About Justin Robinette — Fractional CMO for Accounting & Advisory Firms
I Build the Function. I Don't Just Advise On It
I Build Marketing Engines That Outlast Me
I'm Justin Robinette. I build compounding marketing operations — an approach that builds steady, long-term authoritative trust, rather than short campaign bursts of collateral damage to your firm.
I have spent the last fifteen years leading the marketing function of accounting and advisory firms — including two regional CPA firms, a top-20 national firm, and most recently as the first marketing hire at a tech-forward outsourced accounting consultancy. In every role, my primary accountability was to ensure marketing investments gained traction and achieved business results.
Here's what I've learned in my career that drives the highest enterprise value and marketing execution ROI:
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Build Systems. Turn the strategy you already have — the one from last year's partner retreat — into an aligned marketing machine: Brand, positioning, pipeline, content, proposals, campaigns, reporting, and more.
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Drive Targeted Growth. I run it as your marketing leader until it produces. Weekly cadence, real numbers, one accountable operator that keeps your focus locked in.
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Transfer Knowledge. I train your team, or hire capable junior marketing staff, to run it without me. The systems and knowledge base stays. The dependency doesn't.
Marketing compounds, or it resets.
Doing more marketing doesn't mean better results. I've watched that play out inside accounting and advisory firms that were doing plenty of marketing before I arrived.
Leadership's appetite is never the problem. The problems are (1) great marketing leadership is hard, (2) internal alignment is harder, and (3) that the honest answers needed to make change are uncomfortable and difficult to answer for even the most seasoned marketers. Questions like: Why we spent $200,000 last year and can't say what it produced. Why the referral sources that carried the firm for twenty years aren't carrying it anymore. Why the rebrand didn't change anything.
Fair questions. And the answers we give as marketing leaders tend to seem defensive. We talk about budget. We talk about headcount. We point to a firm in another market with a different service mix and explain why their playbook wouldn't travel here. Sometimes all of that is true. It's also beside the point.
The better question is quieter: how much of what we built and invested in last year is still running? Not the campaign — the system underneath it.
Are we realistically building an operating system or a collection of disjointed marketing activities? Whether the inquiry that came in last week traces back to a decision someone made, or whether it just happened. Whether the thing that was working in December is still working in May, or whether busy season took it and nobody restarted it.
Every new marketing hire, every new agency, every partner with a good idea resets the curve to zero. A curve that keeps resetting never compounds. That isn't a marketing problem. It's a starting-over problem, and it's the challenge I aim to solve.
My Experience & Results
I've spent fifteen years successfully leading marketing and being accountable to people who don't make decisions lightly. Partners at accounting and advisory firms stake their reputation on being right, are highly analytical, and who prove their work with the compliance rigor the profession demands. They need to be the person in the room who can attest to the numbers being right. I learned early that you don't win their trust by selling them something without conviction, proof, or a plan. And you need numbers to tell the story.
That's the thread in my career running through four firms now — DS+B, Lurie, EisnerAmper, and SPRCHRGR — always inside the same industry.
DS+B (2011–2020)
Marketing Director
At DS+B, I was promoted twice from marketing coordinator to marketing manager to marketing director. I proved my worth time and again by building effective strategies, aligning partners to niche-focused goals, and building systems that helped them gain traction. I got to lead a brand refresh that ended up driving 20% net fee revenue growth the following year and continued to grow — the kind of result that proved marketing wasn't a nice-to-have for a firm like this, it was a lever most partners hadn't fully pulled yet. When I joined them, as their first marketing hire, there was little more than a five-page website. Now nearly a decade later, they still use the proprietary CSP client experience framework I built in concert with their partners, still use the trademarked "connected, proactive and accessible" brand promise, and many other foundational marketing systems.
Lurie (2020-2022)
Director, Marketing & Business Development
I then joined Lurie, an excellent regional firm with one glaring marketing problem. As one partner told me, "We're the best kept secret in town. And we need to change that." Despite excellent referrals and a strong client reputation, the next level of growth needed more. We built a brand and marketing system that elevated the partner's and team's profile in the community. In fact, a mere 90 days into my tenure, our COVID-response hub earned top Google rankings and became the go-to resource in our professional network for economic relief program guidance.
