Discover the Seven Growth Secrets That Propel Companies to Success

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for High Velocity Radio.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here. Another episode of High Velocity Radio, and this is gonna be a good one. Today on the show we have the author of the book Sequoia Not a Sequoia, Not a Bonsai The Seven Growth Secrets of the World’s Most Successful Companies, and the CEO with Garneau Digital Advisors, we have Nicholas Darveau-Garneau. Welcome.

Nicholas Darveau-Garneau: Haley. Thank you for having me. I’m really thrilled to be here.

Lee Kantor: Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Let’s start with your agency. Uh, how are you serving folks?

Nicholas Darveau-Garneau: You know, I, uh, I was at Google for a number of years, and I was at Google’s chief evangelist for the last five years of my career. And, uh, I got to meet a thousand CEOs and really understand what the best companies in the world were doing. So every year I advise only about five companies. That’s as much as I want to do, and I helped them dramatically improve their transformation to more digital. So digital marketing, better digital customer experience and an AI strategy. So I’m really picky in who I work with. And typically they can achieve some pretty extraordinary results.

Lee Kantor: And then from that work that that brought you to your book, is that how that happened after you? I’m sure you kind of gleaned some learnings from dealing with all those top companies, and then you put them in a book.

Nicholas Darveau-Garneau: That’s exactly right. So the book, you know, basically not a bonsai is about, you know, what I learned from these 1000 CEOs and about, you know, 5 to 10% of these companies and these CEOs acted and thought very, very differently than the others. And so the book is the seven things that I noticed after. I mean, when you get a, you know, a thousand CEO meetings, right, you get some pattern recognition. So one of the things these companies do that is very different. So the book explains that. And then when I do some consulting with a company, I take them through step by step the seven different things and how to make them actionable.

Lee Kantor: So can you kind of share a little bit about those seven growth secrets?

Nicholas Darveau-Garneau: Yeah, one of them is is most companies. And this is really surprising. Most companies actually don’t try to maximize profits, right. I mean, they say they do right in doing this in a way that’s ethical obviously. Right. Good for the environment, good for the customer. But you know, every CEO that I’ve ever met is like, hey, we’re trying to maximize profits. But if you start asking people below them like, what are you working on? If you ask the chief marketing officer, they’re like, well, we’re trying to get more leads at a lower, lower cost per lead. And it’s nothing to do with profitability by these leads can all be terrible. Or if you talk to the head of product, hey, we’re trying to get more features out there. Well, are these features going to drive customer success? Are they and their customers willing to pay for it. Are they going to maximize profits? If you talk to customer service and so on and so on. So it turns out that the CEO wants to really improve profitability, but very few people inside the company are actually working on that.

Nicholas Darveau-Garneau: So one of the first things that we do is we go through everybody’s KPI right and start rethinking about that. And so an example of that is I was really fortunate to work with Saint Jude’s Children’s Hospital, which is the largest children’s hospital in the world, and they do extraordinary work with with kids. And they were investing, you know, digital marketing with Google, and they were raising some money very successfully. Um, but their KPI wasn’t kind of right, in my opinion. I thought what they should do is maximize the donations they get from Google, minus the marketing investment that they make. Right? Which is pretty logical. So they switched the KPI to that. Uh, and next thing you know, within a few months, uh, by doing this and some other things, they had raised 46% more money and they were already raising $1 billion. So just kind of changing your KPIs can have a massive, massive impact. So that’s the first, you know, and kind of least obvious thing because you would think every company is trying to maximize profits, but they are not.

Lee Kantor: Now, I don’t know if it’s the least obvious, because I think that sometimes people get distracted. We call them in our company cosmetics. These are some metrics that might be easy to kind of capture, but they may not be the important metrics. Um, and I think people kind of get distracted by that just because you can count how many people, um, you know, come to the website or how many people see an ad or something, doesn’t mean that that’s the thing that’s going to drive the profit like the.

Nicholas Darveau-Garneau: Right now you’re completely right. People. You know, people select metrics that, um, they can track easily that are, you know, non questionable. Right. If you track profits, You know, people can debate exactly what the numbers should be because there’s a bunch of assumptions made in there. So you’re right. People just choose the easiest thing. But it’s like, you know, having a rowing team and you know, the eight rowers are rowing in eight different directions.

