Hannah and I were meant to sit down weeks ago, but this industry rarely respects a calendar. Plans shift. Priorities pivot. Something always comes in hot.
If I am being entirely honest, the delay only sharpened my anticipation. I wanted to know what kind of person decides, at twenty-four, to build a talent agency from the ground up in one of the most volatile, image-obsessed, fast-moving waters of the media business, and then actually does it. Not theoretically. Not eventually. Actually.
So when the video feed finally settled after a brief bout of technical drama, it took all of a few minutes to understand why Hannah Holland, HLD Talent agency's CEO, has scaled with such force.
In an industry that often runs on polish, performance, and panel-ready talking points, Hannah’s currency is something rarer, unfiltered clarity. No fluff. No myth-making. No vague girl boss sentiment packaged for LinkedIn. Just sharp instincts, commercial intelligence, and the kind of operational honesty that usually lives behind closed doors.
In today’s multi-billion-dollar creator economy, talent agents do far more than broker deals. They shape careers, engineer relevance, build businesses, and, whether we admit it or not, help curate public taste. At just thirty-one, Hannah has become one of the most compelling operators in that space in the UK.
She launched her female-led agency, HLD Talent at twenty-four. Seven years later, she represents some of the most recognisable and commercially potent creators in the market, including GK Barry, Ami Charlize, and Charlotte Dawson. But this is not a story about viral moments, curated chaos, or the glossy illusion of brand-trip success.
This is a story about infrastructure.
About the grit of building something before you feel entirely ready. About the emotional labour of managing people, personalities, ambition, and growth. About the strategic discipline required to turn fleeting attention into long-term value, and digital influence into something far more durable: intellectual property, brand equity, and business.
For this edition of Voices of the Industry, I abandoned the neat question list. It felt too tidy for a conversation about a business that is anything but. Instead, we pulled apart the machinery of the the influencer marketing industry, stripping away the performative fluff to get to the commercial truth underneath.
What follows is not a fairy tale about influence. It is a field guide to building a talent empire from the inside, told by someone who built the plane while flying it and had the nerve to make it look intentional.
The narrative of the young, calculated tech founder sketching out a ten-year business plan in a coffee shop is a Silicon Valley myth that rarely applies to this industry. For Hannah, the genesis of HLD Talent was not born of a meticulously crafted spreadsheet. Instead, it was born of sheer, unadulterated audacity.
At twenty-four, having dropped out of university and with barely eighteen months of industry experience under her belt, she found herself working for a men’s magazine that had unexpectedly pivoted into talent management. It was the wild west of the reality television boom. Her roster included the inaugural waves of Love Island alumni, personalities who were rapidly capturing the cultural attention but lacked the infrastructure to monetise it effectively. Hannah found herself handling the social media, the negotiations, and the day-to-day management.
The inflection point arrived during a business trip. When a crisis hit and her superior was entirely uncontactable, Hannah simply took the reins. A client looked at her and stated the obvious: You should just start your own thing.
It wasn't a calculated move. I was twenty-four and I was really ballsy.
After a second pondering on it, she claimed that she would likely never take that same risk with the cautious mindset of a thirty-one-year-old. But that leap of faith encapsulates a fundamental truth of the talent industry, experience is a luxury, but resilience is an absolute necessity.
As a matter of fact, Hannah subscribes to the Richard Branson philosophy of entrepreneurial momentum. If you do not know how to do something, say yes and learn to do it later. You cannot simulate the pressure of a collapsing brand deal or a client's public relations crisis in a classroom. You only learn the mechanics of management by being violently thrown into the deep end and figuring out how to swim while simultaneously keeping your clients afloat.
Hannah mentioned more than once that the modern creator economy is heavily romanticised. From the outside looking in, running a talent agency appears to be an endless parade of gifted Chanel bags, Soho House breakfasts, and effortless deal-making. The reality is far more grounded, and significantly more expensive.
When you start an agency from scratch with nothing but a laptop and a healthy dose of defiance, the immediate hurdles are not creative; they are deeply, painfully operational.
She reflected on how do you convince established creators to sign with an unknown entity? How do you build an operating system when you have never managed a corporate team? Hannah was quick to dismantle the glamour. The true foundation of a credible agency is not a slick Instagram feed, it is a watertight legal framework and a ruthless grip on the finances.
