# The club had the members. It needed the calls.

Client: Helm Club (https://www.helmclub.co, www.helmclub.co)
Service: Pipeline and the full programme (https://fortitudemedia.ai/pipeline-that-fills)
Canonical: https://fortitudemedia.ai/work/helm-club
Publisher: Fortitude Media Limited

Up to half the founders who got on a call with Helm Club joined. Too few got on a call. We took ownership of every route to that conversation, and now one in five new members arrives because an AI assistant recommended Helm.

## Facts

- Client: Helm Club
- Sector: Founder membership community
- What we did: Outbound, paid media, search and AI answers, content
- Terms: Fractional mandate, paid on members added

## Numbers

- 1 in 5: new members this year came through an AI assistant recommending Helm
- 2,000: well-matched founders approached every month, each checked against their live LinkedIn profile
- 10: comparison pages, one for every question a founder asks when choosing a peer group

## A proven sale. Not enough people to sell to.

Helm Club brings founders of growing UK businesses together in chaired peer groups. Members stay for years, and between 40 and 50 per cent of founders who took a call went on to join. The sale was never the issue.

The issue was volume. About four qualified calls a week reached the diary, and every month the club added nearly as many members as it lost. Every channel worked on its own, nobody owned the whole picture, and effort went wherever the last good month had come from.

Andreas Adamides, Helm's CEO, did not want a marketing agency and a monthly deck. He wanted one person to own the number.

## Every route to a call, rebuilt and run as one system.

### One number, owned

Qualified calls a week, reported on one page every Monday and checked against Helm's own member records rather than a platform dashboard. Our fee is paid per member above the level that only replaces churn, so we earn when Helm grows.

### Outbound at a human pace

Around 2,000 well-matched founders approached a month across three LinkedIn accounts, each checked against their live profile first. The first message asks a question. No pitch, no link, and every reply gets a same-day answer from a person.

### Paid media under one plan

Google, LinkedIn and Meta run together, with a lead form cut back to one question and ads that say who the club is for, so the ad does some of the filtering.

### Made Helm the answer

We built the structured data AI engines read, then a comparison page for every question a founder asks when weighing up peer groups: Helm against YPO, Vistage and the rest. Ten pillar articles a month double as landing pages for paid search.

### The CRM, worked properly

Every enquiry has one owner and a same-day follow-up. Founders who took a call and never joined, and lapsed members, are worked again every month rather than in a one-off sweep.

## More calls, and Helm can see where they come from.

A channel that did not exist before now brings one in five new members: founders who ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude which peer group to join are told about Helm.

Every comparison page we have published ranks first for its question on Google and the AI engines. The pages not yet built are the ones where a competitor still writes the answer.

Qualified calls a week started at four, and the target is fifteen by the end of November. Andreas reads one page a week, and every channel is judged on the same thing: booked calls.

Headline number: 1 in 5 new members this year came through an AI recommendation

Next step: a free 30-minute Growth Review with a founder, ending with three fixes in writing. https://fortitudemedia.ai/growth-review