Lee Kantor: Right? But you’re calculating, you know, how fast the speed is for each of them, you know, to hit the water. So you think you’re capturing something that is going to translate to value. But if they’re not coordinated, then it’s going to not translate to anything.

Nicholas Darveau-Garneau: Right. And then let me kind of so the next big thing is a little more advanced, which is, um, you know, optimizing profits is great. But um, over what time frame. Right. So kind of optimizing longer term profits or customer lifetime value is something that, you know, very, very few companies do. So an example of that is if you’re trying to acquire customers, whether you’re a small company, you know, you’re you’re a gym or you’re a larger company or a nonprofit, you’re trying to, you know, you’re trying to acquire some new donors. Um, very seldom is any company looking at the quality of that customer or that donor over time. Right. And then if you actually kind of understand the industry. Right. In most industries, 10 to 20% of the customers drive 80% of the profitability over time. And so, um, the top, top companies in the world, when they acquire brand new customer, they can predict how much a customer is going to be worth in terms of profitability in the next 5 to 10 years, right. Their customer lifetime value. And they can share that number back with Google and Facebook and other digital marketing platforms. And next thing you know, they’re just acquiring a lot more valuable customers. For an example is, um, I was working with a car insurance company. And if your car insurance company. Right, your biggest issue when you acquire customers is that some of them crash their car and some of them leave you after after a year.

Nicholas Darveau-Garneau: So, you know, can you use AI to build a model to predict that? And the answer is yes. And so we work with this company. They built the model to predict, you know, the profitability of each individual customer. Send that back to Google and Facebook. And next thing you know, they had 60% fewer of the high risk customers who are much more likely to crash their car or churn within a year. And they had 90% more of their very high quality customers were not going to crash their car and are going to stick around for many, many years. And that quadruple the company’s profitability, right? So that’s pretty advanced, you know, strategy. But it’s not that hard to execute if you know exactly what you’re doing in the book goes into like step by step, like how would you forecast the value of a customer you’ve never seen before? They’re brand new today. And then how do you build dashboards around that? How do you share that data with digital marketing platforms? And companies who do this like significantly outperform because all their competitors are acquiring average customers and they’re just getting the cream off the top and picking off the top 20% customers. And so it’s just really an unfair battle.

Lee Kantor: Now, do you think that in today’s world, doing paid ads? I know you have a I would imagine some sort of a Google bias, but is paid ads kind of a must have part of any digital marketing or marketing strategy in today’s world? Like, do you have to do that? Is that part of how a company grows?

Nicholas Darveau-Garneau: Yeah. You don’t like I mean, the last chapter of the book is around, um, testing and experimentation, right? We should have as a company is a whole bunch of hypotheses. You can test really fast. So to your question, right, is Facebook or Google, you know, profitable for me. And that’s the metric you should look at. So what is the easiest way to test that. You figure that out right. And then you run a test that takes us 2 to 3 weeks and then you know right. So like one of the biggest differences by the way, between companies who just crush it. And companies will struggle as their open mindedness of trying new things, like some CEOs are just really like, uh, give you an example, I was talking to a whole bunch of of movie executives at different movie studios. And, um, Google has this pretty amazing advertising tool that you invest money in it, and then Google can track, you know, the customer saw an ad, right? They saw the trailer of your movie, and then they can track with pretty high degree of precision whether or not that customer has been to a movie theater or your movie showing. And so you can tell, like, for example, you put in $1 million of advertising and you got, you know, a million people to go to a movie theater for a dollar each for each visit.

Nicholas Darveau-Garneau: Right. And that makes sense. It makes financial sense. It’s really profitable. And so some of the movie executives I talked to were like, yeah, this is a no brainer. This is amazing. Like, where has this been all my life? Let’s try it tomorrow. And some you would expect them to try it, but they would be like, well you know how do you track this? Like how precise is your estimate of of where people go. And then if somebody goes into a movie, movie theater, like, we don’t know if they want to see our movie, they could have seen somebody else’s movie. Well, well, they just saw your trailer two days ago, so clearly the odds are very high they’re going to see a movie. So some executives just didn’t want to try it. Right. So to answer your question, like, I don’t know, for most companies paid ads is going to are going to work, but you should have a list of the biggest opportunities for your company and find the minimum viable test you can run. The easiest thing that you can do to see if that thing makes sense or not. Right? And so don’t overintellectualize it. Don’t overanalyze it. Can I figure it out, you know, for a thousand bucks or 5000 bucks in the next two weeks? And then if it works, you scale it. And if it doesn’t work, you don’t.

