Agent, Manager, Business Manager — Who Is Actually for You

The people who manage your career have financial interests in it.

The agent earns a percentage of the contract they negotiate. The business manager earns a fee for the assets they manage. The marketing representative earns on the deals they broker. None of those interests are inherently wrong — professionals deserve to be paid for their work. But those interests are not identical to yours, and in situations where they diverge, understanding whose interest is being served is information you need.

Read this passage slowly.

Let that sit for a second before you move.

With many advisers they succeed. The instruction is not to distrust advisers. It is to have enough of them, and enough diversity among them, that no single person’s perspective or interest dominates the decisions. The athlete who has built a professional support team with overlapping accountability — where the financial advisor knows what the agent is doing, where there is a trusted non-professional voice who has no financial stake in any decision — is in a different position than the one who has delegated everything to a single person they trust completely.

The question of who is actually for you is not primarily about whether your professional team members are honest people. Most of them are. It is about the structure of the accountability and the nature of the interests involved. The agent whose income is tied to contract size has a built-in incentive to maximize the contract. That incentive may align with yours perfectly or it may diverge in ways that are not immediately visible.

The most important person in your professional orbit is the one who has no financial stake in any of your decisions — the trusted advisor, the chaplain, the mentor, the family member whose financial situation is not improved by your choices. That person can tell you the truth that the people earning from you may not be able to tell you without compromising their own interests.

Know who that person is. Keep them close. Give them permission to say what the others won’t.

The named person is the most important relationship in the athlete’s professional life. If they can’t name one, that is the urgent pastoral care issue.