrite creator-economy businesses. Revenue tied primarily to one-off talent introductions or pass-through campaign spend is usually viewed as less durable. Revenue from recurring retainers, managed services, paid-media execution, creator-content production, affiliate programs, and measurable customer acquisition is more attractive because it can be repeated across clients.

The most valuable businesses can demonstrate:

• recurring or repeatable revenue rather than isolated campaign spikes;

• direct brand relationships that are not dependent on a single creator;

• gross margins that remain attractive after creator and contractor costs;

• campaign data showing conversion, customer acquisition cost, return on ad spend, or other commercial outcomes; and

• a team and process that can deliver across multiple clients without depending entirely on the founder.

Maximizing Value: Building a Business That Buyers Want

For owners preparing for a sale, the opportunity is clear. A creator roster helps generate attention, but a documented system for sourcing creators, producing content, testing creative, managing media, and proving results makes the business more transferable.

That transferability can improve buyer confidence, expand the strategic buyer universe, and support a stronger valuation.

1. Build Your Playbook Stack

Create documented systems that survive leadership change. This is what buyers actually pay for.

Build your content playbook. Document what works: messaging frameworks that drive conversions, content formats that perform, creative briefs that resonate. Codify your testing approach. How do you decide what to test? What metrics determine success? Make it repeatable enough that a new team member can execute it without hand-holding.

Document your creator sourcing process. How do you identify performers? What’s your screening criteria? How do you onboard and brief them? Build templates for creator briefs, performance expectations, and content delivery. Buyers want to know that tomorrow’s hired creator can hit results without you personally vetting them.

Create your media buying playbook. Outline your approach to audience targeting, bid strategy, creative rotation, and scaling winners. Document your budget allocation logic. Show that your media decisions are systematic, not intuitive.

Finally, build your measurement framework. Define what success looks like for every campaign type. Document how you track attribution. Show the pathway from creator content to customer acquisition. This is the moat. Buyers will replicate your team before they replicate your talent relationships, so make your data infrastructure bulletproof.

2. Shift Revenue to Recurring Models

Campaign fees are transactional and volatile. Buyers value predictability.

Move clients to retainer-based pricing for ongoing services. Structure it as a baseline monthly fee plus performance bonuses. This locks in revenue and gives buyers visibility into future cash flow. It also means your best performing client relationships become the most sticky.

Create managed service tiers. Offer “Creator Content Production” as a monthly service. “Paid Media Management” as a managed service. “Creative Testing and Optimization” as a retainer add-on. Break your value into repeatable functions that clients can purchase month after month.

Build affiliate and commission programs where applicable. If you’re driving trackable customer acquisition, take a percentage of new customer revenue. This creates an aligned incentive structure and recurring revenue that scales with client success, not your time.

Price your services to capture the value you create. If you’re driving measurable customer acquisition, your pricing should reflect that ROI, not just your hours. Buyers will pay more for proven revenue generation than for campaign management.

3. Make Your Client Relationships Transferable

The moment your biggest client says “I only work with the founder,” your valuation caps out. Fix this now.

Assign named account leads to every material client. Invest in training these people to own the relationship, not just execute the work. Have them present results. Have them participate in strategy calls. Make the client relationship belong to the team.

Create client review cadences that don’t depend on you. Quarterly business reviews with standardized decks and metrics. Monthly performance reviews. Weekly execution stand-ups. Systematize the communication so that if you step away, the client doesn’t feel abandoned.

Document your client success metrics. What does the client care about? Conversions? CAC? ROAS? Engagement lift? Create dashboards that show these metrics automatically, updated weekly. Make it boring for the client and for your team. Remove the need for heroic end-of-month analysis.

4. Scale Your Team Away from You

Founder-dependent businesses are valued at founder multiples, not business multiples.

Hire for the systems you’ve documented. A good operator can execute your playbook. You don’t need to hire replicas of yourself.

Build clear roles: a creative director who owns content output quality, a performance analyst who owns data and attribution, a client lead who owns relationships, a creator manager who owns outreach and retention. These roles scale independently.