Over the next year, I expanded our capacity by hiring exceptional in-house talent and sourcing cost-effective outside agency specialists. The strategy of deep community connection and a raised profile worked: the firm won its first wave of major industry recognition, including Accounting Today's Best of the Best Firms and Regional Leader, and Twin Cities Business's Best of Business Winner in the Accounting Firm category.
I was named a Twin Cities Business Notable Leader in Marketing in 2022, nominated by Lurie's COO. We also supported the firm's advisory services as they grew — Client Advisory Services, Healthcare Consulting, Cybersecurity Assurance — service lines that outpaced the firm's growth goals as it became, in our team's own shorthand at the time, truly "in the left lane." Over Lurie's final two fiscal years as an independent firm, revenue grew 15%, and then 20% to $41.5 million — with $3 million of that final year directly traceable to inbound marketing.
Both DS+B and Lurie, as it happened, had wealth management practices tucked alongside their core accounting business, and I got to market both. That's really where the "finance-adjacent" half of who I work with today comes from — advisory-driven wealth management has its own rhythm and its own way of earning trust, and I learned it by living inside it, not by reading about it afterward.
EisnerAmper (2022-2024)
Marketing Director
When Lurie was acquired by EisnerAmper in 2022, a top-20 national firm, I led the external campaign from Lurie's side of the deal — before I had access to EisnerAmper's own marketing resources — running PR, executive media prep, and creative for a merger that made national trade press before it had even closed. Once the deal closed, I took on national responsibility across three lanes at once: the Healthcare industry group, the SOC and Cybersecurity Advisory service line, and the Minneapolis market, later expanding to Chicago. I also built an M&A brand integration playbook the firm drew on for the acquisition announcements that followed — which still means something to me, honestly, because it meant the work outlasted my involvement in it.
SPRCHRGR (2024 -2026)
VP of Marketing & Partnerships
Then came SPRCHRGR — the second time in my career I got to build a marketing function completely from zero, and the first time I did it without an existing name or reputation to build from. I was the company's first and only marketing hire: brand and positioning, HubSpot CRM and automation, a content engine, partner marketing across four major integrations, sales enablement, ICP work spanning eight different verticals, all built from nothing. I coined "accounting + finance engineers" as the company's positioning — it's still how they describe themselves today. Over two years, I collaborated with SPRCHRGR's CEO to transfer the marketing function from founder-led into a tuned-up marketing engine. A few YoY stats: website sessions grew by more than 600%. New leads increased by +100%. Discovery call requests +130%. Those results were achieved not with a large team or an outsized budget, but with sharp thinking, creativity, bootstrapped execution, and a lean marketing operations model.
SPRCHRGR's CEO Mark Wald puts it this way, "since launching the refreshed brand, our network has taken notice — sales conversations are easier, and inbound referrals from our evangelists have increased. I would recommend him without hesitation to any organization seeking a senior marketing leader or teammate who builds with clarity, works effectively at the C-level, and executes complex initiatives with a lean, efficient mindset. He did all of that for us — and helped us, as we say at SPRCHRGR, “get there faster.”
What Ties It Together
DS+B still uses the client-experience framework and brand promise I built there, nearly a decade later. EisnerAmper still draws on the M&A brand equity transfer playbook I built for the Lurie deal. SPRCHRGR still positions itself as "accounting + finance engineers" today. I build strategies and systems that outlive me. The highest compliment to me is that the next team keeps using something I helped build, because it actually works long term.
These days I call this building compounding marketing operations: not campaigns that spike and fade, but systems and language that keep working long after. That's not a phrase I picked for effect. It's the pattern of results delivered, four firms in a row. My work helped these partners win new business, attract talent, and compete for higher-level client work — not because I stayed, but because what I built didn't need me to work. The ownership belongs to the firm.
Resume details, for anyone checking:
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Master's Degree, Marketing
B.S. Degree, Marketing -
Certified Professional Project Manager (CPPM),
HubSpot Inbound Marketing Certified -
Recognition in Twin Cities Business Magazine,
Notable Leader in Marketing (2022)
B2B marketing strategy + the system that runs it.
I do both halves of the job. I can build your marketing strategy from scratch — I've done it repeatedly — or sharpen the one you already have. But strategy is only the input. What I'm actually accountable for is building the machine that turns it into execution and consistency.
Let's talk about what you're building.
Use the booking link below to schedule a call with me. I look forward to talking with you.