Nicky Gathrite and the business of being known

Nicky Gathrite’s old job had a pleasingly uncomplicated definition of success: get the ball, go the other way. In 2014, playing football for the University of Texas at El Paso, he recovered a fumble against Southern Miss and returned it 59 yards for a touchdown. The distance was visible. The result went on the scoreboard. Nobody needed a presentation about audience engagement.

His present business requires a less obedient kind of measurement. As founder and CEO of Elevate Agency, he works in talent management and marketing, where a person can be widely recognized yet still need help deciding what to do with that recognition. A following supplies possibilities. It also supplies a remarkably convincing distraction from choosing among them.

The connecting thread in Gathrite’s career is the practical question of how someone gets noticed, then puts that notice to work. He has approached it as an athlete, a financial professional, an agency co-founder and a public personality himself. Each role changes the transaction. The person at its center remains a person, with a name that has to survive the next transaction.

Before the audience, a roster

Born in Las Vegas, Gathrite had Riverside, California, listed as his football hometown. He played at Taylor University and Riverside City College before UTEP. His college record includes a Golden State Bowl Defensive MVP award, a senior season with 29 tackles and a place on the 2014 Conference USA Commissioner’s Honor Roll. He wore number seven.

Those details make a useful corrective to the interchangeable biography of the internet entrepreneur. There was a real sporting career before the agency vocabulary arrived. The later emphasis on athletes has that concrete background behind it; football is part of his experience, rather than simply a convenient market segment.

Competition also makes an appearance in his television biography. He won on MTV’s Fear Factor in 2018. Years later, he still places that distinction prominently in his public profile. It is an economical calling card: a few words that give someone outside the marketing business a reason to remember him. An executive title tells you what someone does. A television victory gives the conversation somewhere to go.

When clients asked a different question

Gathrite moved into wealth management and used social media to attract clients. The consequential development was that people began asking him about his social media strategy, too. A skill he had used to sell one service had become a service people wanted to buy. His route into influencer marketing grew from that demand.

There is a small business lesson tucked inside the sequence. Customers sometimes describe a company’s next line of work before its founder has written the description. Gathrite’s experience sits comfortably in that tradition. The requests arrived through work he was already doing; he chose to follow them toward a different profession.

Daily Strides, where he served as CEO, belongs to this earlier part of the story. Its public description in 2019 centered on consulting and helping clients market their brands. The interest was already broader than making someone’s feed look attractive. Visibility was being treated as something a business could develop deliberately.

By 2021, he was explaining that his financial background encouraged him to think about social media over a longer period. An account could keep someone relevant and help acquire clients, but it could also support a continuing business. That distinction runs through his subsequent work. Getting attention once and building a career around attention involve different decisions, even when they begin with the same photograph.

A lunch, a partner, a paywall

Gathrite and Tara Electra co-founded Unruly Agency after a lunch at the W hotel. Their backgrounds met at a useful junction: he understood client acquisition and the longer view of money; she brought experience in influencer campaigns and the relationships surrounding them. The agency became associated with models, digital creators and subscription platforms, including OnlyFans.

In their account of the business, the goal was to help talent become brands themselves. Subscription content offered a way to earn directly from an audience and understand what that audience valued. Their model placed collaboration and production support around the individual creator. The recognizable person remained at the center, but a team could take on parts of the work.

Gathrite’s advice was to begin with the destination. “It always has to start with the end goal in mind,” he said. For a creator offered an endless procession of campaigns, that is a useful restriction. A paid opportunity can still be a poor fit for the career someone hopes to have. The difficulty lies in declining something tangible for a future that has yet to send an invoice.

When the co-founders discussed their agency’s anniversary in 2021, they described listening to how talent wanted to present themselves and building plans around those preferences. They also pointed to clients buying homes, paying off debts and starting businesses as moments that mattered to them. Those were their accounts of success, expressed in ordinary outcomes rather than a wall of follower totals.

“It always has to start with the end goal in mind.”Nicky Gathrite • 2021

The obligations behind the image

The Unruly chapter also brought disputes. Former employees filed a 2021 lawsuit alleging worker misclassification, unpaid wages and retaliation. A separate group of employment cases filed in 2024 named Gathrite alongside Unruly and other defendants; an April 2025 tentative ruling addressed issues involving severance agreements. Allegations in those cases are claims, rather than established findings of wrongdoing.