Document decision rights. Who decides what to test? Who can approve media spend above X dollars? Who owns client escalations? Make it clear where the boundaries are. Buyers want to see that decisions don’t all flow through the founder.

Invest in junior team members with growth potential. Train them on your playbooks. Let them run smaller accounts or campaigns. When a buyer asks “What happens if the founder leaves?” you should have answer: “These three people can run the business without skipping a beat.” That’s worth millions in valuation.

5. Build Your Creator Network as an Asset

Talent relationships are personal, but networks are systematic.

Document your creator performance data. Which creators consistently hit your conversion targets? Which ones are reliable? Which have the strongest audiences for specific client verticals? Turn reputation into data.

Formalize your creator agreements. Make terms repeatable and clear. This way, onboarding new creators or expanding relationships doesn’t require founder negotiation every time.

Create creator tiers based on performance and reliability. Tier 1 creators get priority access to high-value campaigns. Tier 2 get regular mid-level campaigns. Tier 3 are bench players. This allows you to scale creator operations without the founder personally managing every relationship.

Offer recurring retainers to your best creators when it makes sense. Give them predictable income for monthly content obligations. This strengthens the relationship and gives you a cost structure buyers can forecast.

6. Institutionalize Your Performance Edge

What makes your creative better than competitors? What makes your media buying smarter? Make that a system, not a person.

Build a creative testing framework. Design and execute tests systematically. Track what performs. Share learnings across clients. The more you test, the more data you accumulate, the better your next campaign becomes. This is a learning moat that gets stronger over time.

Create performance benchmarks. For each client vertical or audience type, know what good CAC looks like. What conversion rates are realistic. What creative typically performs best. Compare every campaign against these benchmarks. This gives you an edge and gives buyers evidence that you have one.

Document your media spend logic. Why did you allocate 60% to channel A and 40% to channel B? Why did you pause campaign X and scale campaign Y? Write it down. Build a decision log. Buyers want to see that you’re making informed choices, not gut calls.

The Math on Valuation

Businesses with predictable recurring revenue, documented systems, scalable teams, and proven performance metrics trade at 6x to 9x EBITDA in the creator services and marketing services space.

Businesses that are founder-dependent, reliant on one-off campaigns, with transactional pricing and undocumented process, typically trade at 4x to 6x EBITDA.

On a $4M revenue business, the difference between trading at 4x EBITDA and 9x EBITDA is $8M in valuation.

Here’s the math:

• $4M revenue × 40% EBITDA margin = $1.6M EBITDA

• At 4x EBITDA: $1.6M × 4 = $6.4M valuation

• At 9x EBITDA: $1.6M × 9 = $14.4M valuation

• Difference: $14.4M - $6.4M = $8M

That premium exists for one reason: buyers will pay more for businesses they can scale without the founder.

Start building these systems today. They make your business stronger to operate. They make it more valuable to sell. And they make it more likely that your team can scale what you’ve built without you.

The market is moving away from “How many impressions did the campaign generate?” and toward “Can this system acquire customers, improve creative, and scale across clients?”

That is the distinction between influencer marketing as media spend and creator marketing as infrastructure.

Source: Influencer Advantage: The Creator Economy Is Shifting From Brand Awareness to Measurable Customer Acquisition

✦ Talk to Stellamont

Thinking about selling your agency, talent management firm, creator business, or media company? We advise founders on valuation, transaction preparation, and competitive sell-side processes across the creator economy.

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The creator economy is still being described as a talent business. That description is increasingly incomplete.

The most active buyers are not only looking for access to creators. They are looking for businesses that can help brands participate in culture, activate fandom, and produce measurable commercial outcomes at scale.

That matters for founders building agencies, management companies, creator platforms, and talent businesses. A roster can create attention. A repeatable operating model is what creates enterprise value.

The recent transaction pattern

Our latest review of June and July public announcements surfaced 13 supported transactions across creator media, commerce, software, music, and agencies.

Accenture Song agreed to acquire Whalar, adding a scaled creator and social agency to its customer-growth platform.