Lee Kantor: Now your work. It sounds like you’re doing a lot of work with large enterprise level organizations. Um, a lot of the people who listen to this are aspiring large enterprises. What does the advice kind of trickle down like? Can you. You’re throwing out numbers thousand, $5,000 million. It doesn’t work for hundreds of dollars. Is there kind of a minimum size you have to, um, be in order to access data that is meaningful?

Nicholas Darveau-Garneau: You don’t like the. Actually, the last story in the book is, uh, about a gym owner, right? Uh, Mint Condition Fitness out of California. And he’s built a gym that, um, uh, where the customers are 20 times more profitable than the average gym by doing a whole bunch of really clever stuff. Right? That’s that’s he’s basically doing almost everything that’s in the book, and he’s just really, really sharp. And so, yeah, and a gym owner, a restaurant owner, you know, a small business owner, you name it. Right? If you think about the seven principles from the beginning and you test them. And again, it could be for hundreds of dollars to your point. Um, you could absolutely, completely transform your business. So this this gym owner, I think the guy was a private trainer, right? He was making 30,000 bucks a year in Silicon Valley, which is, you know, pretty expensive place to live. So he wasn’t doing that. Great. Now his gym is generating $1.2 million, and he’s opening up a whole bunch more. And so, yeah, absolutely. Any nonprofit. And by the way, like in my consulting firm, um, I do five nonprofit consulting engagements a year for free, right? I mean, I’m working with Saint Jude’s was one of the greatest things I ever did, and it was really rewarding. So, um, if people want to reach out to me on LinkedIn, if you have a nonprofit, delighted to to help. Um, if you’re a small business, you know, I, I don’t do consulting for small businesses, but if you read the book, um, and then you just reach out to me on LinkedIn and ask me questions, I’d be delighted to answer those. Um, but the book is really step by step by step, exactly what you should do.

Lee Kantor: Now, does the book. Okay, let’s make the assumption. I’m a small business person. I can’t afford you. Um, but I’m going to buy the book. Uh, is the book going to be now? That’s my new job. Or can I still be the gym owner? Run a gym train? People do gym stuff. Um, and do this, you know, a few hours a week, or is this something that. Now I got to put a body on this?

Nicholas Darveau-Garneau: No, it’s, uh, it’s not that onerous. And the idea is just to test one new idea. You know, whenever you can. Right. So if it’s once a month or once every three months. So, for example, if you’re not doing any paid marketing right, you can absolutely start a Facebook account on your own. And if you do it right from the beginning, if you optimizing profitability, right. If you’re trying to acquire now, people are going to come to the gym, but they’re not going to leave, you know, in April after they join in January. And you can there’s lots of different ways to do this that are really simple. So now it’s not that hard. Um, the trick is to test ideas that are easy to test, but if they work, have massive impact, right? And so now if you, you know, if you hit pay dirt, if one of your ideas really works right, then you can start investing more time and energy. So maybe you’re finding out that paid ads is just crushing it for you. So now you can hire an agency and pay them, you know, 15% of of what you want to invest or even eventually hire full time. But you don’t have to invest, right? You just test things on your own. You see if they work, and only then do you have to make the time investment or the money investment. And so the book is all about things you can try that are, you know, relatively simple, relatively inexpensive, but have big upside if they work.

Lee Kantor: And that’s really the secret. You have to be able to iterate fast and then double down on the winners and then forget about the losers.