“It’s learning like getting a good accountant and not some cowboy who's cheap,” she explained, highlighting the hidden costs of agency building. When you are managing high-net-worth creators, the legal complexities scale exponentially. Every contract requires meticulous review to protect the talent's intellectual property. Every aggressive poaching attempt by a rival agency requires expensive legal letters to defend your roster.
This is an important and invisible chunk of influence management. It is the unsexy, grinding operational foundation that separates transient boutique agencies from institutional powerhouses.
Please find the cheat sheet below on Hannah's de-mythified version of running an agency, I’ve tried to put together most of Hannah’s top advice.
One of the most fascinating tensions in building a modern agency is the battle of brand identity. We exist in a hybrid scene where the lines between the boardroom and the creative studio have dissolved. For a young female founder, this creates an immediate, psychological quandary. Do you lean into the vibrant, chaotic energy of the creator world, or do you adopt a sterile, corporate veneer to force older executives to take you seriously?
In the early days of HLD Talent, Hannah wrestled with this dichotomy. The initial branding leaned heavily into what she calls the bubblegum effect. Everything was hot pink. The logo, the aesthetic, the vibe, it was perfectly calibrated for the 2010s era of Instagram, which was dominated by glamorous, highly curated, picture-perfect aesthetics.
But as the agency scaled and sought larger broadcast deals, the pressure to conform to traditional corporate standards mounted. The temptation is always to sanitise your identity to appease the gatekeepers. Yet, Hannah discovered a counterintuitive truth: the more she tried to play the corporate game, the less the market responded.
I realized the more corporate I was, the less people liked it because I'm not corporate. I’m a bit out there and I say things I shouldn't... nothing about our brand is corporate.
This is the best policy when you are positioning yourself in an industry that’s savage. Buyers, say CMOs at heritage brands or network television executives, do not want to work with a sterilised, cookie-cutter agency. They are hiring you specifically for your proximity to the culture.
If you mask your native understanding of that culture behind a wall of corporate jargon and gray suits, you strip away your primary value proposition.
For Hannah, authenticity is a commercial filter. Thus, thanks to remaining true to her unapologetic, non-corporate self, she naturally attracted the clients and brands that resonated with her vision, while repelling those who would have ultimately been a cultural mismatch. It takes an immense amount of confidence to look at the established industry playbook, realise it does not fit your DNA, and simply write your own.
The talent management industry has historically been a boys' club, dominated by older men who cut their teeth in the ruthless environments of traditional Hollywood or early-2000s music management. Entering this arena as a twenty-four-year-old woman guaranteed that Hannah would be underestimated.
She recounted the early days when people simply refused to take her seriously. Even today, at the helm of a multi-million-pound business, she still occasionally gets asked how long she has worked at the company, with the underlying assumption that she could not possibly be the founder. But rather than mimicking the aggressive, combative tactics of her male counterparts to command respect, Hannah recognised that her demographic reality offered a distinct competitive advantage.
She identified empathy not as a soft skill, but as a definitive superpower.
I think men are very headstrong. I think they're a lot more ruthless, but I don't think that's always the best approach, and I think having empathy really takes you a lot further.
This is a critical pivot in how we understand management theory. Influencers are not inanimate products; they are highly visible, emotionally vulnerable human beings operating in high-pressure digital environments. They face real-world crises, algorithmic anxiety, and the constant, looming threat of cancel culture. A manager who operates purely on transactional ruthlessness might secure a higher fee on a single brand deal, but a manager who leads with empathy will secure the client's loyalty for a decade.
This empathetic approach extends inward to the HLD team. The emotional labor of the job is staggering. Hannah described the role as being a constant revolver of people needing support, budget, and guidance. Protecting the staff from the harsh realities of business ownership, while guiding them through the emotional weight of their clients' problems, requires a depth of emotional intelligence that cannot be automated or outsourced.
If you want to understand where our industry is heading towards, you have to look at how agencies are vetting their talent. We have officially exited the Aesthetic Era of influence. Ten years ago, a creator could build a lucrative career purely by posting beautiful, static images of an unattainable lifestyle. Personality was optional, the visual was king.
Today, the audience demands raw, unfiltered, multidimensional entertainment. The bar has been raised. When Hannah is looking to sign new talent, follower count is a secondary metric. The primary focus is on cross-platform agility and a distinct, unreplicable point of difference.
But the true north star for modern talent management is the transition from transactional brand endorsements into owned Intellectual Property (IP). “Brand deals are great, but the real fun gets into when you start developing IP,” Hannah told me, her voice accelerating with genuine excitement.
