Sara and Rhi needed their message to get into the room before they did.
Sara Cooke and Rhi Baxter run We Are Brave, a leadership training company that helps senior teams have the honest conversations they keep putting off. Almost all of their work came through people recommending them, and there are only two of them, so between March and October 2026 we made them a set of things they can send on ahead: four films, fourteen short clips, five LinkedIn carousels, a Champion Pack and a 24-week plan for getting it all out there.
Sara Cooke and Rhi Baxter, founders of We Are Brave
Where they started
If you run a small business that lives on recommendations, you'll probably recognise where Sara and Rhi were when we first spoke in March. Their clients stayed with them, one of them for about ten years, and recommended them to other people, and that was how nearly all of their work arrived. The person who first wanted to bring them in was often a second in command rather than the one making the final decision, someone who'd seen what Brave could do and then had to explain it upstairs without Sara or Rhi there to help. And with only two of them, there were always going to be more of those conversations than they could get to.
“In order for us to get into different doors, to grow our business, the message needs to go ahead of us, and it couldn’t wait for us to be in the room.”
What we made
After that first call in March, the real work started with a long conversation in April about how they work and who brings them in. Every script was built from their own words in those conversations, and then we refined them with Sara and Rhi until they were happy to say them. We filmed everything in one day in Bicester on 2 July, and by the end of the day Sara said the lines sounded even stronger when they were saying them out loud.
Four films
The Brave Manifesto says what Brave believes. The Decision Loop is the longest of the four, at five and a half minutes, and it teaches the difference between discussing something and actually deciding it, with four sentences anyone can use in a meeting. What This Is Not goes through the things people might mistake Brave for, like off-the-shelf training or one-off coaching, and the Speaking and Event Teaser is for the people who book speakers.
Fourteen short clips
Twelve are answers from an unscripted interview with the two of them, cut in 4:5 for LinkedIn with the captions burned in, and the other two are scripted pieces cut in both 4:5 and 9:16.
A Champion Pack
There are three six-page briefs, one for each kind of leader who usually signs Brave off: someone running operations or people, someone in a regulated firm and someone in a mission-led organisation. Each one includes words from one of Brave's own clients. The person doing the forwarding also gets a private set of field notes on which brief to send to whom and what to say when they send it.
Five carousels
There are fifty slides across the five, built on photographs by their photographer, Vicky Knight.
A 24-week plan
Every post is already written and every film and clip is slotted into its week, all behind one link, so everyone can see what goes out when and who's doing it.
How it's set up to be used
The first version of the plan we put together was a 42-page document, and as soon as I opened it I could see it looked like homework. Sara and Rhi can't be in every room at once, and they sure as hell can't sit down and read 42 pages, so we put it to one side and started again, and the calendar on this phone is what they got instead.
Once it starts, the plan runs for 24 weeks with posts going out on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I set it up so that Sara and Rhi each need about an hour a fortnight, which is enough to open that week's post, read it, put it out with a photo or a clip and reply to the people who comment. Their team will take one company post a week and a section of the newsletter each month, and my part will be keeping the calendar up to date and looking at what's working with them once a month.
The Champion Pack is for the person inside a client organisation who wants to bring Brave in. They can forward the brief that fits their boss, and the films and clips are there for anyone who wants to get a feel for Sara and Rhi first.
In their words
At the end of the filming day we asked them five questions about working with us. This is some of what they said.
“To see those conversations and the things that we do turned into a script that sounds like us, you know, that they are our words, but sort of not our words at the same time.”
“The first time we got the scripts, it was like, that feels like us. That actually feels like us.”
Rhi Baxter “I know it’s the words that we gave you, but it’s the words that you gave us through different lenses, through different perspectives.”
Rhi Baxter “These wonderful conversations shouldn’t just stay in the room.”
Rhi Baxter “100%. And I don’t say that lightly.”
Rhi Baxter
“I had a quick read of the scripts yesterday, and I’m just reading the Packs, and I have one word on both - WOW.”
Rhi Baxter, by email, May 2026 “Wow! Amazing content in our champion packs”
Sara Cooke, by email, July 2026
The films
Here are all four films and three of the short clips.
