The Prestige Sessions

• WORKSHOP
  Clarity Breeds Opportunity: Brand Communication Tactics To Boost Referrals, Attract Clients, and Expand Possibilities

  Jennifer Bourn

  Your brand is your core business asset. It is the reputation you have in the market, the perception your audience has about your business, and the feelings and thoughts they associate with your products or services. With a strong, clear brand, decision-making is easy, your value is clear, and you can charge your worth with confidence and certainty.

  In this hands-on workshop-style session, you won't be sitting back and relaxing, you'll be neck deep in your brand, gaining clarity and getting things done. You'll walk away with a deeper understanding of your brand, a powerful, refined marketing message, and new tools you can add to your business and use with your clients.

• Scale Yourself: The Art of Letting Grow

  Vasken Hauri

  The thought of scaling a team can be a daunting prospect. With an increasing number of decisions being made by a larger and larger group of individuals, it's easy to become overwhelmed by the fear that things might be going off the rails. On the flipside, micro - managing a group of highly talented creative individuals isn't exactly a recipe for success. So what's the leader of a growing business in a rapidly expanding market to do?

  This talk will focus on ways to handle the natural challenges that come with growth, including how to define, enhance, and promote a consistent and positive corporate culture. We'll also discuss techniques for giving your employees the tools they need to make decisions rapidly and confidently while remaining true to your leadership vision--a necessity in the fast-paced and ever-changing technology sector in which WordPress operates.

• Avoidable Data Traps: Why Your A/B Testing & Other Tools Unwittingly Lie To You.

  Jason Cohen

• Why Here, Why Now?

  Chris Lema

  "When I was a kid, my father would have guests over, and would point to me and say, 'Chris is going to sing now.’”

  Chris Lema quit a once in a lifetime academic opportunity in bioengineering to study social welfare. He become the “data guy” at Berkeley labs where he worked at the forefront of the Internet, then sold his first company for $10 million before he turned 30, and spent several years as an executive at an enterprise software company. Now he's the CTO of Crowd Favorite, one of the oldest agencies in the WordPress ecosystem, and a popular proponent of WordPress and its community. How did that happen?

  Maybe you know Chris for his rousing talks - what Jake Goldman calls his "sermons on the camp". Maybe you've stumbled upon his prolific blog, where he's managed to pump out content every single day for the last couple of years. You might admire his influence, and you might wonder, well, what’s in all of this for Chris? Why dedicate so much time and energy, and so many resources to the WordPress community?

  Jake Goldman, President & Founder of 10up, finishes up Prestige with an intimate interview with Chris Lema, exploring where he’s been, where he’s going, and why he’s betting on WordPress.

• Hiring Employee Number One: From Freelancer to Agency

  Brad Williams

  From a part-time hobby to a full-blown agency, Brad has built WebDevStudios into one of the largest agencies in the world focusing 100% on WordPress development and design. In this presentation Brad will talk through the history of the company, discuss challenges faced along the way, and share tips on how he grew a hobby to a distributed company with 32 full-time employees.

• What Can Easy Digital Downloads Tell Us About the WordPress Marketplace?

  Pippin Williamson

  Just what does the "WordPress economy” look like, anyways? If there’s one man that might just have the answers, its probably Pippin Williamson. Easy Digital Downloads, his brainchild, is by any definition, a WordPress product made for WordPress makers: it’s successful… and profitable! But what exactly is successful in this marketplace? What does the top of the market look like? Is catering to the Presserati a scalable business plan?

  10up’s Jake Goldman sits down with EDD founder Pippin Williamson to understand his business, and the business of WordPress.

• Cash is King: Options for Funding Your Business

  April Downing

  Every business owner worries about cash flow. Whether it’s cash flow to grow or to just keep the doors open. From bootstrapping, to venture capital, to debt (and everything in between), there are so many options available today to fund businesses of all sizes and stages.

  We will take a look at the different avenues for funding your business and how they relate to the goals you are trying to achieve. I will share some of the good, bad and the ugly I have experienced from raising over $200 million for companies of all stages. Cash is critical but how you get it and from whom makes all the difference in the world!

• More Than Just a Website

  John Hawkins

  Sometimes building websites isn’t just about the sites. Sometimes, it’s also about the community that those sites serve and how they help them to grow. John Hawkins of 9seeds and his client, Kim Schaefer, share the ups and downs of working together on a series of sites that exist at the center of a neighborhood and tech revitalization in Downtown Las Vegas.

• Panel: Are WordPress products big business?

