Leaders in Sport, a part of Leaders Group, connects the most influential people and the most powerful ideas in global sport to catalyze discussion, and drive the industry forward. Through a series of global summits in North America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East; invitation-only membership and long-form content, Leaders in Sport provides professional executives, both on and off the field, with access to a community of peers. They share best practices and trends that are shaping the future of sport.

Alongside is Leaders Club, a fast-growing leadership program for mid-career professionals in the sports industry. It helps turn managers into confident, capable leaders by strengthening their networks, deepening their industry knowledge, and building essential leadership skills that drive business impact.

When their existing hosting provider announced they would no longer support WordPress, Leaders in Sport and Leaders Club faced a critical deadline. They needed to migrate the complex Bedrock-based multisite network within six weeks while simultaneously evolving the platform to support new business models. Leaders Group partnered with rtCamp to manage this transition and evolve the platform from a maintenance-heavy state into a scalable, growth-ready ecosystem.

At a glance:

AreaChallengeSolutionOutcomePlatform Migration & DevOpsHosting support ended; Bedrock multisite lacked build and deployment stability.Migrated to Kinsta, rebuilt asset pipeline, and implemented automated Azure DevOps deployments.Zero downtime, stable builds, and faster, error-free releases.Event & Global OperationsEvent setup, Zoom workflows, and timezone handling were manual and error-prone.Unified event workflows, automated Zoom integrations, and implemented UTC-based timezone rendering.Accurate global events with significantly reduced admin overhead.Membership & Community ScaleTiered memberships and lack of discovery limited scalability and engagement.Consolidated memberships, migrated 500+ users, and launched a member directory.Simplified operations and stronger member connectivity.Performance, Content & Marketing AgilityAdmin slowness, poor content discovery, and marketing dependency on devs.Optimized admin performance, introduced multi-dimensional taxonomies, and built reusable editor widgets.~95% faster admin UX, improved content discovery, and faster campaigns.

Ensuring business continuity during a complex platform transition

The Leaders In Sport and Leaders Club networks ran on Bedrock, a modern WordPress architecture that separates application code from the standard WordPress file system and manages dependencies through Composer. During the planned migration to Kinsta, rtCamp identified a critical risk: the active theme lacked the build configuration required to reliably compile front-end assets. Without a defined asset build process, future design updates would have been fragile, post-migration changes would carry elevated failure risk, and the platform’s visual integrity could not be confidently maintained.

To mitigate this, rtCamp reverse-engineered the existing theme, introduced a fully documented Webpack configuration, and aligned dependency versions to stabilize the build pipeline. Rebuilt assets were rigorously validated to ensure 100% visual and functional parity with the pre-migration environment, protecting brand consistency and member experience.

In parallel, rtCamp addressed another major operational gap: there was no documented or proven method for deploying a Bedrock multisite project from Azure DevOps to Kinsta. By synthesizing Kinsta’s Git-based deployment requirements with Azure Pipelines, rtCamp designed a custom CI/CD workflow tailored to Bedrock’s non-standard directory structure and multisite needs.

This shifted deployments from a manual, high-risk activity to a predictable, automated operation, reducing release risk and improving delivery speed. While Kinsta executed the infrastructure migration, rtCamp coordinated and safeguarded the application layer, ensuring that the Bedrock architecture, build processes, and deployment workflows remained intact throughout the transition.

The platforms launched successfully on Kinsta with zero downtime. With a documented asset build process and a reliable Azure-to-Kinsta CI/CD pipeline in place, Leaders Group now operates on a stable, future-ready foundation, one that preserves the sophistication of its development workflow while materially reducing operational and delivery risk.

Automating event operations

The management of events, which forms a core of the Leaders Group’s value proposition, was previously a highly manual and time-consuming process. The internal staff bore the administrative burden of separately creating event posts within their WordPress content management system, configuring the corresponding Zoom meeting details, and then manually managing all attendee communication, from initial invitations to post-event follow-ups.

To streamline these operations, Leaders Group installed a WordPress event plugin. While intended to automate much of the event lifecycle, the plugin introduced a critical bug that significantly impacted the user experience for their global community. Specifically, a bug within the plugin caused event times to display inaccurately for international users. For instance, an event scheduled for 3:00 AM EST (Eastern Standard Time) might confusingly appear as 2:30 AM IST (Indian Standard Time) to members viewing the site from India. This failure to correctly handle and display international time zones created widespread confusion and frustration, particularly for an organization whose leadership community spans the entire globe and relies on precise scheduling for virtual participation.

