By: Phil Ranta, CEO, Stealth Talent

For nearly 15 years, I’ve managed talent managers.

Not as a talent manager. But as a manager of talent managers. One who manages the managers. And many of the managers from my teams who were once wide-eyed recent college grads are now CEOs of powerful representation orgs, CAA agents, and massive creators themselves.

And now I’m doing it at my own company Stealth Talent. We’re turning good talent reps into great talent reps, and popular talent into real businesses.

I’m often asked: “What skill separates the ‘constantly winning’ from the ‘constantly challenged’ in the creator representation world?”

I have plenty of canned answers: grit, charm, time management, negotiation skills, social media know-how, popularity amongst creators, constant networking with brands, sales process mastery.

But none of those deserve to be number one.

The only real answer: the winners know the difference between opportunity and potential.

Potential is passive. It can lay dormant forever. A talent can get 10 million views per video with incredible engagement, but if they get their own Netflix show they’ll spend their time playing Call of Duty instead of writing script.

“If only I can get them to focus!” the manager may say. But sometimes, you can’t.

The internet is full of creators who could be billionaires in ten years with a little focus. But it’s very hard to teach focus. Especially when they are young, rich, hormonal, and care more about views that business-building.

Opportunity is kinetic. It’s an actionable moment or, in this case, an actionable talent. It’s a talent with potential and product and grit and vision.

You can sign ten talent that have high potential and make exactly zero dollars after a year of grinding.

Give me one talent at half the size who has real opportunities to seize, who also have the experience and maturity to seize it.

Then the manager is no longer dragging their client to success kicking and screaming.

The talent and manager can spend their time turning opportunity to success to generational success to the next opportunity.

How often do you hear industry execs talking about how busy they are? And how often do you think, “Well I see your numbers…what the heck are you doing all day?”

Some of them are GATBAWs (‘good at talking, bad at working”). The industry is full of people that can turn a thirty minute coffee meeting into a two-hour lecture on their very, very interesting story on how they came to the digital world (ugh…………)

But those who are actually working all day are spending too much time on potential and not enough time on opportunities. They’re busy, but not productive.

And managers who know how to spend more time executing will always get more done.

Am I perfect at this? Heck no. I’ve spent way too much time trying to train employees who had high potential that was never realized. Then I do the math on the amount of time I spent on them. Then I think about what else I could have done in that time. Then I go to bed sobbing in the fetal position staring at my lackluster KPI dashboard.

But I’m not a manager. I’m a manager of managers. So I’m allowed to be a better coach than a player.