NextTrip acquired a controlling interest in YADA, adding a TikTok commerce agency to its creator, entertainment, and travel-commerce ecosystem.

Penske Media acquired Vox Media’s digital brands, including The Verge, Eater, SB Nation, Popsugar, and The Dodo.

LBG Media acquired 75% of Uncovered, bringing a Gen Z-focused social-first creative agency into its media platform.

ECD International acquired a majority stake in SC Media House, adding an influencer-marketing agency to its broader services platform.

Miroma Group took a majority stake in Ad Results Media, combining creator, audio, podcast, and performance media capabilities.

Podean acquired Social Commerce Club, expanding its TikTok Shop and social-commerce infrastructure.

AMZ Advisers acquired Reach Social Commerce, moving from Amazon growth services into TikTok Shop.

Wonderloom Media launched with the acquisition of Dr. Insanity, treating a YouTube-native business as scalable media IP.

Epidemic Group acquired Blenda Labs, adding AI-native video production capabilities to a music and sound platform.

Whatnot acquired Shaped, strengthening real-time discovery and personalization for live commerce.

Influencer Hero acquired Afluencer, combining campaign-management software with a creator marketplace.

SoundCloud acquired Nina Protocol, adding an independent-artist community, editorial archive, and discovery assets.

These are not identical transactions. Some add brand-facing agency capabilities. Some consolidate scaled audiences and media IP. Others add software, commerce, or production infrastructure.

The common thread is that buyers are acquiring strategic capabilities and operating systems, not simply lists of creators.

The distinction buyers are making

In a recent conversation with a large agency platform, the buyer described its acquisition strategy as an effort to build a more integrated agency. The focus was on sports, creators, experiential work, branded content, partnerships, and social activation: services that can be sold directly to brands and integrated into a broader client offering.

That is different from pure talent representation.

A representation business primarily earns commissions from contracts between talent and brands. It can be an excellent business, especially when the roster is differentiated and the relationships are durable. But a buyer evaluating an agency platform will ask a different set of questions:

• Does the company own the client relationship, or only the talent relationship?

• Can the service be sold repeatedly to brands without relying on one-off introductions?

• Is revenue generated from repeatable agency services, or mostly commissions passed through to talent?

• Can the team execute campaigns across creators, athletes, media, experiential, and content?

• Does the business add capability to an existing platform, or require the buyer to rebuild the model?

This is why some buyers are actively looking for agency-like businesses. An agency can be integrated into an existing sales machine, introduced to more brands, and scaled through shared creative, media, strategy, data, and production resources.

How a pure representation business becomes more sellable

The answer is not to stop representing talent. The answer is to build layers around the representation model.

1. Own a clear commercial niche

“We represent creators” is not a strong enough position by itself.

A more valuable business might own a defined intersection such as sports creators and betting brands, beauty creators and commerce, gaming and live events, or music creators and direct-to-fan monetization.

The narrower the commercial problem, the easier it is to explain why a buyer needs the business.

2. Build brand-direct revenue

Track the percentage of revenue that comes directly from brands, agencies, platforms, and recurring accounts. Separate it from pass-through talent economics.

Buyers want to understand net revenue, contribution margin, client concentration, renewal behavior, and the amount of work required to generate each dollar. Gross billings can look impressive while obscuring the actual economics of the business.

3. Turn relationships into repeatable services

Project work is useful, but repeatable services create more strategic value.

Examples include creator campaign management, brand partnership strategy, content production, experiential activation, social commerce execution, measurement, and ongoing account management.

The goal is to make the company useful even when a particular creator is unavailable.

4. Make the roster durable

Exclusivity helps, but it is not the only measure of roster quality. Buyers will look at contract duration, renewal history, revenue concentration, creator retention, audience quality, and whether the business can add new talent without losing its identity.

A roster should be an asset supported by systems, not a spreadsheet held together by personal relationships.

5. Institutionalize the operating system

Document how the company sources talent, prices campaigns, manages brand relationships, approves creative, tracks deliverables, collects cash, and reports performance.

