To go along with this point, SEO is just another tool in your marketing toolkit. To claim that SEO is the sole reason you're going to grow would be a mistake in my opinion.

What about the branding decisions made long before? Or the work put into the marketing framework? The work that went into creatives? And I'm not even getting into the coding that goes into bringing everything together.

SEO can provide growth, but only after you've used everything else in your arsenal to get the platform to the point that you are ready to start optimizing.