Empower your team to reach their full potential so everyone can do their best work.

Your team. Our training. The perfect fit.

Introducing WPS Private Training – personalized training for you or your entire development team. Grow (and retain) a team of high performers – people who are genuinely excited to come to work and solve challenging problems.

What is Private Training?

Simply put, the WPSessions Private Training program is a private and dedicated coaching solution to help every person on your team excel at what they do. WPSessions provides directly relevant and concise education and mentorship so that your team can solve the problems at hand and get back to work. Long term, our time together will have a measurable impact on the overall quality of your team.

Most developers don't have five years of experience – they have one year, repeated five times. Don't pay for another repeat year. Invest in the development of your entire team.

This training opportunity comes with fresh, custom-tailored presentations every other week that revolve actual issues your team is currently facing. These presentations could focus on code reviews, tech demos, workflow discussion, or whatever else makes the most sense for your team for that week. In the off-weeks we will meet for 15 minutes to discuss your most recent problems, solutions, and pain points.

The material is always catered especially for you and presented at a level that is most accessible for the entire team.

We recognize that scheduled presentations aren't enough, though. To really help your team push through those real-world, deadline-blocking, mid-week problems we need to do a bit more.

To best help your team succeed we’ll also work together inside a dedicated Slack channel (either yours our ours). This provides an opportunity for everyone on the team to raise questions, introduce problems, and get real-time feedback all throughout the week.

What’s more, everyone on your team will have access to all of the training material that WPS provides (recorded sessions, courses, and live broadcasts) so that everyone can continue learning at their own pace. This affords us the opportunity to spend all of our time together talking through key issues without burning any time on questions that are better-answered by a video that already exists in our library.

Make Fewer Mistakes

How expensive is a single mistake in your production pipeline? How about those single-yet-cascading mistakes that are made early in the process but not rectified until launch week? And let's not forget the worst of them all, the repeat mistakes that seem to crop up across several different projects. Mistakes in web development are both costly and unfortunate, but they don't need to be! 

Why do these mistakes (especially repeat mistakes) occur so often in our line of work? Well, one reason is because we're working within an industry that is constantly changing. Another is a lack of dialog or process to create a collective wisdom, so to speak.

One of the core focuses of this private training and coaching is to help you and your team identify and rectify mistakes more quickly, make fewer mistakes overall, and completely eliminate repeat mistakes (because the only thing more expensive than fixing a problem once is fixing the same problem again and again).

Grow a happier, more satisfied team

Opportunities for personal growth is one of the most statistically significant indicators of job satisfaction. It’s also the most surefire way to grow a team of high performers.

80% of survey respondents ranked Personal Growth as ​"Very Important"​ for their workplace happiness – higher than salary and raises! In fact, this was the statement that these survey responders agreed about ​the most.​ (Source: PostStatus)

By putting your team’s education first you’re investing not only in their growth but the overall betterment of your company as a whole.

This is not a force-fed presentation on the newest trending framework or techniques.

You're being given a comprehensive, tailored education that equips your team with the practical skills and experience they need to succeed.

Core Benefits

  • Bi-Weekly Coaching – Once every two weeks we will host a private, 60-minute webinar catered specifically to your team's current focus. In the off-weeks we'll sync to discern what topics and format are most relevant to your team right now. One week might be entirely spent reviewing and refactoring your project code, the next might be spent demonstrating a new tool or technique, etc.
  • Ongoing, Virtual Training – Your very own custom-tailored training curriculum featuring a mixture of coding exercises, recommended reading, pre-recorded training videos/presentations, and tight feedback loops. All curriculum materials will be made available to your team for future reference.
  • Dedicated Slack Channel – We’ll provide a private channel in Slack (or join yours) so that your team members can have access to our training coach to ask questions, discuss development issues, share insightful articles, and generally get near-real-time help all throughout the week.
  • Initial Evaluation – We will conduct an introductory interview to help assess your internal team’s skill level and experience in order to identify any knowledge gaps. This will give us a baseline for what to focus on and how to approach the material.
  • Quarterly Report Cards – At the end of each quarter we will conduct an informal evaluation to help highlight specific strengths, areas of demonstrable growth, and areas for continued improvement.
  • But wait, there's more! Every member of your team also gets an honorary WPSessions VIP membership (a $299 value per person), granting them full access to all WPS training material – every single session, course, and live broadcast – for as long as you're all a part of the Private Training program.

Seating is limited!

To ensure the highest possible level of attention and service, this opportunity is currently limited to two (2) concurrent teams or individuals. Use the form below to reserve your space today.

