Today, growth happens in public, not behind the scenes.
There’s a version of building a company where the walls stay up. The brand stays manicured, the founder is always composed, and the audience only sees the result.
Nowadays, that veiled approach to business seems like a distant and outdated mode—building out loud, in public, and in real time has become the new GTM.
Shannae Ingleton Smith, co-founder, CEO, and president of Kensington Grey Agency, has spent the last several years proving this. Her creator management firm represents more than 200 culturally relevant creators across the globe and operates a ventures arm that grew through radical transparency, practiced before it was a strategy or a trend.
She started by giving everything away
Kensington Grey, named after Ingleton Smith’s daughter, didn’t begin as a business. It began as a private Facebook group.
Ingleton Smith spent years in advertising sales at Rogers Media, one of Canada’s largest media conglomerates, watching brands spend millions on placements while readership migrated to social. She also watched the people deciding who got deals consistently fail to reflect the communities they were supposedly serving.
“I always made it a point to advocate for people of color, to advocate for Black women, to make sure those stories were being told in the boardrooms,” she said in a recent interview with Inc.
While on maternity leave, she and her best friend started a pro bono Facebook group advising Black creators on pricing, pitching, and industry access. The group grew to 400-plus creators. Members came back with wins rooted in their guidance, and a viral story about the process drew attention to the community’s organic growth and success. The DMs that followed, asking for their formal support, were the launch pad for starting the agency.
The origin of Kensington Grey is an act of building in public.
“Those things were previously gatekept by the influencer marketing community,” Ingleton Smith says. “But those were our posts going the most viral because nobody was talking about that.”
The transparency wasn’t a tactic. It was a value system that happened to build the brand.
What building in public requires
Most conversations about building in public collapse into content advice: post more, share your process, be relatable.
Ingleton Smith’s version is more demanding. “Throw perfection out the door,” she says.
She noted that audiences expect founders to share the journey—good and bad—in real time. That’s accountability to an audience sophisticated enough to distinguish authenticity from performance, and willing to act on that distinction.
“People buy things and support brands they believe in now more than ever,” she says. “Growing up, the general consumer didn’t know who the CEO of Dell was, but people know Hailey Bieber is behind Rhode. They know Danessa Myricks is behind Danessa Myricks.”
The founder and the brand are no longer separable
Kensington Grey’s growth makes this concrete. When the agency launched, management firms had social pages but weren’t using them. Ingleton Smith ran Kensington Grey’s Instagram the way she’d run a creator’s account by posting daily, taking positions, and sharing what the industry kept quiet.
“That visibility helped us gain clients and opportunities for our creators,” she says. The agency built community the same way it taught its talent to—by showing up consistently and providing real value to people, whether or not they were on the roster.
The business case for a long-standing community
Kensington Grey’s support in the launch of Jenee Naylor’s bespoke sunglass line, 12PM Studios, is the clearest proof of concept, and Ingleton Smith is careful not to let it read as a formula anyone can lift.
“The community building starts way before launch,” she says.
Naylor had driven hundreds of thousands in sales through Target collections, Amazon drops, and six years of YouTube content before one of her own products shipped.
“There are people with millions of followers who are just there to watch,” Ingleton Smith shares. “Jenee’s audience—she has trained them to shop.”
The infrastructure matched: Naylor as creative director, her husband on finance and paid media, a full-time hire before launch day.
“We built this to be a household name from day one,” Ingleton Smith says.
Community isn’t built in a pre-launch sprint
“Get on camera so your audience feels like they know you,” Ingleton Smith says. That takes years of work, but it’s also the only version that converts when it matters.
Ingleton Smith recommends that any CEO who really wants to make an impact should show up—not because founders need to become influencers, but because the audience has gotten too smart for the alternative.
Feature image credit: Adobe Stock, Kensington Grey
BY SOPHIE MEHARENNA
FOUNDER + NARRATIVE STRATEGIST, @WORDYSOPH