The more the business depends on the founder’s memory, network, and personal ability to close every deal, the more the buyer is acquiring a job.

The more the company has repeatable processes, trained account owners, clean data, and visible pipeline, the more it resembles an asset.

Sources

Recent transaction announcements and public disclosures referenced in this article:

• Accenture Song — Accenture to Acquire Leading Creator and Social Agency Whalar from Whalar Group

• NextTrip — Form 8-K: Acquisition of Controlling Interest in YADA

• Penske Media — Penske Media Corporation Acquires Vox Media Brands

• LBG Media — LBG Media Acquires 75% of Uncovered

• ECD International / Clairfield — Majority Investment in SC Media House

• Miroma Group — Miroma Group Acquires Majority Stake in Ad Results Media

• Podean — Podean Acquires Social Commerce Club

• AMZ Advisers — AMZ Advisers Acquires Reach Social Commerce

• Wonderloom Media — Wonderloom Media Launches with Acquisition of Dr. Insanity

• Epidemic Group — Epidemic Group Acquires Blenda Labs

• Whatnot — Whatnot Acquires Shaped

• Influencer Hero — Afluencer Joins Influencer Hero

• SoundCloud — SoundCloud Acquires Nina Protocol

All transaction descriptions are based on publicly available company announcements, SEC filings, and press releases. Stellamont M&A is not advising on these transactions unless expressly stated.

✦ Talk to Stellamont

Thinking about selling your agency, talent management firm, creator business, or media company? We advise founders on valuation, transaction preparation, and competitive sell-side processes across the creator economy.

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Traditional entertainment is contracting while creator advertising and M&A continue to grow. The apparent contradiction disappears once you understand what buyers are actually acquiring.

A founder recently described what the last several years had done to her entertainment business.

Clients had left, most of the staff was gone, and domestic film and television production had slowed dramatically. New business was becoming harder to win, while the clients who remained were on month-to-month agreements and could leave at any time.

Her experience raises an uncomfortable question:

If the creator economy is growing, why are some entertainment and talent businesses struggling?

The answer is that “entertainment,” “media,” and “the creator economy” are not one market moving in one direction.

Traditional production is contracting while creator advertising continues to expand. M&A remains active, but buyers are becoming much more selective about the difference between a growing category and a transferable company.

That distinction matters for every founder considering a sale.

Two media economies are moving in opposite directions

The divergence is visible in both operating and advertising data.

Traditional production and creator advertising are moving in opposite directions. Sources: IAB and FilmLA; trend lines are conceptual rather than indexed time series.

The pressure on traditional entertainment is real.

FilmLA reported that Greater Los Angeles on-location production fell 16.1% in 2025 compared with 2024. Feature-film activity ended the year 31.7% below its five-year average.

Fewer productions mean fewer launches, fewer working actors, fewer publicity campaigns, and less spending across the network of firms that historically served Hollywood.

For a business whose revenue depends on domestic film and television production, this is not a temporary headline. It is an operating reality.

At the same time, creator-led advertising is moving in the other direction.

According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, U.S. creator advertising spend was projected to reach $37 billion in 2025, an increase of 26% year over year and nearly four times the growth rate of the broader media industry. IAB expects the figure to approach $44 billion in 2026. Nearly half of creator-ad buyers now consider creators a “must buy.”

The creator economy is not insulated from economic pressure. It is taking share from traditional media because brands increasingly see creators as a measurable distribution channel.

That money tends to reward businesses connected to:

• Influencer and creator campaigns

• Social-first creative

• Athlete and talent partnerships

• Performance marketing

• Affiliate and social commerce

• Owned audiences and intellectual property

• Audience data, attribution, and measurement

• Recurring brand relationships

It does not automatically reach every company with an entertainment logo or celebrity client list.

M&A is active but activity is not immunity

The same distinction appears in the transaction market.

Public-relations M&A slowed in 2025, with PRovoke Media and Davis+Gilbert identifying 80 transactions, down from 99 in 2024. Buyers increasingly favored integrated firms with differentiated capabilities, technology, analytics, healthcare exposure, and meaningful scale.

