Be a Sequoia, Not a Bonsai

The Seven Growth Secrets of the World’s Most Successful Companies

De: Nicolas Darveau-Garneau

Narrado por: Perry Daniels

Simple, low-risk experiments for long-term profit growth that you can test right now—from Google's former Chief Evangelist, Nicolas Darveau-Garneau.

As a business leader or marketer, if you've been pouring your efforts into efficiency metrics (like customer acquisition cost or return on ad spend) instead of trying to optimize profits, your methodology is unsustainable. In the age of AI, optimizing the wrong key performance indicator can be catastrophic.

Whether you work at a Fortune 500 giant, a startup, or a nonprofit, Be a Sequoia, Not a Bonsai gives you a growth playbook that will help you correctly prioritize sustainability over short-term efficiency.

With step-by-step guides and hundreds of case studies, Darveau-Garneau will shift how you measure marketing success by teaching you how to:

• Maximize profitable growth by tracking the right metrics, not vanity metrics.
• Acquire the most valuable customers, not just the most customers.
• Dramatically increase customer lifetime value with practical, scalable strategies.
• Strengthen your brand with modern, profit-driven branding approaches.
• Deliver a customer experience your competitors can’t match.
• Build a culture of rapid testing and innovation that keeps you ahead.

Nicolas Darveau-Garneau has advised senior executives at more than a thousand companies. He discovered that the fastest-growing 5% all followed these same seven principles. . .

The best part? These breakthroughs don't require acquisitions, billion-dollar tech investments, or years of product development. They're simple, testable, affordable, and scalable. And they're all based on one premise: Corporate sequoias prioritize profitable growth, while bonsai concentrate on efficiency and stay small.

“. . .a groundbreaking book. Nicolas Darveau-Garneau has distilled thousands of CEO and CMO meetings into a playbook every ambitious leader needs to read—and, more importantly, put into practice every day." —Jasper Malcolmson, Head of Growth at Gusto and Robinhood

Figures can be found in the audiobook companion PDF download.

Easy to follow. Hard to forget.

This is a smart, energizing listen for marketers who want ideas they can actually use. I finished the last chapter with a mental checklist of experiments to try immediately.

Rather than hype or theory, the author shares examples from nonprofit fundraising goals to global brands changing a mindset from short-term efficient wins (the bonsai) to long-term profit and growth (the mighty sequoia). That doesn’t mean there aren’t any immediate wins when making everyday micros decisions to increase profits. Just changing a KPI may help course correct and increase CLV.

The narration feels less like instruction and more like an encouraging, well-timed conversation.

As a well-seasoned marketer who is constantly updating the tools in my marketing toolkit, it was helpful to learn how AI was integrated into the tactics that lead to success.

Truly an inspirational listen and learning from one of the best in modern marketing.

Amazing Marketing Advice and Toolkit

Imagine what you could learn if you spent an hour with over 1,000 CEOs. If you read this book, you'll feel like you have. It summarizes some of the best ideas from top companies. Each of the seven ideas stands on its own but, together, they form an amazing system that is unbeatable.

I was a former Partner in one of the top global consulting firms, and I loved that this book brought clear logic and tools to marketing - and bucked a lot of conventional wisdom around metrics to use, target setting, structuring of goals / incentives -- that many consulting firms might charge millions of dollars to do (and often would do wrong).

The last chapter on "getting better at getting better" should be required reading for every executive that is trying to improve their results. Its a set of brilliant tactics used by the best companies to come up with improvement ideas, test them fast and cheap, and scale them. In the age of AI, the book argues, speed of execution is the ultimate competitive advantage. Love it!