Nicholas Darveau-Garneau: Yeah, I actually think so that the last chapter of the book is about moving faster and increasing your velocity. You know, if you believe, like I do, that AI is going to flatten the world a lot, meaning it’s going to it’s going to make a lot of things easier for smaller companies. Um, and so the competitive advantage of larger companies, I think will get diminished to some extent. So, you know, how differentiated are going to, you know, is our website going to be how differentiated are ads going to be? How differentiated is our service going to be when you can have AI do a lot of that very inexpensively? So I think in the end, right, you know, over, over time, the most important competitive differentiation is how quickly can you try something new and how quickly can you scale it. Right. So one of the things that as you get going with these ideas in the book, you try one, you know, a month for a while and then you get some success. And not every idea is going to work, but you get some success. And next thing you know, you’re making more money. You reinvest, you try another idea, you know, next month, and then next thing you know, you’re trying two ideas a month and then three and then five and then 100.

Nicholas Darveau-Garneau: So, uh, I work with an internet company Funny that 25 x the number of tests they were doing over the course of a year by just, you know, trying new things, finding better tools to test, finding the simplest tests you can do. And then whenever they were doing a test, they would figure out what was hard about this test. Like what? Why did this test take so long? Well, we had to go through a lawyer to get this approved. And we have to do this all the time. So why don’t we put, you know, a part time lawyer on this team to get approvals happening faster? And so, like, the kind of figuring out how you can improve your improvement system, I call it I call this getting better at getting better, right? I mean, it’s like working out, right. If you’re working out and you’re, you know, you’re improving by 1% a year, that’s great. But if you can make that 5% a year, you’re just going to be a lot better off. So the the rate of improvement of a company becomes extraordinarily important in a very competitive, AI driven environment.

Lee Kantor: Now, you mentioned AI a few times. Can you talk about how this strategy, Um, kind of works with the AI framework. Are you saying to do the same thing while using and learning about AI? Should you be going there and iterating and learning fast in that ecosystem?

Nicholas Darveau-Garneau: Yeah, I mean, a lot of the ideas in the book, you know, um, are driven by AI, and AI is just a tool, right? It’s not just a few advertising on Facebook or Google. I mean, it’s 95% AI driven. So Google and Facebook are doing a lot of the grunt work for you. So what is it that you as a human should do differently than others? Right. But but you know, in addition to that, yes, I think AI can um, I mean, every small medium business should look at AI for internal productivity. There’s a lot of, um, there’s a lot of news right now about AI, you know, not working, not increasing productivity. Um, that’s not my experience, right? There’s actually a study by Harvard Business Review, uh, Harvard Business School with BCG that had consultants that use a lot of AI and consultants who didn’t lose, you know, use a lot of AI. And the ones who use a lot of AI did 12% more work and 25% less time, and it was 40% better work. But when the consultants using AI were doing stuff that hadn’t been trained on well with AI, they were 19% less productive. So what’s happening a lot is people are like, you know, they put ChatGPT or Gemini or Copilot inside their business, right? They pay 20 bucks a month, whatever it is. And then they’re like, okay, AI is in. Well, you can’t do that if, you know, if you have somebody in HR, right? That’s writing job descriptions. They have to be taught how to use AI to write job descriptions.

Nicholas Darveau-Garneau: So you have to go to that level of specificity internally. The other thing internally is that, you know, obviously employees are nervous about AI. So how you introduce it, what you say really matters a lot. If you say like, hey, I’m bringing AI to increase productivity, that’s like code word for you’re going to lose your job, right? So you have to be thoughtful about it and say, look, now I want to double the business in the next five years and just, you know, hire 40% more people. That’s my goal with AI. So if I hear that as an employee, I’m like, oh, okay. So that’s, you know, point one, right? Point two is like, hey, look, you know, I really want you to learn AI and I’m going to help you learn AI. So I expect you to learn AI, and that’s going to be part of your performance reviews going forward. And three like look you know AI is going to start you know grabbing some things from your job. It’s just going to happen right. So AI will start doing the low value stuff, but eventually the middle value stuff and then even some of the higher value stuff that you do. Let’s be honest. Right. But look, here’s what your job is going to look like a year from now, two years from now. So I’ve thought through how you’re going to grow and you’re going to stay ahead of AI. So if you combine these three things right, you can get massive productivity improvements. And then and then you can start putting AI in front of your customers.