Are you going to see someone on a billboard in five years for a big TV show, or are you going to be sat still doing the same brand deals?
This is the ultimate separator between a fleeting influencer and a generational media brand. Agencies like HLD are no longer just negotiating Instagram grids, they are developing television formats, pitching documentaries, and securing mainstream broadcast roles. They are actively bridging the gap between the digital subculture and legacy entertainment.
However, there is a crucial caveat. The manager is an architect, not a magician. A persistent myth among aspiring creators is that signing with a top-tier agency will automatically manifest their dreams. But as Hannah sharply pointed out, a manager cannot invent your ambition. If a creator does not know their end goal, no amount of strategic leveraging can get them there. The creator must provide the destination and the agency provides the map and the vehicle.
The graveyard of the creator economy is littered with failed, influencer-led brands. We have seen it repeatedly, massive beauty creators who assumed their millions of followers would blindly purchase white-labeled, uninspired product lines, only to watch their brands crash into obscurity.
I think the ones that have not succeeded are those who haven't done much research, are white-labelled, and where influencers take advantage of their name when the brand needs to feel natural and authentic.
The lesson is simple folks, audience attention does not equal consumer trust. You cannot slap a name on a generic product and expect a sophisticated modern audience to open their wallets. To understand how to actually move a product, we must look at HLD's masterclass in audience alignment. Take the collaboration between GK Barry and Echo Falls wine for instance.
This was not a random licensing deal. Grace Keeling (the creator behind the GK Barry persona) had a long, publicly documented history of drinking Echo Falls during her university years.
It was woven into the lore of her content. More importantly, the product perfectly aligned with the economic reality of her audience demographic, university students and young women who want relatable, accessible fun, not an aggressively priced, unattainable luxury product.
The result? A staggering 150% increase in sales on the very first day the collection launched in Tesco. This is what happens when you stop throwing spaghetti at the wall and start engineering campaigns based on lived behaviour. It requires turning down the immediate cash grab of a mismatched brand deal to cultivate a product integration that feels so inevitable, the audience actively champions it.
In an industry built on rapid monetisation, the ability to say no is the ultimate flex of commercial authority.
There is a saying I often repeat to clients, the deals you refuse define your brand far more than the deals you accept.
It is also one of the hardest disciplines to maintain, especially for a self-funded agency where cash flow is the lifeblood of growth. The temptation to take a six-figure deal from a brand with questionable ethics or a total misalignment with the creator's voice is immense. But Hannah's philosophy is rooted in long-term equity over short-term liquidity.
“You could if Chanel came to you and said, 'I'll give you £500 to be the face,' and that's your dream brand, you're probably going to do it,” she reasoned. “But if you've got some sort of dodgy AI brand giving you a million pounds, but that ultimately someone could lose a lot of money, you're not going to do it”.
This strategic discipline protects the creator's most valuable asset: audience trust. Once that trust is breached for a quick payout, it is almost impossible to rebuild. The talent that HLD seeks out understands this intrinsic value. They are not chasing the immediate check, they are playing a ten-year game.
But how do these creators survive the ten-year game without completely burning out? This industry is notorious for chewing people up. The pressure to be constantly on, constantly sharing, and constantly vulnerable is a psychological meat grinder.
The secret, according to Hannah, lies in the deliberate construction of the Dual Persona.
Consider the difference between GK Barry and Grace Keeling. GK Barry is the amplified, stage character who is energetic, entertaining, and highly visible across digital platforms. On the other end of the spectrum, Grace Keeling is the private individual underneath it all. Through establishing a firewall between the two, the creator can perform at an elite level without letting public criticism or the demands of the audience pierce their actual psyche.
When the camera turns off, the performance ends. This boundary is reinforced by a strong, offline support system. The most successful creators share a common denominator. All of them have families and friends who keep them aggressively grounded. They have spaces where they do not have to perform, where they are not terrified of disappointing a fan, and where they can simply exist. In an industry that monetises intimacy, fiercely protecting your private peace is a revolutionary act.
If there is one section of this article that I want every brand marketer, CMO, and agency strategist to read twice, it is this one.
You are your own marketing company, your own accountant, your own business manager, you're everything.
Despite a decade of data, despite endless case studies, and despite the obvious shift in consumer behaviour, legacy brands consistently operate under a massive delusion when they enter the creator space. They still believe that because they hold the budget, they hold all the intelligence.
