In January 2019, Ted Raad sat in his bedroom with a laptop, no investors, no business plan, and no employees. He had one insight: the influencer marketing industry was broken for the very people it depended on. Seven years later, Trend Companies manages over 130 creators, facilitates roughly $80 million in annual brand deals, employs 70 people across Nashville and Houston, and earned a spot on the 2025 Inc. 5000 list.
His total startup cost was a laptop and an internet connection.
How a Broken Brand Deal Sparked an $80 Million Company
The idea for Trend didn’t come from market research or a business school case study. It came from watching his wife get a raw deal. Dede Raad, known online as “Dress Up Buttercup,” had been building her creator business since late 2015. She signed with a talent management agency that started pushing brand partnerships that didn’t align with her audience or values.
When Dede declined those campaigns, the relationship turned uncomfortable. Ted, who was working at Hewlett-Packard in IT mergers and acquisitions at the time, saw the problem clearly. Agencies were optimizing for their own commission checks, not for the creators who generated the revenue. He believed there was a better way to run talent management, one that put the creator’s brand integrity first.
So he opened his laptop on January 7, 2019, and started Trend Management from his bedroom in Houston, Texas. No outside funding. No co-founder. Just a conviction that treating creators well would attract more of them.
200% Growth in Year One by Doing What Other Agencies Wouldn’t
Raad’s background in mergers and acquisitions gave him an edge that most talent managers lacked. He knew how to read contracts, negotiate terms, and spot clauses that disadvantaged his clients. He applied that discipline to every brand deal Trend brokered, and word spread quickly among creators that this agency actually fought for them.
It took about six months to see consistent revenue. After that, the growth was explosive: approximately 200% year over year in the early stages. Creators started referring other creators. Brands noticed that Trend’s talent delivered authentic content that performed better because the partnerships genuinely fit.
The strategy was counterintuitive in an industry built on volume. Raad told creators to say no to deals that didn’t align with their personal brand, even when the paycheck was significant. That short-term revenue sacrifice built long-term trust, which turned out to be far more valuable.
From One Division to a Full Creator Ecosystem
As Trend Management grew, Raad saw opportunities beyond talent representation. He launched Trend Social, a full-service influencer marketing agency that connects brands directly with creators for campaigns. This gave Trend control of both sides of the marketplace: they represent the creators and they sell the partnerships to brands.
The company has since expanded into athlete management and a product incubator that helps creators build and launch their own brands and product lines. This vertical integration means Trend earns revenue at multiple points in the creator economy value chain, not just from management commissions.
By 2023, Raad opened a second office in Nashville, recognizing the city’s growing role as a hub for creators and digital media. The team grew from one person in a bedroom to nearly 70 employees across two cities.
Why This Story Matters for Every Aspiring Founder
Ted Raad’s trajectory illustrates a pattern that keeps showing up in successful side hustles that become real companies. He didn’t raise capital. He didn’t build a product. He started with a service that solved an obvious problem for a specific group of people, and he delivered it better than the existing options.
The creator economy is projected to be worth over $500 billion by 2027, according to Goldman Sachs. But Raad didn’t chase the macro trend. He noticed a micro problem: his wife’s agency wasn’t acting in her best interest. He built Trend to fix that one problem, and the market rewarded him for it.
His advice to aspiring founders is blunt: “Be realistic before you start. Understand what revenue actually looks like and how long it takes to get there. Once you commit, go all in.” Six months of inconsistent income is normal. The cost of getting started is lower than most people think. The hard part isn’t the money. It’s the patience to keep going when the early months are slow.
Raad went all in from a bedroom with a laptop. Seven years and $80 million later, the bet paid off in a way that mergers and acquisitions never could have.
