How Can an Influencer Terminate a Management Contract?
How can a social media influencer terminate a management contract? Most influencers will have either an agent or a manager or maybe even a marketing agency working for them. And then you should have a contract with them and there are times where it might just not work out and the influencer is interested in terminating the agreement and then determining what the implications are if they terminate the agreement. In any kind of contract, there’s going to be a section that states how you can terminate the agreement, normally called termination. And there are generally four common ways you can terminate a contract. One, your influencer management contract is going to have a term.
And the term just simply means how long it lasts. Somewhere between one all the way up to five years is kind of a normal amount for an influencer management contract. And then it will state after that initial term if it automatically renews or not. Many contracts, let’s just say it’s a one-year term, will just state if neither party terminates the agreement, it’ll just automatically renew for successive one-year terms that just kind of go on forever until terminated. There are some contracts that don’t have that language, and it’s just a fixed term, meaning, it’s one year and that’s it. And in that scenario, if your contract ended after a year, neither party renewed it, it’s done. The contract is terminated. The second way would be through mutual agreement. If either party, for whatever reason just said, you know what, this isn’t working out, regardless of what the contract says, I’m just interested in kind of washing our hands of the situation, moving on.
That would be another way you could terminate the agreement. The third way would be with cause. There are things that both parties must do during the term of a contract. And if one of those parties is breaching the contract, so they’re not kind of fulfilling the terms of the agreement, let’s say you’re an influencer and your agency or manager simply stopped providing you or reaching out to find you deals or something, and they’re just not doing the job that they were contracted to do, well, you would find them in a breach of contract. In most well-written contracts, it’s going to state how you can provide notice of the breach. And then normally, there would be what’s called a cure period. If the manager was in breach of contract, you would give them a letter that states, here are the things you’re doing to breach the contract, and then there’d be cure period normally. And a cure period would be basically an amount of time that the manager or agency could fix whatever the breach is. And then the influencer could not terminate the contract with cause. That’s the third way, with cause termination. Other topics of interest include:
- What is a Standard Influencer Management Commission?
- What Should an Influencer Management Contract Include?
And then the last and the most common way is without cause termination. Without cause termination simply means either party can terminate the agreement at any time, for any reason, with a certain amount of notice to the other party. In most influencer management contracts, it’s going to be somewhere between 30 to 120 days’ notice. And what that would mean is if you’re the influencer and you were just unhappy with the agency, you would give them the, let’s say it’s a 60-day notice. And then both parties would kind of work through those last 60 days. And then at the end of that, they could move on and find new management. Now, there’s usually one kind of, I guess, thing that sticks with the management contract.
And that would be if you had any sponsoring companies while working for the management company, and obviously, if they were worth what you were paying them, they should have plenty of sponsoring companies for you. There will usually be a clause in the contract that states, for a period after the contract ends, you can’t work with that sponsoring company. For instance, if a manager brought you a deal for a meal prep company and they said, alright, you must give one 90-second spot once a month for every YouTube video you do. Well, you couldn’t go back to that same company the day after the contract terminated and tell them, hey, I want you to pay me directly from now on. And the reason why most management companies do that is they don’t want to bring an influencer deals.
And then most management companies get around 20% commission. So, whatever they bring the influencer, they’re going to get 20% of that. They don’t want to bring them deals, have the influencer terminate the contract, and then just basically circumvent having to pay the management fee or commission. One year is kind of a standard amount for that. Now, certainly, that’s negotiable. I’ve seen some that I would consider completely unreasonable are four, or five years in length and that’s not something any influencer should agree to. So, that’s how an influencer can terminate a management contract.
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