How Corporate Natalie turned a $500 brand deal into a creator empire—and her own agency

When Natalie Marshall, better known as Corporate Natalie, landed her first brand deal (a sponsored post for Twisted Tea), she made $500 and felt invincible.

“I was like, I am the richest woman in the world,” she told Fortune. The then-nascent content creator took her friends out to the nicest sushi restaurant she could find in San Francisco (but was really a “hole in the wall place,” she said) and bought everyone dinner. 

Marshall, a Notre Dame alum and former Deloitte consultant, started Corporate Natalie as a side project. Over the past six years, she’s developed a character built around the absurdities of office life, from passive-aggressive Slack messages to buzzword-heavy all-hands meetings. The skits resonated. She now has 1.4 million followers on Instagram, 827,000 on TikTok, and 276,000 on LinkedIn—numbers that have attracted brand partners ranging from major tech firms to consumer goods companies.

Pretty soon after Marshall started making content, she realized she could make real money from content creation. To build rapport and the illusion that she was already a well-established creator, she created a fake assistant.

“I made an assistant who was actually just me, operating on my other email alias, looping in my assistant to handle this brand deal,” Marshall said. “So it seemed like I had this whole business and this world around me.”

She may have been orchestrating somewhat of an illusion then, but it worked. Now, Marshall has an entire brand and character in which she parodies office culture across TikTok, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and has three full-time employees working for her. She was also recognized as a 2023 LinkedIn Top Voice and appeared on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list and appeared in a Dunkin’ Donuts commercial with Will Arnett and on a Roku series in a Kris Jenner wig playing Charlie Puth’s “momager.” Marshall, 29, also previously produced a podcast, Demoted, with fellow B2B creator Ross Pomerantz, known as Corporate Bro. She declined to share revenue or income with Fortune, and influencer income can vary greatly between follower count, content type, and platform—but some content creators have been known to bring in millions of dollars per year.

Corporate Natalie has gained such a following and been such a success that she’s launching Expand Co-Lab, a creator-led influencer marketing agency, which she believes can overhaul a system she says is fundamentally broken. 

“Brands pay massive amounts of money for one singular video to creators, and they often never meet them or talk to them,” Marshall said. “Agencies play this intermediary role that creates separation between the creator and the brand. I sat with that with my team, and we decided we wanted to launch [a] creator led influencer marketing agency.”

The influencer marketing industry

The timing of Marshall’s Expand Co-Lab comes at an inflection point for the global influencer marketing industry, which is estimated to reach $32.55 billion in 2025, up 35% from 2024, according to Influencer Marketing Hub. 

Brands are increasingly pouring those dollars into B2B channels. According to TopRank Marketing’s 2025 B2B Influencer Marketing Report, 99% of B2B marketers using an always-on influencer strategy rate their programs as effective, and 72% of the most advanced teams have a dedicated influencer budget they expect to grow. 

But for Marshall, more money doesn’t always equate to better outcomes. She argues it’s actually made influencer marketing less efficient. 

When you’re a creator, Marshall explained, a brand or agency will reach out to you and offer a certain amount of money to talk about certain topics on their channel, and they’re given a creative brief. But “oftentimes these briefs are written by copywriters, not creators,” which means there can sometimes be several calls to action, many text overlays, and requests for making brand points that have all been approved by their legal teams, she said. She’s rewritten scripts up to 10 times to satisfy briefs that were never built for the type of content she makes.

“We understand that there’s things you have to do to get your message across, but it’s often really difficult, because me, as a comedy creator… how am I supposed to make a joke but also mention all of these things?” Marshall said. “I think the sweet spot that really makes incredible content is when I meet with the brand directly, and we talk through [the] main problem point [they’re] trying to solve.”

Corporate Natalie’s solution to influencer marketing friction

Expand Co-Lab’s premise is simple: Bring creators into the room earlier. 

Rather than handing off a 60-slide deck, the agency facilitates direct conversations between brands and creators during the briefing process. This helps everyone focus on what Marshall calls the “one hero moment or message” a brand actually needs. Plus, many content creators almost never get feedback on their work from the brands they work with.

“I don’t know how the campaign performed. I don’t know if I’ll ever speak to them again. Were they happy? Were they sad? I don’t know,” Marshall said. “There’s no communication.”

Expand Co-Lab doesn’t represent talent or take commissions from creators. Instead, it works with a collective of creators interested in the consulting and ideation aspects of the process. Some of the creators Expand Co-Lab works with include Brandon Smithwrick, Varun Rana, Sara Uy, Corporate Bro, Rachel Tokar, Matthew Kearney, and Morgan Young. Marshall said she’s meeting with dozens of new creators weekly to build out the collective. The B2B space is where Marshall sees the biggest white space and where she’s staking her claim.

Marshall has spent six years operating at the intersection of creator culture and the professional world, so she knows both how brands think and how creators work. But even as Marshall continues to expand her business ventures, she’s careful not to make it seem as if everyone can or should be a content creator, no matter how fun or fulfilling the job may be.

“I don’t think everyone needs to be a content creator. If you love filming yourself and you love filming videos, absolutely—stick with it,” she said. “Find the thing that makes you uniquely you… that single point of failure. If you left the company because you’re so good at this one thing, the company would fall apart in some small way.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com