Nicholas Darveau-Garneau: Right. For customer service for advice, for lots of things you can do. You have to really be careful. There’s lots of things that can go wrong here, right? The AI can just say crazy, stupid things, so you have to really test it. You have to have the right technology. It’s a little bit complexity. You have to find the right partner. But you can do some pretty amazing things for customers using AI as well. And so yeah, AI is a must, right? For almost every, um, every company actually just go to ChatGPT, right? Explain your company to ChatGPT and ask it what AI will be able to do five years from now for your company and ask it, you know, whether you should invest right now or wait. And honestly, it’s going to be a really good discussion you can have with ChatGPT. And sometimes it tells you like, hey, for your company, it’s no big deal, don’t worry about it. Maybe wait a year or two, but sometimes it tells you like, hey, your hair should be on fire. You should be all over it now, uh, because other competitors are way ahead. And so inform yourself on where you are. Compare yourself to others. Ask ChatGPT what do you think I should do? Um, but, um, you know, AI is just a tool. It can’t do anything for you on its own. The biggest issue is just change management inside your company and changing how employees think and what they do. So it’s really a human problem, not a technology problem.

Lee Kantor: And in order to leverage it to its fullest effect, um, I think it goes back to your original point. You have to aim it at things like maximize profitable growth. Not right. This LinkedIn copy for me, like those are different asks. And it could do both if you ask. And you have to give it the data so that it can inform, you know, the key metrics, not the cause metrics.

Nicholas Darveau-Garneau: Yeah. I mean, if you if you start doing paid advertising, if you haven’t done it before and you ask AI for more leads at the lowest cost per lead, which is what 90% of B2B you know, advertisers do, you’re going to get a lot more leads at a lower cost per lead and AI will be amazing at delivering that. There’s no evidence whatsoever these leaves will be useful to you. Right. And so the AI, like the more AI we use and the worse the KPI is, the faster we drive off the road, right? It’s like having a self-driving car with the wrong map. And so yeah, in order to for AI to really improve your business, you as a human have to really be very thoughtful about what you’re asking it to do. And you also have to be thoughtful with about what data you share back to the AI so it understands like an AI without a closed loop, like an AI just doing stuff, not knowing if it’s good or not good. Um, it’s not as helpful as an AI that is being told, like, hey, thank you for sending me this lead, but this is complete garbage or comparing or this lead as gold for me. Uh, if you’re just going to rank the leads from 1 to 5, right. And just share that with the AI, next thing you know, you get a lot more leads that are fives and a lot fewer that are ones. And so asking the right question to the to the eye is critical, and then feeding it the right data is also critical.

Lee Kantor: So what do you need more of? How can we help you?

Nicholas Darveau-Garneau: Well, look, you know, I like every anybody listening to to buy the book and be a part of bonsai. I donate all my profits to Saint Jude’s Children’s Hospital. So, you know, we’re also going to cure cancer together. I want people to start trying things from the book, and I want them to reach out to me on LinkedIn to tell me I was going to ask me some questions. I’ll answer every single question. Um, and look, you know, like, it’s not that many folks have had the privilege of meeting a thousand CEOs. I just was lucky to be in that position. Um, these ideas are not my own, right? These ideas are just from the best, best companies in the world. I’m just summarizing them. Um, and I’ve seen them work over and over and over again, and very few companies do them. So if you, you know, are open minded, if you want to do a little bit of work and test some of these ideas. I’m guarantee you your company will be unrecognizable two years from now. And so, um, really encourage people to to buy the book and then reach out to me.

Lee Kantor: Well, Nick, if somebody wants to learn more, is there a website or is LinkedIn or obviously, I’m sure on Amazon, or they can get the book anywhere, but, um, what what is kind of the best way to connect? You mentioned LinkedIn. Is there a website as well?

Nicholas Darveau-Garneau: Yeah, you can go to Nicholas Comm, uh, and contact me there. But LinkedIn, I’ll accept, you know, any LinkedIn friend requests and I’ll answer any email.

Lee Kantor: Good stuff. Well, Nick, thank you so much for sharing your story today, doing such important work. And we appreciate you.

Nicholas Darveau-Garneau: Hey, thanks. Cheers.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on High Velocity Radio.