Activity then accelerated in the first half of 2026. Davis+Gilbert reported 44 completed PR and earned-media transactions, with more than 60% of sellers generating less than $6 million in revenue. Influencer and celebrity partnerships moved higher on buyers’ priority lists. Reputation and crisis management, data analytics, and content strategy remained in demand.

Creator-economy M&A has also remained active across agencies, talent management, media, software, commerce, and infrastructure.

But this does not mean buyers will acquire any business that operates in the category.

Instead, buyers are underwriting creator companies the same way they underwrite every other company:

• Is revenue growing?
• Is it recurring?
• Is it contractually durable?
• Is the customer or talent base concentrated?
• Are margins healthy?
• Can the business operate without the founder?
• Do the relationships transfer after a change of control?
• Is there a system behind the revenue—or only an individual?

The market may be growing while a particular company remains difficult to sell.

A category is not an asset

Consider three anonymized businesses.

The first is a traditional entertainment publicity boutique. It has recognizable clients and decades of relationships, but revenue has declined, the team has contracted, clients are month-to-month, and nearly every important relationship belongs to the founder.

The second represents athletes and digital creators, executes brand partnerships, has grown rapidly, and has signed revenue scheduled through the remainder of the year. It still faces concentration and founder-dependence risk, but buyers can see financial momentum and strategic scarcity.

The third represents a carefully curated roster of digital creators in attractive, brand-friendly consumer categories. Its niche aligns with consumer-brand spending, and the roster may support multi-creator campaigns, affiliate revenue, commerce, and owned products. But without financial statements, creator-level concentration, contract terms, and retention history, its strategic appeal remains a hypothesis rather than an underwritable transaction.

All three can be described as entertainment or creator-adjacent businesses.

Only the underlying evidence determines whether they are sellable.

Month-to-month revenue is not automatically worthless

Founders often assume that recurring billing equals recurring revenue.

Buyers make a finer distinction.

A monthly retainer that can be canceled tomorrow is not equivalent to a multi-year agreement. But contract duration is not the only evidence of durability.

A client that has renewed every month for eight years may demonstrate stronger behavioral retention than a newly signed one-year contract.

Buyers evaluate durability using multiple factors, including:

• Contract term and cancellation rights

• Historical client or talent tenure

• Gross and net revenue retention

• Churn by year

• Reason for each material departure

• Revenue concentration

• Relationship ownership inside the team

• Performance through previous market cycles

Month-to-month relationships become a valuation problem when they are combined with declining revenue, high concentration, and founder dependence.

The founder-dependence discount

Many service businesses begin because the founder is exceptional at the work.

That strength becomes a transaction risk when the founder remains the only reason clients stay.

If every client calls the founder, every employee relies on the founder, and every new engagement comes through the founder’s reputation, a buyer is not acquiring an autonomous company. The buyer is acquiring a relationship book plus the founder’s continued labor.

Those transactions can still happen, but the structure changes.

Instead of receiving the full price at closing, the founder may receive:

• A smaller upfront payment

• An earnout tied to retained revenue or gross profit

• A multi-year employment agreement

• Equity in the acquiring platform

• Additional payments as relationships transfer

This is why two firms with identical EBITDA can receive very different offers.

One has a leadership team, durable agreements, diversified revenue, and repeatable systems. The other has a talented founder and a collection of relationships that may disappear when the founder leaves.

What buyers are paying for now

Across creator, talent, media, and communications transactions, the premium attributes are becoming clearer.

1. Revenue engines, not audience narratives

Follower counts and recognizable names can open a buyer’s door. They do not complete diligence.

Buyers want evidence that attention converts into recurring revenue, commerce, licensing, subscriptions, brand partnerships, or owned intellectual property.

2. Diversified talent and clients

One creator, athlete, or client contributing a disproportionate share of income can materially reduce value. If that relationship leaves, the buyer’s investment thesis may disappear overnight.

