Role & purpose
The role and purpose of your Hero within their world.
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ABOUT ROBB / PEOPLE FIRST
I love helping people succeed.
Not in a “line on my LinkedIn” kind of way—in a genuine, this-is-what-gets-me-out-of-bed way.
01 / THE PEOPLE PART
I'm a big believer that if you help the people around you win, everything else tends to fall into place.
Business success is the goal, sure, but it's usually the result of getting the people part right first.
So when I work with someone, I try to do two things. First, I look at the situation through their eyes—their team's, their customers', whoever's actually living it. Then I bring 25 years of scars and lessons to the table to help guide them through whatever they're trying to accomplish.
I lead with experience and insight. My team handles the tactical execution. That combination is where the magic happens.
02 / WHERE HMS BEGAN
The Origin of Hero Mission Strategy
Hero Mission Strategy didn't come to me in a dream. It came to me sitting in a session at INBOUND, somewhere around 2016 or 2017, listening to Luke Summerfield talk about growth-driven design.
He mentioned “jobs to be done”—the idea of understanding what a person is actually trying to do. And something clicked. I realized this shouldn't just apply to a screen or an interface. It applies to everything people are trying to accomplish, way beyond any graphical user interface.
So I took the old “As a / When I / I want / So I” framework and reframed the whole thing around the human:
The mission
The mission they're actually trying to accomplish.
The outcomes
The outcomes that mission is supposed to deliver.
The impact
The real impact those outcomes have on their life.
The “Hero” is your customer—specifically the customer you're best suited to serve. Your mission is not their mission. Their mission almost always goes beyond what product or service you sell.
You sell the quarter-inch drill. Your Hero wants a quarter-inch hole.The whole game is understanding why they want that hole. That's where the real value lives.
03 / 25 YEARS OF PROOF
The work changed. The principle didn't.
I don't have a giant library of polished case studies to wave around. What I have is 25 years of marketing experience that evolved from keyword-stuffing title tags to rank #1 in Google, to understanding that alignment with the mission your Hero is trying to accomplish provides greater value than any one-off campaign or feature-rich tear sheet.
The agency is a case study.
We started as a two- or three-person shop back in the early 2000s, when I answered a Craigslist ad posted by Jeff Schroeffel for a Digital Marketing Specialist position. As I write this in 2026, we're pushing 30 people. That growth is the case study.
The framework revealed a new business.
My favorite example is a compliance company we took through the Hero Mission process around the time I really started developing it, in 2019–2020. By digging into who their clientele actually was and what those people were really trying to accomplish, we uncovered something none of us expected: a whole new market. That company launched a brokerage and eventually sold off the compliance side entirely.
That's not a content play. That's not a marketing tactic. That's understanding the Hero so deeply that it reveals an entirely new direction for the business.
04 / WHAT I BELIEVE
Two things guide the work.
Continuous improvement in all things.
Nothing is ever finished. There's always a better version of the work, the process, the relationship—and chasing that is half the fun.
Be a good person and care about people.
That's it. That's the non-negotiable one. Everything I've built professionally sits on top of that.
If those two ideas resonate with you, we're going to get along just fine.
LET'S TALK
Tell me where you're headed.
Here's my genuine invitation: reach out. Let's have a conversation about your goals and where you're going. It honestly doesn't have to be a sales conversation—I just like talking to people. If there's something I can help you think through, that's a good day for me.