Running a Creator Agency Is Not Passive Income. It's an Operations Job.
Let's kill the fantasy first, because it is doing real damage. The pitch you have heard is some version of: sign a few creators, take a cut, watch the money roll in while you sleep. Passive income, hands off, easy. It is a lie, and the people selling it know it is a lie. Running a creator agency is not passive anything. It is an operations job, and the agencies that survive are the ones that figure that out fast.
Here is the gap nobody talks about honestly. The dream is "manage creators and make money." The reality is a daily grind of logging into accounts, switching between platforms, chasing your team in DMs, reconciling numbers that do not match, and putting out a fire you did not see coming because you were busy putting out a different fire. The money is real, but it is not passive. It is earned in the operational weeds.
What the day actually looks like
Pull back the curtain on a working agency and here is the actual job:
Platform management: juggling logins and accounts across multiple platforms, switching constantly, trying not to mix anything up or trip a security flag.
Performance tracking: figuring out who is up, who is down, which creator needs attention today, usually by checking five places that each tell you something slightly different.
Client communication: keeping creators happy, informed, and confident that you are earning your cut, which mostly means proving value with numbers.
Billing: tracking revenue and commissions across a roster, where one math error becomes a trust problem.
None of that is glamorous. All of it is the job. And it scales badly, because every new creator adds load to a system that is mostly running in someone's head.
Why spreadsheets and DMs became the standard
So how does everyone run this? Spreadsheets and group chats. A founder's giant Google Sheet, a shared login or two, a Telegram chat where every decision lives until it gets lost. That is the industry standard, and it is not because agency owners are lazy. It is because that is what was available. The creator-tool boom built apps for solo creators, not operations software for the businesses managing them. So agencies improvised.
The improvisation works until it doesn't. There is a specific moment, usually somewhere past a dozen creators, when the spreadsheet stops being a tool and starts being a liability. The founder is the bottleneck for everything. A chatter quits and takes context nobody wrote down. The monthly report eats an entire day. Numbers disagree and you cannot tell which is right. That is the moment the fantasy of passive income dies and the reality of operations sets in.
The moment agencies realize they need real infrastructure
Every serious agency hits this wall. The smart ones recognize it for what it is: not a sign they are failing, but a sign they have outgrown the manual approach. The agency got big enough that hustle and memory are no longer a system. You cannot duct-tape your way to fifty creators. You need infrastructure.
This is why "creator operations" is becoming a real category. It is the software layer for exactly this problem: a central place to manage the team, track performance across platforms, control who accesses what without sharing passwords, and produce the reports that keep creators trusting you. Not a monetization gadget for one person. An operations system for the business you actually run. OnlyMonster is one platform built specifically for this, giving agencies a single workspace to run the roster instead of fifteen browser tabs and a prayer.
The honest takeaway
If you are running a creator agency or thinking about starting one, here is the unglamorous truth. The hard part is not finding creators. It is operating them, day after day, without dropping any. The "passive income" story skips that part entirely, which is exactly why so many agencies burn out and vanish within months.
The ones that last treat it like the operations business it is. They build systems early, they stop running everything through one overloaded founder, and they put real infrastructure under the chaos before the chaos wins. Passive income was never the offer. The offer was a real business, and real businesses need real operations. Build for that, and you might actually be one of the agencies still standing next year