Sidemen manager: ‘I was C-suite at 20, it was hard’
Jordan Schwarzenberger, manager of YouTube sensations The Sidemen, discusses the pitfalls of being a young leader
In this instalment of our video series, My CEO Secret, we talk to Jordan Schwarzenberger, the 27-year-old co-founder of Arcade Media who manages the careers of The Sidemen.
The Sidemen YouTube collective has more than 130 million followers and includes KSI amongst its number, the man behind Prime drinks.
The Sidemen have branched out into areas like food products (Sides) and a vodka brand, under Schwarzenberger’s guidance.
They are one of the few UK social media brands that can rival US-based influencers and content creators.
But Schwarzenberger wanted to share an experience from earlier in his career for our advice series – so let’s roll back.
The young entrepreneur dropped out of university at King’s College London in his first term to join media firm Vice and then viral content specialists LadBible.
He then made what he considers a key decision, at age 19. He started his own digital talent agency called Roundabout. By choosing the entrepreneur’s path, he was all of a sudden CEO, however small the team was! This brought him a new status and opened doors for him, he says, as he continued to network.
He was talent-spotted by Mary Bekhait, who brought him into the talent agency YMU in 2018. It is a large, established agency that manages the careers of stars like Ant and Dec and Rylan Clark. Schwarzenberger joined as Chief Creative Officer, even though he was only 20 years old.
The mismatch between his age and his seniority made him insecure, he admits looking back.
“Being so young I felt impostor syndrome,” he tells Business Leader, “that led me to being a little… let’s call it arrogant, let’s call it slightly brash.”
He rubbed some people up the wrong way and he tried to “bulldoze” through his ideas, he recalls.
It was a personal piece of feedback from his mentor Bekhait during his first appraisal, which hit hard, but ultimately saved him from himself, as he recalls in our video.
His key lesson?
“To build my career I had to be a service to others, I had to lead from the back, not the front.”
