We work in an industry that loves to disguise transactions as relationships. We call it partnerships when we are really just renting a face to sell a moisturiser. We talk about authenticity in boardrooms while simultaneously handing creators heavily scripted, soul-crushing campaign briefs that make them sound like infomercial hosts.
The influencer marketing space has become a well-oiled machine, but somewhere along the assembly line, we forgot that the gears are made of people… Then I met Bronagh Quinn, and honestly, the conversation was like catching a breath of fresh air in a room full of stale marketing jargon.
I sat down with Bronagh to record an editorial interview, fully expecting the standard agency founder script. Instead, I got radical candor, empathy, and strategic long-term thinking. Bronagh is the founder of Enhance Management, a talent management agency she launched in 2022.
She operates out of Ireland, managing talent regionally rather than from a traditional centralised hub like London or LA, and despite her youth, she is cementing her name as a formidable force in the European creator economy.
Here is the result of our sit-down, what the industry gets terribly wrong, and the framework Bronagh is using to build a human-first empire.
Every great origin story has a catalyst. For Bronagh, it was the global standstill of 2020. She graduated with an Event Management degree right at the peak of COVID-19, which forced her to completely re-evaluate her career plans. With live events dead in the water, she pivoted, taking an internship at an influencer agency just as TikTok began its meteoric rise in Ireland.
She was tasked with finding rising TikTok creators, analysing their stats, and figuring out who was going to make it big. It was in the trenches of the FYP that she found her calling.
"It was during that time I realized this was what I wanted to do rather than working on the PR side. It wasn't really for me. I like a different task every day."
After two years at that agency and a brief stint at a food app, she hit a wall. The transactional nature of the business was gnawing at her. So, in November 2022, she took a massive leap of faith. She told me:
"I just decided I'm young, let's just take the jump... I feel if you don't do it now when are you ever going to do it and I'm so grateful for what I have achieved in the past four years with my own company but also seeing everyone achieve as well."
There is a profound lesson here about imposter syndrome. Bronagh noted that one of the distinctive challenges she faced early on was questioning if she was mature enough to run her own business. But she didn't let her age dictate her altitude. She credits her can-do attitude to her background in competitive Irish dancing, a grueling discipline that taught her how to take a hit, fail, and immediately get back on her feet.
If you want to know why most influencer campaigns fail, look at how the talent is treated behind closed doors. Many agencies operate like talent factories, churning out pitch emails, taking their 20% cut, and leaving the influencer to figure out the emotional and operational heavy lifting.
Bronagh’s core thesis is simple but revolutionary, you have to be a human being first.
"I feel like with creators, you have to be there for them. You're not just there to be an agent, you're there to be afriend as well. You need to be open to listening to them."
She refers to her roster as family. She joked that her friends tell her she has 16 kids. "These are like my kids and that's the way I treat them," she told me, adding that she expects her entire team to maintain this exact level of care.
This is a hard-nosed business strategy. When you treat talent like humans, you build loyalty. You build trust. You reduce churn. Bronagh thrives on being the ultimate shock-absorber for her talent, dealing with the daily chaos so they can focus on what they do best, creating.
Her morning routine reflects this. Before she even looks at a brand brief or sends out an invoice, she texts all her talent a simple "good morning," asking how they are and checking in on their evenings. That emotional buffering is critical to her daily operations before diving into commercial execution.
Most agencies will sign anyone with a pulse and 100,000 followers. Bronagh flips the script entirely. She completely rejects vanity metrics, opting instead for a rigorous alignment process.
Here is how Enhance Management vets new talent:
It is a slow-burn strategy in an industry addicted to instant gratification. But it works because it filters out the divas and the mismatched expectations before they poison the well.
One of the most revealing moments of our conversation was when we touched on the darker side of the industry. The influencer space is currently under a microscope. The Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC) and Irish Revenue have launched crackdowns on creators failing to label ads or pay taxes on gifts. The European Parliament is investigating the ethical lines of the creator economy.