3. Transferable contracts and relationships

The agreement must survive a transaction—or the person represented must be willing to affirmatively remain. Buyers will examine assignment clauses, change-of-control provisions, exclusivity, termination rights, and historical churn.

4. Leadership beneath the founder

Managers must own meaningful relationships. Finance must produce reliable information. Sales must originate opportunities without the founder. Operations must function through documented processes.

5. Data and measurement

Brands increasingly expect measurable outcomes. Agencies with audience intelligence, attribution, campaign analytics, and repeatable reporting are more valuable than firms relying only on personal judgment and access.

6. Profitable growth

The creator label does not excuse weak economics. Buyers still want healthy margins, controlled working capital, clean revenue recognition, and confidence that growth will not require expenses to rise at the same rate.

A founder’s sellability test

Before launching a transaction, a founder should be able to answer the following questions:

1. What percentage of revenue is truly recurring?

2. How much revenue comes from the largest client or creator? The top five?

3. How long have the most important relationships stayed?

4. Can contracts be assigned after a change of control?

5. Who owns each relationship besides the founder?

6. What has annual churn looked like for the last three years?

7. Can the company add meaningful revenue without doubling headcount?

8. Are gross billings and net agency revenue clearly separated?

9. What is adjusted EBITDA after paying the founder a market salary?

10. How long is the founder genuinely willing to remain after closing?

If those questions cannot be answered, the business may still have strategic potential. It is simply not ready for market.

The creator economy is growing up

The creator economy’s maturation is good news for founders—but maturity brings discipline.

Buyers are no longer paying simply for proximity to creators. They are paying for scalable systems, durable economics, proprietary access, differentiated capabilities, and companies that can survive a transition of ownership.

The opportunity is real. So is the divide.

Traditional entertainment businesses exposed to declining production may need to reposition toward creators, brands, reputation management, digital distribution, or measurable campaign services. Creator-native firms may need to reduce concentration, strengthen contracts, build leadership, and document recurring revenue before approaching buyers.

The strongest transaction story is not:

“We operate in the creator economy.”

It is:

“We built a durable revenue engine inside one of media’s fastest-growing channels—and that engine will continue after the founder steps back.”

That is what buyers are competing to own.

Sources

• FilmLA — Q4 and Full-Year 2025 Production Report

• Interactive Advertising Bureau — 2025 Creator Economy Ad Spend & Strategy Report

• Davis+Gilbert — Mid-Year 2026 PR M&A Tracker

• PRovoke Media — 2025 M&A Review

✦ Talk to Stellamont

Thinking about selling your agency, talent management firm, creator business, or media company? We advise founders on valuation, transaction preparation, and competitive sell-side processes across the creator economy.

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There is a framework that institutional investors use to time capital deployment into entire industries. It’s called the capital cycle. Marathon Asset Management built one of the most respected long-only funds in the world using it. The insight is simple: the best time to buy into an industry is when everyone else has given up on it. The best time to sell is when supply is constrained and strategic buyers are competing for assets.

The creator economy just finished three of the four stages. This isn't true for the entire space. New agencies still launch every day. But for the established, profitable tier, the cycle looks exactly like this.

The Cycle

Marathon’s framework breaks every industry into four phases:

Stage 1 — Investors Optimistic / New Entrants Flood In

Capital chases narrative. Everyone wants a piece of the opportunity. New firms launch, platforms raise at impossible multiples, and money enters faster than the market can absorb it.

For the creator economy, this was 2019 to 2022. Influencer marketing agencies raised rounds. Creator platforms were valued at 15x ARR. SPACs targeted UGC businesses. The pitch was simple: the internet is eating advertising, and these agencies own the relationships.

Stage 2 — Rising Competition / Returns Fall

Supply exceeds demand. Undifferentiated players compete on price. Clients get more selective. The firms that grew fast on the promise of scale start losing accounts.

This hit between 2022 and 2023. Brand performance budgets tightened as inflation rose. Agencies that couldn’t prove ROI lost retainers. The market started asking hard questions that the optimistic phase never had to answer.

