![]() ![]() TCB: I am motivated by my team and their desire to learn and grow, and my responsibility to provide them with the resources to do so. SQSP: After a challenging day, week, or month, what keeps you motivated? It is definitely a lifestyle choice that continues to reveal and teach you things about yourself daily. I always say, I wish I was the type of person who naturally fit better in a 9 to 5 job! I never saw my decision to be an entrepreneur as this big life choice, but when I think about it and hear how others want to take the leap, I get really surprised that I have been able to be an entrepreneur full time for the past two years. It also surprised me how friends, family and other people were “inspired” by me and my decision to be an entrepreneur. There were a lot of changes I had to make personally, like sticking to a schedule and executing follow-through that transferred over to my business and stuck. I heard once that how entrepreneurs show up in real life is how they show up for their business. TCB: What surprised me the most was how disciplined I became as a person and professional. But that was the whole purpose of starting Rebelle Management: helping to build those talent brands to a level where the inbound opportunities came frequently. There were many reasons for this, but the main one was working with rising talent instead of talent that were already heavily sought out by brands. Thankfully I already had an operating business and income but it definitely took almost a year for the business to start consistently operating in an efficient fiscal manner. I had to quickly learn what worked well for our talent clients, specifically, and approach each opportunity with an individual lens, which was time consuming and risky.Īnother risk was figuring out the financial structure of the business because managers take a commission of talent fees and don’t get paid by retainers, like in my PR agency. Additionally, I started with two influencers - and the influencer marketing industry was (and still is) figuring itself out in terms of budget, engagement, ROI, etc. For nearly a decade I had honed my skills as a Communications professional, and some of those skills overlap, but I was very aware that I was stepping into a completely unknown territory when it came to talent management. TCB: For Rebelle Management, the biggest risk I took was that I had no formal training. ![]() Legal documentation always makes things a reality! SQSP: In every entrepreneurial endeavor, there are unexpected risks and challenges. SQSP: What was the first step you took to make it a reality? I am changing that with Rebelle Management. Once I started, I realized that there weren’t a lot of representation opportunities for rising talent (especially for talent of color) and that talent and influencer marketing agencies didn’t always treat influencers or content creators as talent brands - and therefore stifled potential opportunities outside of just social partnership. Specifically for my management company, I was actually asked to start managing due to my deep understanding of people and ability to negotiate. I have started two businesses in the past eight years and both were born from this feeling that something was missing in each respective industry. Tanisha Colon-Bibb: I would say it was less inspiration and more necessity. Squarespace: What inspired you to launch Rebelle Management? She talked with Squarespace about the logistics of building a venture from the ground up, how branding is integral to a business, and why she considers failure a necessary step on the path to success. Throughout her career, and through building Rebelle Management, in particular, Tanisha has learned to push through the uncertainty that comes with pursuing a business idea, and to navigate the inevitable ambiguity of working in undefined spaces like influencer marketing. While she transitioned to full-time entrepreneurial work two years ago, the process of ideating, launching, and scaling her now successful companies has been nearly a decade in the making. For Tanisha Colon-Bibb, becoming an entrepreneur and owner of two businesses - talent management company, Rebelle Management, and the Rebelle Agency, a communications company - was a gradual career progression.
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