  Jake Goldman

  WordPress is said to power 23% of the web’s top 10 million websites. Of identifiable CMS’s, its share is estimated at over 60%. But when was the last time you read about a WordPress product on TechCrunch or Bloomberg? By tech industry standards, how do our smashing successes measure up? Is the future in platforms and software as a service, and if so, how do WordPress product businesses factor in?
  
  
  
  Jake Goldman, President & Founder of 10up, sits down with Corey Miller - owner of one of the oldest and longest standing WordPress product companies, Ben Fox - a younger entrepreneur using WordPress as a jumping off point for SIDEKICK.pro, and Andrew Norcross - who sits at the intersection of agency services and products, for a provocative conversation about the WordPress product economy.

• The Whole Person Concept: Finding Balance In Our Work, Our Lives, and Our Successes

  Lea Newman

• Knowing When to Pull the Ripcord: Moving On to Your Next Big Thing: Moving On to Your Next Big Thing

  Dre Armeda

• Taking The Leap: Switching Careers to Follow Your Passion: Switching Careers to Follow Your Passion

  Lisa Sabin-Wilson

• How to Land Enterprise Clients

  Shane Pearlman

• The Business of Security: The Nitty Gritty of Running a Multi-Million Dollar Business: The Nitty Gritty of Running a Multi-Million Dollar Business

  Tony Perez

• Mining Lessons from the Commercial Plugin Gold Rush

  Carl Hancock

  Since 2007, Rocketgenius has been specializing in extending WordPress, especially through their flagship product: Gravity Forms. Carl Hancock, founder of Rocketgenius, joins us for an interview to dig into the business background of their commercial plugin success.

  If you heard Carl on our expert business panel in Minneapolis last year, you know he’s full of great information that can help other entrepreneurs grow their business. In Vegas, we’re dedicating an entire session to interviewing him about the organization design, revenue perspective, and profitably of Rocketgenius to answer the question - are WordPress products really the gold rush some people make them out to be?

• Stop Sucking At Accounting

  Brianna Norcross

  No matter how great your coding chops, your business needs a solid financial foundation to be able to thrive. This talk will outline the most common ways small business owners erode that foundation and how to build it right instead.

• Tales from the CMS Wars: WordPress and the Enterprise

  John Eckman

  WordPress isn't your typical enterprise CMS - and that's a good thing. The typical enterprise CMS is expensive, complicated, and difficult to use - but the best have a strong market presence and also support robust ecosystems of implementation partners. WordPress, on the other hand, still faces challenges being taken seriously as "more than a blogging platform."

  What can the community of WordPress agencies interested in larger projects with more impact learn from other platforms aimed at the enterprise market? Adobe Experience Manager, Sitecore, and even Drupal offer object lessons in how to speak to enterprise buyers.
  We'll also look at other ways the enterprise market differs from the small-to-medium business market and how WordPress agencies can more effectively break into that conversation.

  Selling WordPress into the enterprise can be challenging - there are lots of assumptions and myths to be overcome - but it ultimately offers a compelling value proposition no other platform can touch.

• Taking Control of Your Destiny

  James Dalman

  Every one of us has a chance to live a meaningful life. Sometimes, that means fixing bayonets and making sure that we go out in a blaze of glory. Whatever it means, embrace and take control of your destiny.

• WordPress Moneyball: How a Little Web Shop Can Continually Out-muscle the Big Dogs by Exploiting Overvalued Things

  Toby Cryns

  You are small, scared, suck at writing code, don’t know what you are doing most of the time, and you work out of your basement office. They are shiny, confident, and possess some of the best talent this side of the Atlantic Ocean. But that doesn’t mean you can’t compete with and beat them. I have seen it done countless times, and you can do it too!

  In this session, Toby Cryns will share some of the unorthodox business strategies he and his friends use to outmuscle the bigger, better, and badder competition in a hyper-competitive marketplace.

• You Should Charge More

  Lisa Sabin-Wilson

  As freelancers and entrepreneurs, we are in charge of assigning value to the work that we do. In 2004, as a freelancer, Lisa sold her first WordPress project for $75. Ten years later, as a partner in a thriving web design and development agency, she is frequently involved in projects 1000 times that much, often more.

  There are different considerations in pricing as a freelancer, and pricing as an agency. Lisa explores these considerations and shares her insight into common mistakes she made in her career as a freelancer, as well as pricing lessons, strategies and advice she is using today.

  This session will explore different pricing models, help you identify signs that your rates might be too low and some similarities and differences between freelancing vs. agency pricing strategies. You'll find out how she gradually increased her pricing as a freelancer because one of her (paying) clients encouraged her to do so, and you should be prepared for Lisa to encourage you to do the same!