Stage 3 — Investors Pessimistic / Firms Exit

Capital retreats. The narrative dies. VC moves to the next thing. Weaker operators close. Consolidation happens quietly, without fanfare, because nobody is writing about this sector anymore.

This was 2023 and 2024. Venture moved to AI. Mid-tier influencer agencies contracted or shut down. The firms that survived were leaner, more defensible, and running on real economics.

Stage 4 — Supply Contracts / The Cycle Turns

This is where we are now.

Marathon’s observation, backed by decades of equity research, is that the highest returns come not from chasing what is popular but from buying what has been abandoned and is now scarce.

The same logic applies to sell-side timing in M&A.

When an industry is in Stage 1, buyers overpay because they are competing on optimism. When it hits Stage 3, buyers pull back because the narrative is broken. But Stage 4 is different. Supply is contracted. The survivors are proven. And strategic buyers who missed the window in Stage 1 are now under pressure to acquire rather than build.

That is exactly the setup in the creator economy right now.

Publicis acquired Influential. UTA expanded its creator division. Havas is active. Night Media is acquiring. The buyers who sat out 2021 and 2022 because valuations were irrational are now moving -- because the assets that remain are worth acquiring and the price of waiting keeps going up.

What This Means If You Own One of These Businesses

If you built a creator economy business and survived the last three years, you are not just still standing. You are scarce. That scarcity has value -- but only if you move while the strategic window is open.

Capital cycles do not wait. Stage 4 does not last forever. The firms that sell into buyer competition extract significantly more value than the ones that wait until the next optimistic phase drives the narrative back up.

The question is not whether the market for your business exists. It does. The question is whether you are positioned to access it before the window closes.

✦ Talk to Stellamont

Stellamont advises founders of creator economy businesses on sell-side M&A. If you are thinking about a process in the next 12 to 18 months, reach out at ruben@stellamont.com.

The most expensive mistakes in a business sale happen before any document is signed. They happen in the first call with a buyer. A founder answers a question they didn’t need to answer. Reveals a number they shouldn’t have named yet. Enters a bilateral conversation without knowing the other side has run this exact process dozens of times.

Here is what that process looks like from the other side of the table, and what it costs to learn it during the deal rather than before it.

The deal starts before you know it’s happening.

When a strategic acquirer reaches out, they are already running a process. You are not. They want to learn how much you want to sell, whether you have other options, and how low the number can go. Every question in that early call is intelligence-gathering. Every answer is leverage you’ve surrendered before the negotiation has officially begun.

The side that wants the deal more loses. Professional buyers know this. They are trained to reveal as little desire as possible while drawing out as much as they can from the seller. Most founders walk into that dynamic without knowing it exists. By the time an advisor is brought in, the founder has already shared their ARR, explained their margins, disclosed why they’re open to a sale, and implicitly confirmed there’s no competition. The leverage is gone before the first offer arrives.

Price is a function of competition, not business value.

This is the most important thing to understand before entering any sale process. Your business has real value. But the price a buyer offers reflects how many other buyers they believe are in the room far more than it reflects the underlying business. A buyer negotiating with no competition offers what the model supports and nothing more. A buyer who believes they are competing against four credible acquirers offers what they need to win.

Here is what each scenario typically produces on a $10M ARR business:

• Single inbound buyer, no process — The buyer controls the price. Anchored below market.

• Structured competitive process, 6 to 12 buyers — The market controls the price. Competitive tension at top of range.

On a $10 million ARR business, the spread between a bilateral conversation and a structured competitive process is routinely $5 to $15 million. That is not a negotiation skill gap. That is a market structure gap. You cannot close it by being a better negotiator. You close it by running a different kind of sale.

The acquisition universe is almost always too small.

Most business owners come into a sale with a short list of obvious buyers. One or two strategics they’ve heard mentioned. Maybe a PE firm that reached out. The instinct is to focus on the most likely buyer and protect the relationship. That instinct is expensive.

Effective sell-side processes expand the buyer universe aggressively, including buyers who may seem like secondary fits. Not every participant is expected to close. Some are in the process to create pressure. In at least a quarter of the competitive processes we run, buyers with no realistic chance of closing force the eventual acquirer to pay more than they otherwise would have. That is not a coincidence. It is the design.