Potential Training Topics


During our time together we could focus on any or all of the following (and more):

  • Development environments and workflows
  • Coding best practices
  • WordPress theme/plugin architecture and flow
  • Writing performant, scalable code
  • Effective team management
  • Project estimation, pricing, and forecasting
  • WordPress coding standards
  • Building eCommerce and Membership sites
  • Integrating with third-party APIs
  • REST-based development
  • WordPress security (data validation and sanitization)
  • Productivity hacks (work faster, work smarter, make fewer mistakes)
  • Code reviews
  • Testing, Automation, and Continuous Integration
  • Management processes and advice
  • Whatever is most relevant to your team's evolving needs
Brian Richards (@rzen)

About Your Instructor

Most of the training with your team will be led by Brian Richards, the creator of WPSessions.com – though on occasion we may feature guest presenters if the topic warrants it. Brian has been using WordPress since 2007 and leading development teams since 2011, most recently with Crowd Favorite.

Over these last several years Brian has had the opportunity to work with many amazing WordPress experts and agencies and help develop sites for Microsoft, Disney, TIME, YMCA, and numerous others. Brian has an affinity for self-directed learning and helping others develop skills and workflows to better solve important and complicated problems.

silva

WPSessions is Perfect

“WPSessions is perfect. I don’t want to learn something twice, I want to learn it right the first time.”
– Michael Silva, MichaelSilva.me

Chris Lema

Simple Focus

“WPSessions has a simple focus – to educate you by bringing incredible talent together to focus on specific topics you need to know. They could charge much, much more, but their focus isn’t on money as much as it is education. Check it out now!”
– Chris Lema, ChrisLema.com

dils

Quality Teaching

"I’ve had the opportunity to work closely with Brian and see how he works with teams and coaches people. He’s respectful, but doesn’t hold back when it comes to offering feedback and teaching quality. Sprinkle that with his dry humor and you’ve got a great combination of teacher, coach, and leader."
– Carrie Dils, carriedils.com

Brian Krogsgard

Most Experienced

"Brian is one of the most experienced developers in the WordPress ecosystem. He has a broad range of technical capability, as well as the ability to translate his knowledge so others can understand. I trust him completely for when I need expert help."
– Brian Krogsgard, PostStatus.com

Shawn Hesketh

Easy to Grasp

"Brian is not only one of the most knowledgeable developers in the WordPress community, but is also uniquely gifted at teaching highly technical topics in a way that makes them easy to grasp. When someone asks me how to take their development skills to the next level, I recommend Brian’s training courses."
– Shawn Hesketh, WP101.com

Here's how it all works:

Everything about the Private Training program has been designed to deliver maximum results for you and your team. When you succeed, we succeed.

To maximize our impact, this program is based around a quarterly curriculum. We believe that after a minimum of three months together (six bi-weekly coaching sessions) you'll already be able to see measurable improvements in production output and team cohesion.

As our relationship deepens with each new quarter, you'll begin to see the effects of our time together compound – this becomes especially true as you become more able to onboard new team members and bring them into the fold.

We also recognize that every team is unique and is prioritizing a different set of goals. In our initial chat we'll work through your specific needs and design custom-fit a curriculum just for you (for instance, maybe you want to front-load more training in the first quarter and meet weekly rather than bi-weekly).

Next Steps:

  1. You submit the form below to say you're interested and want more details.
  2. We set up a time for a quick chat to learn about you and your business. The goal of this call is to understand where you're at, where you're going, and how we can best help you get there.
  3. We sort out all the logistics: where our bi-weekly coaching presentations best fit into your busy production calendar; whose Slack channel we'll use; who the main point person will be on your end of the relationship; etc.
  4. After we've nailed down the details and picked a start date, we'll setup a quarterly billing cycle and start rolling with all the on-going perks of WPS Private Training! There's no hard subscription commitment/contract and we can stop the training at any time.

The Private Training program starts at $1500/mo and can support teams of any size.

The most ideal size for this training program is a team of 3-6. If your team is bigger than that, or if you're running solo, don't worry: there's room for you, too! This private training program can scale to support individuals or teams of any size

If you have more than 5 team members who will be participating in this program, we can talk through the details what training will look like for you. This will include price breaks for your larger group, different scheduling options, and all that fun stuff.

Let's Get Started!

First things first, we need to put some time on the calendar to talk about your team and determine if WPS Private Training is a good fit for you. You probably want to know a bit more about this program as well.

After you submit the form below you'll get an email with more details about the program and we can work together to schedule a time to talk.