Courtney Bagby Lupilin and the business on the other side of the screen

Five people. That was the scale of the question Courtney Bagby Lupilin’s father put to her after about a year in Los Angeles. Could she manage five clients and earn what she was making at her job? She already knew the kind of work she wanted. The conversation gave her a way to picture doing it for herself, with a number small enough to attach to actual people.

Her ambition had an unfashionably cheerful ingredient: she liked reality television. She went to meet-and-greets, watched the contestants and wanted to work with them. Years later, she would describe the pleasure of accompanying clients into events where she once would have waited outside. When somebody approached for a photograph, she recognized the impulse. She had been that person. Depending on the celebrity, she admitted, she still was.

Little Red Management, the company she founded in 2019 at 25, grew out of that sustained interest. The name carries a straightforward personal reference: its founder has red hair. There is a pleasing lack of corporate camouflage in that choice. This was a business built around people she knew something about, doing work she had spent years trying to get close enough to understand.

Starting a company had not been her original objective. She has explained that she wanted an agency job doing this work, and continued applying even after she had agency experience. That makes the eventual decision more revealing. The attachment was to the work itself: representing reality personalities and arranging their social partnerships. A business of her own gave her a way to pursue the specialty she kept looking for in other people’s job descriptions. The founding date came after years of trying to find the right place.

Learning the business from the people on television

Bagby Lupilin graduated from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2015, having studied advertising, communications and digital media. The Bachelor contestants appearing in her Instagram feed caught her professional attention. Here were people whose relationship with an audience continued after their time on television. Their accounts were becoming places where brands could advertise. She wanted to be involved in that work.

Her first job took her to Oracle in San Francisco, handling internal communications and events. After three years, she moved to Los Angeles. Applications to brands working with influencers failed to produce the opening she wanted. An assistant role at a commercial talent agency gave her experience with celebrity campaigns, though her own interests stayed with reality personalities and social partnerships.

She was already finding smaller ways into the industry. At Reality Rally, a charity event attended by reality stars, she volunteered. She also contacted cast members from shows including Survivor and Big Brother, offering to help manage their social accounts in the off-season. Some accepted. By the time she met them at the event, there was something to talk about besides her enthusiasm for the show.

One account of her early outreach involves a Bachelor contestant she repeatedly invited to brunch. The invitations did not produce a meeting. Then Bagby Lupilin ran into her at The Grove in Los Angeles. The contestant recognized her from the messages, and they sat down to talk. The education she had struggled to obtain from agencies was available, on that occasion, from the talent.

“slide into those DMs!”

Courtney Bagby Lupilin

Her advice has the buoyancy of someone who remembers how badly she wanted a reply. She has said she now responds to people seeking career guidance because she remembers trying to learn the business. That is a modest, useful form of institutional memory: remembering what the closed door felt like once you have a desk inside.

A new job after the finale

The work she chose begins with an awkward transition. A person appears on a television show and gains an audience. Then comes the task of deciding what to make for those people when the programme is over. A familiar face is a starting point. It leaves plenty of practical questions unanswered: what to post, how regularly to post it, and which commercial opportunities make sense.

In conversations about her business, Bagby Lupilin returns to helping clients establish routines and find photographers or videographers. Content creation can be a new occupation for a reality contestant, with unfamiliar responsibilities. The manager’s role includes helping someone turn a burst of public interest into a working schedule. An episode arrives with a production team. The next week’s social content requires another arrangement.

Her argument for smaller creators is similarly practical. A brand may value a useful piece of content and permission to keep using it. Audience size matters, but so do production quality and usage terms. That perspective makes room for a creator whose commercial usefulness cannot be read directly from the follower count printed beside their name.

The clients associated with her firm have included Becca Kufrin, Cory Wharton, Deepti Vempati and Taylor Selfridge. The brands in its partnership history include Disney, Amazon, Nike and Mattel. These are different sorts of familiarity: a viewer knows a personality; a consumer knows a company. A campaign asks whether the two belong together in a way an audience will accept.

When discussing full-time influencing, Bagby Lupilin describes the work in ordinary employment terms. Brainstorming, filming, editing, publishing and talking with the audience all occupy time. Her advice puts a working week behind a feed that can look effortless. The relaxed appearance of a post does not tell you how many decisions went into making it.

There is a trace of her earlier working life in a public recommendation from Oracle colleague Luke Brunner. He described someone who anticipated difficulties, improved projects and delivered on commitments. It is a colleague’s assessment, and a useful companion to the fan stories: the enthusiasm arrived with habits that could survive an ordinary workday.

The inbox behind the Instagram post

Her own description of a typical day in 2024 began at seven in the morning, with emails, and continued until about six. There were phone calls taken on walks. Much of the day went to coordinating campaigns and approaching brands about new work. A job born from an interest in television turns out to contain a considerable amount of correspondence.

She has also spoken about campaigns requiring reshoots and close attention to detail. The attractive finished image is only one point in a longer process. A manager must keep the people involved moving toward something they can approve and publish. The ability to like somebody’s television persona gets very little done when a campaign needs another version.

And then there is payment. She has singled out the repeated pursuit of outstanding invoices as one of the aggravations of running the company. Terms can stretch across thirty, sixty or ninety days. The photograph has been delivered; the post has appeared; somebody still has to follow up. Glamour, it seems, is perfectly capable of arriving before the money.

A fan at her own wedding

There is a more personal measure of how far those early relationships travelled. At her wedding to Dmitriy at Chalet View Lodge near Lake Tahoe, the officiant was Ashley Iaconetti Haibon, familiar to viewers of The Bachelor and Bachelor in Paradise. The celebration, featured in August 2023, brought together friends from several of the shows that had interested Bagby Lupilin for years.

Cory Wharton and Taylor Selfridge attended, as did Nicole Franzel and Victor Arroyo. Her dog Skylar appeared in the celebration too. Pale purples and greens ran through the outdoor setting. It was a wedding with recognizable guests, and also the thoroughly personal business of vows, family and deciding who should sit beside whom.

Her advice for couples included a line that sounds comfortably at home in a talent manager’s vocabulary: “negotiate everything down in pricing!!” She also encouraged them to enjoy the planning, including the Sunday coffee and debates over late-night snacks. The negotiating instinct survived the occasion. So did an appreciation for the small, companionable parts of it.

What attention is worth

By 2023, Bagby Lupilin was on the speaker list at Advertising Week New York, discussing how enthusiasm for brands could lead to influencer partnerships. The panel placed her alongside people from Free People, LTK and Women in Influencer Marketing. The person who had once struggled to find someone to explain the industry was now participating in its professional conversations.

Looking ahead to 2025, she predicted that creators would increasingly want managers who were closely involved and could bring regular work. It was a forecast about the obligations inside representation. An impressive roster is easy to display. The relationship has to justify itself in the repeated effort of finding opportunities and seeing them through.

In July 2026, Little Red and Sigment announced a partnership focused on creator audiences and paid-media measurement. The announced plan connected organic creator content with advertising aimed at active viewers and similar audiences, tracking actions such as clicks and purchases. It also named the company’s October creator retreat in the Dominican Republic as a planned setting for the offering.

The announcement adds a new question to a familiar sequence. Someone watches a person on a screen. They choose to keep watching elsewhere. A brand wants to know what that attention can do. Bagby Lupilin has built her working life around the people inside that sequence. Her father’s five-client question gave it a manageable beginning. The work since has been keeping those relationships useful, one conversation and one campaign at a time.