The right buyer universe sits between six and fifteen participants. Below six, there isn’t enough competitive pressure. Above fifteen, the process becomes cumbersome. High single digits, run simultaneously, is where the math consistently works in the seller’s favor.

A bidding process is not complicated. It is just rarely used.

Most sellers assume a structured competitive process means months of complexity and friction. The mechanics are simpler than that.

No asking price goes to market. Buyers have to bid to find the floor. Bids are closed: no buyer sees what anyone else offered. Rounds run simultaneously. Round one bids are due Thursday at 5 PM. All of them. Not one this week and one the next. All of them at the same time. Then the seller reviews the offers side by side and asks everyone still in the room to sharpen their number.

That is the structure. It exists because ninety percent of progress in any negotiation happens in the last ten percent of time. Imposed deadlines compress that into the seller’s timeline, not the buyer’s. A buyer chasing a deadline they didn’t set is a buyer who can’t control the pace. That is exactly where a seller wants them.

Founders who negotiate their own sales give up the result before it starts.

This is not a question of intelligence or preparation. Business owners are structurally disadvantaged when negotiating their own sales for reasons that have nothing to do with capability.

Your identity is tied to the business. Your employees are on the line. The number being discussed is the largest check you have ever seen. And the person across from you has done this exact deal 20 to 40 times. They are trained to read when a seller is nervous, when they’d take the lower number, when the walk-away is a bluff. They see it before you know you’re projecting it.

The value of a dedicated sell-side advisor is not just buyer access. It is the insulation between the seller and that exposure. The advisor takes the heat. Makes the difficult asks. Has the uncomfortable conversations. And because the advisor is not the decision-maker, they can say “I’ll bring that back to my client.” Buyers use that phrase against sellers every single day. It is far more powerful when the seller’s team says it first.

"The price you walk away with is not a reflection of your business's value. It is a reflection of how many buyers had to compete to get it. Those two numbers are often far apart."

The right time to think about this.

If you are fielding inbound interest or beginning to think seriously about a sale in the next one to two years, the most useful conversation you can have right now is not with the buyer who called. It is with someone who already knows which companies are actively acquiring in your space, what they paid in the last 12 months, and how your business sits against their criteria.

The founders who get the best outcomes are not the ones who waited for the right offer. They are the ones who understood the market before any buyer knew they were thinking about it. That knowledge changes what you say, what you don’t say, and how the process gets structured when the time comes.

A 30-minute conversation, under NDA, at no cost, is enough to tell you whether the timing and the value are there. That is where this starts.

✦ Talk to Stellamont

If you’re considering a sale or fielding acquisition interest, we’ll give you an honest read on value, the active buyer landscape in your space, and what a competitive process would actually look like for your business. No cost, no commitment.

Accenture just paid roughly $500M for Whalar.

The deal closed in June 2026. Whalar is a 170-person creator and social agency. The kind of business a lot of people in this industry would call a “lifestyle company.” Accenture called it a strategic acquisition and wrote a nine-figure check.

Industry observers called it the largest creator economy transaction on record.

That framing matters. Not because of the headline number, but because of who bought it. Accenture is not a media company. They are a $200B management and technology consulting firm. When firms like Accenture start buying creator agencies, they are not dipping their toe in. They are making a structural bet that creator infrastructure is core business infrastructure.

The week Accenture announced Whalar, CAA and TPG announced a $250M acquisition vehicle specifically to buy creator economy businesses. The week before that, Publicis paid $500M+ to acquire 160over90 from WME.

Three deals. Three weeks. Over a billion dollars deployed.

This is not a trend. It is a cycle completing. The creator economy spent 10 years proving itself. Now the institutions are here to buy what the founders built.

If you own a founder-led agency or creator business, the question is no longer whether buyers are active. The question is whether you will be ready when one calls you.

Stellamont is a strictly sell-side M&A advisory firm. We represent founders only, never buyers. stellamont.com