“They think they hold all the cards and they know the audience better than [the creator] does, because that's not true,” Hannah stated, delivering a masterclass in polite exasperation.
A creator has spent years, sometimes a decade, speaking to their specific audience every single day. They know the cadence, the inside jokes, the threshold for promotional content, and the exact tone that will trigger a conversion versus an eye-roll.
Then a brand steps in, hands over a highly sanitised, corporate-approved script written by someone who has never downloaded TikTok, and demands the creator read it verbatim. When the campaign inevitably tanks, the brand blames the creator's lack of influence, rather than their own suffocating brief.
Furthermore, brands operate under the false assumption that every creator has a price tag. They believe that throwing enough money at an influencer will automatically buy their compliance. But as we established with the "Dodgy AI Brand" scenario, elite creators are fiercely protective of their platforms. They will reject massive payouts if the product is harmful, inauthentic, or simply embarrassing.
If brands want to see the 2.5x ROI that companies like Hershey's see with their creator-led Halloween campaigns , or drive real sales enablement , they have to relinquish control. You are not buying ad space; you are hiring a native creative director. Give them the guardrails, give them the core value proposition, and then get out of their way.
We need to talk about the noise on LinkedIn. Recently, there has been a pervasive, slightly cynical narrative floating around the B2B marketing space. The sentiment essentially boils down to this: If your talent agent or agency founder is trying to build a personal brand, ditch them immediately.
I brought this up to Hannah, half-expecting a diplomatic pivot. Instead, she offered a razor-sharp deconstruction of the entire debate.
I think there's a difference between wanting to be an influencer and building your personal brand, and people need to understand the two better and not be so ignorant, she fired back. It’s professional rage-baiting. That’s what those kind of statements are.
She is entirely correct. We have to separate the desire for vanity metrics from the strategic necessity of commercial visibility. We exist in a hybrid ecosystem. As someone truly knowledgeable mentioned to me recently, we are in an era where creators are desperate to become entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs are realising they must become creators.
For an agency founder in 2026, building a personal brand is the ultimate top-of-funnel marketing strategy. When Hannah shows up on podcasts, shares her unfiltered opinions, and documents the realities of her business, she is building an impregnable moat of authority.
Let's be super clear on this matter. This visibility does two critical things. First, it clearly attracts aligned talent. Creators want to be represented by someone who actually understands the mechanics of digital attention. If a founder can build their own engaged audience, it proves they possess the tactical skills to do the same for their roster.
Secondly, it filters out the friction. Thanks to putting her authentic, unapologetic self out into the world, Hannah ensures that the people who reach out to work with HLD already understand her vibe. The traditionalists who want a quiet, invisible, corporate manager filter themselves out automatically.
I think people love to tear each other down rather than raise each other up and actually if it's not harming you and it doesn't affect you, who cares if someone wants to build their personal brand? I built my personal brand and my business did better and it attracts the right people.
The idea that a founder should stay entirely in the shadows is an antiquated relic of the Mad Men era. In the trust economy, people buy from people. A visible founder is not a liability, they are the agency's most potent asset.
Scaling a business from a solo operation to a powerhouse team of over twenty people requires a fundamental rewiring of the founder's psychology. You have to transition from being a scrappy operator to a strategic leader. And the hardest part of that transition is managing the internal culture.
Hannah’s leadership philosophy is beautifully pragmatic and simple. Treat people exactly how you want to be treated, but never forget where the boundary lies. It is incredibly easy, especially in a young, dynamic, female-led agency, to blur the lines between colleague and best friend. But Hannah offers a sobering reality check.
Understand that ultimately when shit hits the fan, you're the person who has to have those horrible conversations. You don't want to be so close that it's ever utilised against you.
You can be friendly, you can be empathetic, and you can build an incredibly supportive culture, but you cannot abdicate your position as the ultimate decision-maker. The team needs a leader, not just another peer.
We live in a business culture obsessed with dashboards, analytics, and data-driven decision-making. But when you are operating in the trenches of talent management, an industry entirely dependent on human volatility and shifting cultural winds, data only tells half the story. When it comes to the massive, trajectory-altering decisions, Hannah relies on a different metric, the gut check.
My gut has never let me down, she stated. You can look at the logic of it... but I think following your gut is the only way that I can firmly make a decision and sleep well at night.
In a complex business environment, intuition is the subconscious synthesis of thousands of micro-observations, past failures, and behavioural patterns. Trusting that synthesis allows a founder to move with speed and conviction.
