Be a Sequoia, Not a Bonsai: The Seven Growth Secrets of the World’s Most Successful Companies

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