If your initiatives at work don’t reach their potential, you may need to be more BRAVE.
Lindsay Tjepkema shared her 5-part BRAVE framework to help you gauge the success of a new project at B2B Forum 2025.
And if the project doesn’t score well on all 5, she says, you’re not ready!
Don’t waste your time on an incomplete idea.
Get Lindsay’s BRAVE framework in this clip from B2B Forum, or read the transcript below.
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Does this sound familiar?
“Yes, Product is launching a parts and consumables series on YouTube.
“They want you to do it!
“But make it edgy though.
“And also get us lots and lots of followers and subscribers and whatever they’re calling it.
“And make sure that it generates ROI……… by next week.”
Okay, so that’s the situation we’re all in, right?
Yes, it sucks. Yes, there’s this pressure.
But you have a choice of how you want to approach it.
And what I’m going to ask you all to do is to use this, okay?
Use it to get closer to being a “human brand.”
So, first:
Brand.
How does this series (that Product is launching about parts and consumables), how does it align with our brand?
That might seem, duh, obvious, like we’re here talking about brand. Like, this is a brand thing. But come along with me here.
How’s it going to establish brand positioning? You probably ask yourself that. You might ask them that. “Excuse me. How’s this going to establish brand positioning?”
Elevate brand authenticity. Is this on brand? How do we make it feel like us? Does it differentiate us, or did our competitor’s Product team just launch a YouTube channel about parts and consumables and that’s why we’re doing it?
Does it build consistency? Even if it is different from what we’re doing and pushes the edges, does it make us more consistent?
And then the brand equity at the bottom. That’s a big one. Because when we’re under all this pressure, we are inclined to think short term and say, “okay, this YouTube series has to generate leads tomorrow.” But think about how it’s going to feel for the brand next year, five years from now. Again, does it get closer to, or farther from?
Relationships.
Again, if you’ve heard me say anything, I say, “who’s it for, and why are we doing it?” I say it all the time.
Are you prioritizing depth of the audience that you’re trying to reach? Or are you simply trying to reach more people? Why are you doing that?
Surrounding yourself with advocates, nurturing, collaborative partnerships. That part is saying, “hey, how are we getting closer to the people who actually want to be part of what we’re doing? Who are already fans of what we’re doing? How is this getting us closer to them?”
Fostering a sense of community, considering the long-term impact.
First it was about brand, now it’s about relationships.
Again, if we think more about breadth than depth, what’s that going to do about the long-term impact of the relationships with the people that we’re trying to impact over time?
Brand… Relationships…
Audacity.
This one is my favorite.
When you are met with something that is a big, crazy audacious goal—sometimes it’s yours, I love that if it’s yours—but it can be really easy to think, “let’s do this big crazy thing. It’ll be so crazy and so awesome!”
But does it actually help us pursue the vision of the company? Or is it just a crazy idea? Does it prioritize creativity? Does it actually hold space for doing something different? Or again, are we just under so much pressure that it’s just a rinse-and-repeat, Control-C, Control-V copy of something somebody else is doing?
And we’re going to get to this one, it’s on here twice actually: Does it energize your team? Read the room. How can we take a look, “We’ve got this mandate. We need to create a YouTube channel for the Product team about parts and consumables. How do we do this in a way that the team can get behind?”
Because we know what we’re doing here. We can do something really cool with this.
Values.
Sure, yours, but also the company’s. You got to know, what’s the “why” of your business?
You need to know that. It’s not just posters on the wall. And if it is just posters on the wall, it’s your job to change that.
What you’re doing, that even the Product series about parts and consumables on YouTube, should be aligned with the values of the company. Why the heck do you exist? How does it advance that? Does it have integrity? Is it courageous? Again, with the audacity, is it empathetic? And does it uphold the responsibility of what your company says it stands for?
So, something that might be out of alignment here is, let’s say that your company is super high-integrity, very buttoned up, very kind.
And then you’re like, “this parts and consumable series? We’re going to be so provocative! We’re going to totally push the envelope. We’re going to get that crazy guy in Product to be the host. It’s going to be awesome.”
If it doesn’t align with your values, no matter how audacious and cool and creative it is, it’s going to fall flat. It’s not going to do what you think it’s going to do.
Energy.
How does it make you feel?
I had a project once, a very long time ago, that I was really excited about. Super, super pumped. Super pumped. It was creative, it was new, it was different. It was awesome. I had buy-in…
I had done all the things.
I, I, I. And I hadn’t brought the team along with me, and so I was sitting in the room and they were like, “what are you doing?”
And it was a grind to get them to, in this example, get behind the series on YouTube about parts and consumables I was doing. I was like, “we’re going to do it in this cool way and it’s going to be so great!”
And they were like, “I don’t understand.”
So again, take a minute and say, “does this align with the purpose of the business with what we’re trying to do here?” Examine your reaction to this and your team’s reaction? Do we feel good? Do we not feel good? Is it a drain?
Trust your instincts.
And that doesn’t mean if people are low energy that you’re like, “just kidding. I guess we’re not going to do it.”
It just means that you need to take a minute because if it is a slog and you don’t address it, it’s not going to reach its full potential.
Okay, so: Brand, Relationship, Audacity, Values, Energy.
Think of it as a scorecard—and actually fun fact, at the end of this, I have a QR code where you can get the scorecard to walk through all of this on your own.
If you have any combination of those, but not all five, don’t do it.
Don’t do it just yet.
Take a minute. Because, think about it. Think of any of those combinations.
If you’re about to launch the YouTube series about parts and consumables for Product, and it meets all of them, but the Audacity one falls flat, you know what you’re going to get?
Something that’s safe. And boring.
If you do something that misses out on Values—but is super high on Brand and Relationship and Audacity, and everybody’s Energized about it—you’re going to get something crazy. You’re going to get a whole lot of pushback. And it probably won’t do what you think it’s going to do.
If you have everything, but nobody’s Energized about it, it’s not going to reach its full potential.
If you have all the things except for Brand, you’re going to have something… and I know you’ve all seen this. I come from Podcast Land. Companies be launching podcasts all the time that have nothing to do with anything, and they’re great. And the podcast [popularity] is super high, they’ve got all kinds of subscribers… And nobody knows that the brand that’s behind it is behind it.
Like, “oh, that’s by ABC Incorporated? I had no idea. That’s so weird.”
So you’ve got to have all five.
Published February 27, 2026
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