And when mistakes inevitably happen, because they always do, the protocol is simple: fix it, learn from it, and employ a strict no dwelling policy. You cannot drive an agency forward if you are constantly staring in the rearview mirror.
There is a fascinating psychological phenomenon that occurs when highly driven people achieve the exact things they spent years bleeding for.
A few years ago, Hannah was named to the prestigious Forbes 30 Under 30 list. For a founder who started with nothing but a laptop and a lot of audacity, who fought to be taken seriously in rooms full of older men, this was the ultimate institutional validation. This was the moment the industry officially recognised her power.
So, how did it feel in the moment?
“Underwhelming,” she admitted with brutal honesty.
This is the curse of the high achiever. The moment the goal is met, the brain instantly recalibrates and asks, What’s next? The celebration is fleeting, perhaps a nice dinner, but the hunger never actually subsides. It often takes months, sometimes years, to look back and process the magnitude of the achievement.
But this relentless momentum eventually forces a redefinition of what success actually means. When you are twenty-four, success is highly tangible. It is the revenue targets, the designer bags, the visible markers that you have made it. As the business matures and the founder evolves, the metrics of success shift dramatically from external accumulation to internal peace.
Today, Hannah defines success not by the balance in the corporate account, but by the quality of her life outside the office. It is the ability to come home to a life that excites her, to her dogs, to her partner, and to a sense of genuine comfort.
Professionally, success is now defined by the impact she has on her circle. It is the profound fulfillment of watching her talent dominate mainstream television, or seeing her employees buy their first homes because of the business they built together.
I try and remind people all the time... when you die, these things aren't coming with you.
She reflected on this for a longer moment, noting the ultimate futility of cutting people down to climb the ladder. “The inanimate objects and money... that can keep coming back, but the people you've cut off along the way don't.”
I want to close this article by addressing the toxic underbelly of the agency world. Because this industry is so lucrative, and because the barrier to entry is technically low, the space is flooded with actors operating from a mindset of deep scarcity.
They believe the industry is a zero-sum game. They believe that for their agency to win, someone else has to lose. This manifests in the ugly practices of aggressive talent poaching, undercutting fees, and bad-mouthing competitors.
Hannah’s perspective obliterates this scarcity mindset. The true heavyweights of the industry do not operate this way. In fact, the leaders of the biggest, most successful agencies are often the ones who collaborate the most freely.
If you’re friendly with everybody, you have more alliances and you can build together. There’s enough room for us all.
This is the ultimate sign of industry maturity. When you are confident in your operational systems, your empathy-driven culture, and your ability to generate long-term IP for your clients, you do not need to steal from your neighbor's yard. You just build a bigger house.
For those wanting to hear these stark truths directly from the source, Hannah is officially relaunching her podcast, Managed, after a two-year hiatus. The show goes strictly behind-the-scenes in the digital talent space, exploring the granular business side of the creator and entertainment industries in the UK.
The new season features deep-dive conversations with clients like Shakira Khan, Mariam Musa, Liam Brown and Sophie Snazz. Building on the momentum of previous seasons, which featured the likes of Alex Partridge from LADBible, Elz the Witch, and Sophie Hannah—the discussions comprise reflections, strategic debates, and the mechanics of storytelling. It offers listeners rare access to how the creator economy actually functions.
From strategy, creativity and future-proofing to teaming up with the right people to drive the industry forward. Managed gives audiences access to the voices they don’t normally hear from, and will show new sides of fan-favourite talent as they reflect on the business behind being a creator. This season, we’re going deeper than ever, sharing the stories and truths you won’t hear anywhere else.
“There’s so much that goes into this business we love,” Hannah claimed during another interview.
My conversation with Hannah Holland was supposed to be a standard editorial interview. Instead, it became a mirror held up to an industry that is rapidly shedding its adolescent growing pains and stepping into its institutional power.
We have moved past the era of the bubblegum aesthetic. We are in the era of architecture. The agencies that will survive the next decade are the ones that understand that influence is not a shortcut, as many consider it, but that it is a discipline after all. It requires the courage to say no to the wrong money, the empathy to protect the humans behind the handles, and the audacity to show up as your unapologetic self in rooms designed to make you shrink.
If a twenty-four-year-old with a pink logo and a refusal to play the corporate game can rewrite the rules of UK talent management, what exactly is stopping the rest of us from challenging the status quo in our own sectors?
Are we building businesses designed to chase the next trend, or are we building systems resilient enough to define the next decade?