Squeaky Wheel Branding Marketing

Robin Beattie is the founder and CEO of Squeaky Wheel Branding & Marketing, a Houston-based boutique agency she launched in 2016 after nearly a decade of independent consulting. Her path into agency ownership is unusual for the restaurant space: she spent roughly twenty years inside large consumer packaged goods companies, including Coca-Cola North America and Kao Brands, where she worked on brands such as Simply Orange, Minute Maid, Coke Zero, Jergens Moisturizers, and Jergens Natural Glow. She holds an MBA from the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin.

In 2007 Beattie began advising small businesses and professionals on the side, and the experience reframed her ambition. She became interested in bringing the brand-strategy rigor that CPG giants take for granted — point-of-difference positioning, integrated planning, disciplined execution — down-market to independent operators who rarely get access to it. That thesis still anchors the firm: Squeaky Wheel pitches itself as a full-service shop for small and midsize companies, with restaurants and hospitality as its most developed vertical, built on long-running relationships with multi-concept operators like Grupo Herrera.

The agency today is a roughly ten-person team organized around branding, web, content production (photo, video, copy), paid media, SEO, PR, and traditional advertising, with Beattie serving as both CEO and lead strategist. The public founder story leans heavily on her CPG résumé rather than on restaurant-industry tenure specifically; the restaurant focus appears to have grown organically out of Houston client work rather than from a stated early-career hospitality background.