When Austin Neal launched his talent booking firm, The Neal Agency, in 2022, he faced a steep learning curve.

“It was like I was dropped into the ocean. I had to figure out how to swim,” he says with a laugh as he looks back on that daunting period. From his years as an agent at prominent country music booker Buddy Lee Attractions and WME, he knew how to book and route clients, but he had no clue about setting up his own company. “I didn’t know what I needed to do to form an LLC. My assistant at the time, who is now an agent with us, jokes that she walked into my apartment and saw Business for Dummies sitting on the counter.”

With a little aid from the instructional book, a much greater assist from lawyer Elliot Groffman (the powerhouse attorney who represents Dave Matthews Band, Phish and more) and a business management team that handled everything including setting up payroll, “it’s like I blinked and we had an office, a lot of employees and new artists,” he says.

Fast forward four years and, in addition to flagship client Morgan Wallen — who is performing double stadium plays in nearly every market on his current tour — Neal, 39, and his team have developed Riley Green (who Neal signed in 2017, when he started at WME), Ella Langley, Bailey Zimmerman and HARDY into arena headliners.

“Austin saw what Riley was doing in the Southeast long before [his career] took off in Nashville. Over the years he has helped us navigate a steady and strategic path to building a strong business both in the U.S. and internationally,” says Zach Sutton, who co-manages Green with Daniel Miller.

“When Austin decided to [open] The Neal Agency, we were instantly on board with his vision,” Miller adds. “He has been able to take his generational experience and channel it through a modern approach. His competitive spirit and sharp instincts resonate throughout the team and have led their incredible success.”

As a third-generation music industry executive, Neal has entertainment in his blood. His grandfather, Bob Neal, founded The Neal Agency in the 1960s after serving as Elvis Presley’s first manager before Colonel Tom Parker. (Neal named his own distinct agency in his grandfather’s honor.) His father, Kevin, who retired last year, is a renowned agent who worked at Buddy Lee Attractions (which closed in 2018) and then WME, representing such artists as Jason Aldean and Florida Georgia Line during his career.

Growing up in Nashville, Neal fell in love with a wide range of acts, including Deftones, Three 6 Mafia, Incubus and Metallica. “Music discovery was my thing,” he says. “I used to make mixtapes for everybody.”

But his father initially discouraged him from going into the music industry. “My dad said, ‘Don’t get in this business. It’s too brutal … You don’t need to be the third generation to go through it,’ ” Neal recalls.

At the University of Mississippi, he studied chemistry with the intention to attend medical school. “Medicine was very interesting to me,” he says. “I was always drawn to [science] in my brain. If I find something, I want to learn as much as I can about it and the deep, dark details of every little thing. Science and math really played to how my brain is wired.”

After graduation, he interned at the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation in the drug chemistry lab running confirmatory tests on confiscated marijuana. Neal then worked at lab services company Aegis Sciences Corp. before deciding to do “something that had a little more excitement to it.”

He switched career paths to work for School of Legends, a now-defunct website that was “trying to be the Facebook of the NFL,” Neal says. The website faltered but Kevin noticed a spark in his son. “My dad saw me working deals and being around NFL players and that was when the light bulb went off with him, like, [saying], ‘Hey, you should actually come try the music thing. I think it’s a good time for you to try it out and see if you like it.’ ”

Neal began working at Buddy Lee Attractions with his father, booking acts with names like Old Southern Moonshine Revival on the Southeast’s club circuit. He then switched to working at management firms, joining the teams that represented acts like Big & Rich and Josh Abbott Band.

He decided he liked being an agent more than a manager and was planning to move back into the agency world. Then, in 2016, his father had a major stroke. Neal left Triple 8 Management to help care for Kevin. After Jay Williams, partner and co-head of WME’s Nashville office, visited Kevin in rehab, he texted Neal: “It’s time for us to get you over to WME.”

At WME, Kevin was working with then-developing act Wallen, whom the younger Neal had already met playing golf and bonded with over their shared love for acts like the synth-pop duo Empire of the Sun. After Kevin’s stroke, Wallen would check in with Neal and his family frequently, so when Neal moved over to WME, he took over booking Wallen, who at that point was playing clubs for $500 a gig.

In February 2021, as Wallen was on the precipice of becoming an arena headliner — and early in the 10-week run his second full-length, Dangerous: The Double Album, would have atop the Billboard 200 — the artist was caught on camera using a racial slur, and the video went viral. WME dropped Wallen from its roster, but Neal continued to work with him as a friend, booking Wallen’s 2022 tour before Neal officially left WME in December 2021.