These issues were addressed through a two-step process:

The time zone fix ensured that members from London to Sydney see accurate event schedules, protecting the brand’s reputation for reliability.

Streamlining membership operations and community engagement

As Leaders Group expanded, its membership ecosystem began to show strain across multiple properties. On LeadersinSport.com, the Bronze, Silver, and Gold membership tiers, powered by the MemberPress plugin, were operationally heavy, required manual sales intervention and separate maintenance despite being functionally similar.

In parallel, on Leaders Club, members had no centralized way to discover or connect with one another, limiting peer engagement and reducing the community value of the platform beyond content and events.

Team membership consolidation

Leaders in Sport transitioned to a simplified team membership model. rtCamp engineered a custom WP-CLI script to migrate over 500 active member accounts by directly remapping Plan IDs at the database level in controlled batches. The migration preserved all user metadata and transaction history, ran entirely in the background with zero downtime, and required no password resets.

Community discovery

rtCamp introduced a Member Directory on LeadersClub.com, providing a structured, searchable view of active members with profile images, company details, and LinkedIn profile links. While the directory operates independently from the membership system on LeadersInSport.com, it complements the Team Membership model by strengthening community discovery across the Leaders Group ecosystem.

Leaders Group's Leaders Club Members Directory

Together, these initiatives transformed Leaders Group’s digital platforms into a scalable, community-driven ecosystem. Internally, simplified membership operations reduced administrative friction and enabled faster, more confident onboarding of organizations and leadership teams. Externally, greater visibility into the member network strengthened peer connection, collaboration, and knowledge exchange in reinforcing Leaders Group’s mission to connect, develop, and support leaders across sport, business, and performance at a global scale.

Enhancing content discovery

With a library exceeding 1,200 articles, reports, and videos, the Leaders in Sport “Intelligence Hub” faced significant discoverability challenges. The legacy system relied on a single-dimensional category taxonomy, which lacked the flexibility to tag content across multiple relevant areas simultaneously. This limited filtering capabilities and made it increasingly difficult for members to locate specific resources as the archive grew.

The multi-dimensional taxonomy solution

To resolve these limitations, rtCamp implemented three distinct custom taxonomies that allow for more granular content classification:

Multi-dimensional taxonomy solution implemented on Leaders Group

This backend restructuring enabled a more intuitive frontend experience. Instead of browsing exhaustive lists, users can now utilize multi-dimensional filtering to refine their search results.

The user flow follows a clear, four-step process:

  1. Access: The user visits the Intelligence Hub listing page.
  2. Selection: The user selects one or multiple criteria from the Pathway, Topic, and Sport dropdown menus.
  3. Update: The interface automatically updates to display only the content that matches the intersecting filters.
  4. Refinement: The user can further narrow their selection or clear filters to restart their search.

By transitioning from flat categories to this structured system, the Intelligence Hub provides a high-precision discovery experience, ensuring that members can quickly access insights tailored to their specific professional context.

Navigating citywise events faster

Beyond improving content discovery, Leaders Club needed the ability to rapidly surface events based on a member’s city of interest without relying on ongoing developer support.

rtCamp addressed this by building a reusable Divi Custom Widget (Event Navigator Divider) for LeadersClub.com using React. The component can be deployed and configured directly within the Divi Builder, enabling editors to dynamically showcase events by city across multiple pages.

Custom widget made using Divi for navigating events faster on Leaders Group's Leaders Club.

This shift empowered the marketing team to iterate faster, maintain consistency across event experiences while preserving a cohesive user experience for members and readers.

Freddie Clark, Head of Digital and Product Strategy

Leaders Group

rtCamp became the digital partner we required. They managed a complex Bedrock multisite migration with zero downtime and transformed our platform from a high-maintenance system into a scalable, future-ready ecosystem. Their work, especially simplifying our memberships and automating event workflows, has significantly reduced our admin effort, allowing us to focus entirely on global community growth.

Freddie Clark, Head of Digital and Product Strategy

Freddie Clark

Head of Digital and Product Strategy

Conclusion

Through a combination of infrastructure stabilization, workflow automation, and targeted feature development, rtCamp transformed Leaders Group’s platforms from a high‑maintenance system into a scalable, future‑ready digital ecosystem.

Leaders Group now benefits from:

With legacy constraints removed and internal workflows optimized, Leaders Group is positioned to scale its global leadership community with confidence, delivering reliable, high‑value experiences to members worldwide.

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