7 to 100: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly of Scaling a Business from $7M to $100M

Helium
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Most business podcasts show you the highlight reel. This one shows you the actual film. Hosted by 2 Inc 5000 founders and marketing experts, Tim Warren and Paul DeMott, this podcast is your ultimate resource for watching a real company scale in real time. Every day we hit record on our actual sales and marketing stand-up, no scripts, no polish, no pretending we've got it figured out. We're building Helium from $7M to $100M out loud: objections, close rates, funnel math, ad spend, and every ugly mistake in between. Follow along, we're figuring it out in front of you.

  1. Sep 30

    Episode 32: Why Cheap Advice Is Usually the Most Expensive Mistake

    Tim opens with the three core lessons from the last 90 days of real changes: most struggling businesses are underspending on ads, not overspending on sales; a strong offer with real guarantees removes far more friction than most founders assume; and trying to scale purely through selling, rather than through consistent advertising, gets exponentially harder once growth outpaces churn. The standout story of the episode: paying a genuinely proven expert $150,000 just for a single piece of advice, and why that's often smarter than free advice from someone who's never actually climbed the mountain they're advising you on. Tim closes with a sharp analogy: if you want to win a gold medal, you don't hire a college coach with theories, you hire someone who's actually coached gold medalists before, and the same logic should apply to who you take business advice from.

  2. Sep 30

    Episode 31: Nearly $9M in Run Rate, 90 Days After the Hormozi Conference

    Tim recaps the three biggest changes made since attending a Hormozi event roughly 90 days earlier: shifting focus to gross profit instead of just revenue, cutting the size of the cold-calling sales team to redirect dollars into advertising, and tracking ad frequency to know when an audience has been saturated. The results show up directly in the numbers, current run rate is closing in on $9M, up meaningfully from where they started. The back half makes an important case for channel diversification: Google and Meta actually work better together than either does alone, since someone who sees a Meta ad often searches the company on Google before ever engaging, meaning pulling back too hard on one channel to fund another can quietly break the trust-building sequence that makes both work.

  3. Sep 30

    Episode 30: The Three-to-One Rule, and Why Business Problems Never Actually End

    Tim breaks down a new, simpler dashboard built around one core question: for every dollar spent on ads, is the business generating at least three dollars in lifetime gross profit from the resulting customer, the ratio Hormozi teaches as the bar for sustainable growth. They also dig into pricing philosophy for service delivery: instead of building a long list of options for clients to choose from, present a clear recommendation and only build in exceptions for genuine edge cases, keeping the core process built around your best clients, not your worst ones. Tim closes with a mindset reset worth sitting with: business problems don't disappear as you grow, they just change shape, from growth problems to management problems to entirely new categories of problems, and getting comfortable with that cycle is the actual job.

  4. Sep 30

    Episode 29: Is the Algorithm Getting Smarter, or Are We Just Getting Out of Its Way?

    Paul shares a counterintuitive observation: the less he touches Meta, the better it performs. Every time creative gets swapped, results dip for a week or two before recovering, which suggests the algorithm's own exploration process needs stability to work. He walks through real numbers backing this up: the percentage of good leads jumped from roughly 25% to over 60% in two weeks, and leads over $1,000 in budget hit a new single-day record. The team lands on a practical technique for finding proven creative without guessing: checking Meta's Ad Library for competitors' longest-running ads, since an ad still running months later is a strong signal it's actually converting.

  5. Sep 29

    Episode 28: Checking Real Podcast Numbers, and Why the Product Has to Be Fixed Before the People

    The team pulls actual data on the podcast's traction so far (Spotify plays, YouTube views, LinkedIn engagement) and has an honest conversation about whether the current format, three people livestreaming their daily standup, is actually what audiences want, or whether it's simply too early to tell with only a few months of data and no paid promotion yet. The back half of the episode turns into a bigger strategic gut-check: Tim admits that trying to scale the team and hire more people before fixing a low-margin product was backwards, and lays out a clearer division moving forward, Paul owns building an automated, high-margin, easily deliverable product, while Tim focuses on people, training, and building the org that can eventually scale it. The core lesson: get the product's economics right first, since no amount of great hiring or management can fix a business built on a product that doesn't have enough margin to support it.

  6. Sep 29

    Episode 27: Stop Losing Leads to a Full Calendar

    Tim and the team dig into a real operational gap: leads that come in while a rep is fully booked often just sit and die, since no one reassigns them or sends a quick follow-up in time. The fix is a simple triage rule: if a high-budget lead comes in while Tim's calendar is full, send a personalized Loom video reviewing their site data on his behalf so they still get a real, human touchpoint before the window closes; if it's a lower-budget lead, hand it straight to another rep instead of letting it age out. They also share encouraging movement in lead quality data, watching the share of low-budget conversions shrink as targeting and ad feedback loops improve. The bigger principle underneath it all: don't let good opportunities go cold just because of a scheduling conflict, build a process that catches them either way.

  7. Aug 28

    Episode 26: Why Competence Is Rare, and Modeling True Agency Profitability

    Tim opens with a story about Hormozi discovering that even people who follow him closely, and who walked right past a billboard he paid for, had no idea about his book launch, driving home the point that no matter how much you advertise, most people still don't know who you are. That leads into a deeper leadership conversation: borrowing Hormozi's two-question test for true competence (what metrics do you use to measure your own performance, and how does what you do daily move those metrics), Tim argues most people, even good employees, can't actually answer that clearly, and that closing that gap is key to unlocking more profitability company-wide. The episode ends with real financial modeling: what a genuinely profitable agency's net margin should look like (30%+), what would need to be cut to get there, and why ad-based programs are structurally easier to scale profitably than SEO, since SEO's complexity and slower payoff make it a harder product to build a scalable, high-margin business around.

  8. Aug 28

    Episode 25: The Math Behind 20 Ignites a Month, and Rebalancing SEO vs. Ads Spend

    Tim breaks down the real math behind their new goal of 20 monthly sales: at their current close rate, that means roughly 40 proposals a month, which means the team needs airtight tracking on every second meeting, no-show, and cancellation, since untracked meetings quietly hide the true funnel numbers. Paul walks through the sales dashboard live, showing how proposal and no-show data is currently underreported by the team, and the fix: getting reps to mark every outcome so leadership can actually see what's working. The back half tackles a budget reallocation question: should they pull dollars out of Google paid search and put more into organic SEO and link building, especially since their own Ahrefs traffic has become a genuine closing tool, showing prospects real proof that Helium outperforms their current agency, right there on the call.

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Most business podcasts show you the highlight reel. This one shows you the actual film. Hosted by 2 Inc 5000 founders and marketing experts, Tim Warren and Paul DeMott, this podcast is your ultimate resource for watching a real company scale in real time. Every day we hit record on our actual sales and marketing stand-up, no scripts, no polish, no pretending we've got it figured out. We're building Helium from $7M to $100M out loud: objections, close rates, funnel math, ad spend, and every ugly mistake in between. Follow along, we're figuring it out in front of you.

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