In 2022, his Instagram musician verification was revoked. Gathrite denied knowing about a paid verification scheme.

For a business organized around public identity, these episodes matter alongside the promotional accounts. Representing someone involves obligations to the people doing the work as well as promises to the people whose names appear on it. The glossy surface is only one part of an agency. Its contracts and employment arrangements belong in the same picture.

A second agency, closer to the field

Elevate Agency was formed in 2022. By late 2023, Gathrite had sold his Unruly stake, shifting his focus to sports and entertainment management.

Elevate’s stated work spans talent management, content creation, marketing, public relations and brand partnerships. It represents athletes, entertainers and digital creators, and says it works with their agents on brand building and longer-term planning. The combination makes room for careers that cross several public settings: the game, the stage, the interview and the social account.

Some of the work is pleasantly specific. In 2024, the agency’s public account of its activities included six Stagecoach-weekend performances for country musician Zay Wilson, a LIV Miami performance for Stefanie Quenville and national endorsement campaigns for Chase DeMoor and WNBA player Rae Burrell. It also described helping arrange Super Bowl opportunities involving Tyga and Rich The Kid.

Booking a performance and arranging an endorsement require different negotiations. Yet both offer an answer to the question hanging over a visible person’s career: what comes next? An agency earns its place when it can make the next step concrete. A calendar entry, a performance slot or a signed campaign is easier to understand than a promise that someone’s personal brand will someday become enormous.

The photograph of Gathrite with Wilson gives this work a more human scale. There are wristbands, denim and a large umbrella. It looks like two people at an event, which is exactly the point. A talent business can be described in sweeping language while still depending on particular people showing up in particular places.

The founder enters the feed

Gathrite’s own public presence keeps him inside the system he helps clients navigate. His personal link pages gather press coverage, social accounts and videos, including a burger-rating clip. They also carry travel posts from Monte-Carlo and Saint-Tropez. The range is part of the appeal of a personal account: business can share space with lunch without requiring a departmental reorganization.

His agency title does not account for everything people encounter there. He is also a television participant, a sports enthusiast and a person who posts about furniture. One caption jokes about dressing up only to stay inside and enjoy it. It is a smaller, more amusing moment than the grand claims often attached to a founder’s profile. Sometimes the occasion is the sofa.

In 2022, Gathrite appeared on Michael Chernow’s Kreatures Of Habit podcast for a conversation advertised around learning, relationships and ego. More recently, he has moved into the interviewer’s chair: a public post promoted his Elevated Podcast conversation with client Chase DeMoor about boxing. Being the host puts another kind of attention to work, allowing an agency relationship to become a conversation an audience can follow.

His festival work continued into 2026. He publicly celebrated Elevate’s Adobe Premiere campaign during Coachella and Stagecoach season, crediting the team’s hours of work. He also appeared in the campaign’s creator roster. The founder could be involved in the agency work and visible in the resulting content, a fairly literal example of participation in his own business.

What the network is for

In January 2025, Gathrite organized a Los Angeles fire-relief fundraiser, partnering through Elevate with Jermaine Johnson. Its stated purpose was to assist displaced families and support firefighters. The campaign page asked people to follow their accounts for updates. The same channels used for promoting talent were being directed toward a local emergency.

That effort offers a concrete example of what a network can be asked to do. An audience has people at the other end of it. Asking those people to help is different from inviting them to admire, and the distinction gives the word community some practical weight. The fundraiser’s purpose can be understood without translating it into marketing terminology.

Gathrite has said he wants creators to build lasting personal brands and keep pursuing their interests through changes of direction. His career supplies several such changes. Football, finance, consulting, subscription management and sports representation have each given him a different way to understand the relationship between an individual and the people paying attention.

The ambition behind Elevate is to make that relationship useful over time. For an athlete, an entertainer or a creator, being known opens doors but does little to choose the right one. Gathrite’s business occupies that next decision. The old scoreboard was easier to read. The current work is to help another person decide what a good result should look like, then give them somewhere to go.