“It was a big strain for both of us, because here I am continuing to work at WME,” Neal says. “We’re coming off COVID. He’s still over in this corner and he’s [radioactive], and we’re still friends and we’re still hanging out. We’re trying to work through it together behind the scenes.”

In February 2022, Neal officially launched The Neal Agency. His initial clients, some of whom he’d represented at WME, included not only Wallen, but also Green, Chase Rice, Ashland Craft, Seaforth, John Morgan, ERNEST and HARDY (he wooed the lattermost while they were playing video games). His elevator pitch to join the new company was simple: “ ‘Hey, you guys, come with me and if you’re not happy, leave me. But I’m going to bust it. I’m going to build a company that can support everything you need and just have some faith.’ ”

As he built the company, Neal found his lane: a boutique agency focused on young artists who could grow alongside it. The Neal Agency now has 34 acts, none of whom are older than 40 and whose careers are all still on the rise.

“If you look at WME, they’ve been able to become so big because they have the top headline talent. We’re not going to go beat them at having the biggest roster,” he says. “We’re not going to beat these heritage-leaning agencies that know the nooks and crannies in the places that I used to book in Georgia that book Diamond Rio two or three times a year. I’d rather focus on keep[ing] our brand cool, young, hip. Could we sign an artist that [is] on the backside of their touring career? Yeah, but I think being hungry, signing new stuff and trying to develop has always been at the heart of The Neal Agency.”

After about a year, Neal brought in WME agent Adi Sharma as co-head and agent. “Adi is like me. He’s a math guy. We’re nerds. We would just look at deals in the WME system and think about tour deals and scaling. We would be the last ones at WME every single night when we were there, because we just loved it,” Neal says of himself and Sharma, who started as Kevin Neal’s assistant at WME. “If I was going to take somebody from WME with me, getting Adi was worth the flak that I was going to catch. It just was important to have another person that I trust implicitly be riding shotgun with me.”

While Neal is creating a new-school agency, he’s built on plenty of the practices he learned from his dad. “The first [Florida Georgia Line] tour where he had a relationship dealing directly with the buildings versus going through a promoter, that was always kind of my goal: to be more hands-on and involved in every aspect,” Neal says.

Neal, who spends up to 150 nights a year on the road with his artists, also took his prior experience working in management into account: “I just tried to look at an agency through a manager’s lens and [think], ‘How can we make their day as easy as possible on the live side?’ ” That includes providing marketing, branding (his team recently coordinated Langley’s American Eagle deal) and other services for all acts on the roster, not just “the top 1%,” he says. “One of my main focuses initially was, ‘We need to get our own tour marketing team in house and really have them focus on the small artists while also doing work on Morgan’s tours. Let’s have white glove service with our managers to where they’re not having to dig through to make sure if we use the right country radio station in [a] market.’ ”

The Neal Agency represented 13% of the acts playing Stagecoach this year, according to bookingagentinfo.com, including Langley, Green, Nate Smith and Zimmerman — a higher percentage than much larger agency UTA and only slightly less than THE·TEAM (formerly Wasserman Music). Wallen, The Neal Agency’s highest-earning client, does not report his grosses to Billboard Boxscore, but some of the agency’s growing acts are already outpacing last year’s grosses. Zimmerman’s 2025 reported dates grossed $7.1 million over 17 shows; with more than 30 dates to come on his 2026 headlining arena tour, he’s already grossed more than $8.1 million.

Neal has ventured into other areas: In 2023, he started a publishing company, TNA Publishing; in 2024, he launched Cervidae Records with clients Palmer Anthony, who is also signed to TNA Publishing, and McCoy Moore, who Cervidae has since partnered with Sony Nashville on. Later that year, he founded Sticks Management with Wallen as a partner and first client. He’s since added Gavin Adcock and is looking for more artists.

As his businesses expand, Neal’s life is expanding in other ways, too: He and his wife are expecting their first child in July. He’s already thinking about balance and “making sure that I’m giving enough time to everybody. It’s really tough to do that,” he says. “I’ve had to learn that there’s only so much to give in a day and my family is my priority.”

And as for that college degree, he still puts it to good use when tackling challenges. “The thing that keeps me up at night is just making sure I fully understand every aspect. Goes back to my chemistry mind. I don’t ever want to walk into a room where I feel unprepared.”

This story appears in the May 30, 2026, issue of Billboard.