When the rules are constantly shifting, talent managers have to act as the moral compass. Bronagh isn't afraid to draw hard lines in the sand. She has actively declined highly lucrative brand deals when the opportunity did not align with her larger goals or when a brand's ethics conflicted with her own.
"Saying no isn't a bad thing. It's actually a good thing. And it really shows your power when you're able to say no."
This ethical grounding bleeds into how she manages PR gifting. We all know the stereotype of the influencer drowning in free PR packages they will never use. Bronagh recognised this waste and did something uniquely human about it.
Every Christmas, Enhance Management gathers unused brand items and gifts from their roster and donates them to a local women's aid charity. Her creators enthusiastically support this, completely destroying the narrative that influencers are inherently greedy hoarders. Don’t we need more of this?
Mental health in this industry is a ticking time bomb. The audience demands vulnerability, but punishes imperfection. In a small country like Ireland, where creators can feel the intensity of local gossip, keyboard warriors can be utterly debilitating.
I have heard some ruthless talent agents advise their creators to leave hate comments up because it drives up the engagement metrics. Bad for the soul, good for the algorithm. Bronagh absolutely refuses to play that game.
She advises her talent to block out the noise and delete hate comments immediately. She prioritises her talent's mental health over metrics, noting that waking up at 2:00 a.m. to read negativity is detrimental to their well-being. Enhance Management even offers monthly life coaching sessions to their creators to ensure they are mentally anchored.
Let’s talk about market dynamics. The Irish PR sector now contributes over €1 billion to the economy. Yet, there is still a massive gap where global brands fail to fully tap into the cultural nuance of the local market.
Bronagh has taken advantage of what she calls the Irish Advantage. Irish creators have a naturally chatty, humorous, and friendly style. They speak to the camera like they are FaceTiming a best friend. Bronagh leverages this cultural relatability when pitching talent to international juggernauts like Fiat, Lululemon, and Benefit Cosmetics.
To bridge the gap for global brands entering Ireland, she forces a collision of authentic storytelling and corporate briefing.
She also instills a fierce global mindset in her roster. She warns creators against limiting their potential to the domestic market, constantly pushing them to post organically and tag global brands.
She uses a past collaboration with Alo Yoga to demonstrate to her talent how organic, unpaid posting can quickly snowball into massive, global opportunities.
We spent a good portion of our time discussing the sheer friction of validating this career path. Bronagh expressed deep frustration that content creation is still viewed skeptically in Ireland, with many locals in her hometown questioning if it is actually a real job.
People outside the industry severely underestimate the time investment required for shoots, concept creation, approvals, and endless amendments. A simple 30-second TikTok for a brand like Fiat could be the result of a grueling nine-hour shoot.
When deals fall through, and they always do, because that is the nature of the beast, Bronagh leans on a singular mantra to keep her team focused:
"A door closes, another one opens."
She believes that if a deal dies, it simply wasn't meant for them, and something better is waiting in the pipeline. She pairs this philosophical resilience with intense operational discipline. If you want to know her holy-grail productivity tools, it isn't some complex AI software. It simply is a religious dedication to Google Calendar and Google Spreadsheets. She is highly organised and admits she would put her grocery list in a spreadsheet if she could.
By the end of our conversation, I was struck by how beautifully Bronagh balances fierce commercial ambition with genuine human tenderness. She has already achieved incredible external validation, including securing major brand partnerships and landing a spot on the Irish Independent's 30 Under 30 list.
But for her, the real metric of success is found in the quiet moments. It was standing at a jewelry launch event, watching one of her long-time talents unveil a collection after six years of hard work, and realising, "She's done it."
The creator economy is loud, chaotic, and often entirely devoid of loyalty. Bronagh Quinn is proving that you don't have to sacrifice your humanity to scale a highly profitable agency. You just have to be willing to do the hard, unglamorous work of actually caring about the people on the other side of the screen.
If this is the future of talent management, we are in incredibly good hands.