About Thrive
Built for the companies that compete with enterprises for people.
Thrive is not an LMS. It is a talent development function for companies of 50 to 2,500 people: live workshops and programs led by facilitators who have held the role, a growing course library with compliance included, and agents that run the administration, at one flat price per organization. It was built in Grand Rapids, Michigan by people who spent their careers building training for Fortune 1000 companies and kept meeting growing companies that could not get any of it. It is delivered with SDI Clarity.
The founder
Twenty-five years of building training for very large companies. One recurring conversation with much smaller ones.
Jeremy Erard spent his career designing leadership, sales, and professional development for Fortune 1000 organizations, and founded SDI Clarity, the consulting firm that still delivers Thrive’s programs. The pattern he kept meeting was the operator with fifty to twenty-five hundred people, growing, losing good ones, promoting people into jobs nobody had prepared them for, and unable to buy what the large companies had.
What those companies needed was not a learning system. It was the function: people who could teach because they had done the job, a library that grew with what employees asked for, programs built on real work, and someone to handle the administration. Agents finally made the last part affordable. Thrive is the result.
- Built in
- Grand Rapids, Michigan
- Delivered with
- SDI Clarity
- Who you deal with
- The founder, directly
- Company age
- New. The programs are not.
What we believe
Four things everything here is built on.
Humans in front of humans
Skills change when someone practices with a person who has done the job watching. Video libraries get watched by the people who least need them. Everything at Thrive is built so the live moment is the center and everything else supports it.
The work is the curriculum
Applied work happens on the participant's actual job and is reviewed by their own company. A case study teaches the case. A real problem teaches the job.
AI runs the administration, not the relationship
Morgan sets teams up. Coach Taylor prepares people and follows up. ARIA has the first conversation. None of them teach. They make it possible for a small company to have a function it could never staff.
Growth ripples outward
An individual who grows changes a team. A team changes a company. A company that develops its people changes the families and the town around it. That is the point of doing this for companies of fifty to two thousand five hundred people rather than only for the largest.
Who teaches
Held the job. Not studied it.
Content is the easy part to buy. A dozen vendors will sell you a library this afternoon. What none of them sells is the person who has already done the job, live, for two hours, watching your people practice it.
Every Thrive session is led by someone who has done the work they are teaching: run a shift, carried a quota, managed a team through a change, sat across from the person who needed the hard conversation. They bring the real version of the problem into the room, and the practice is done on your people’s actual work, not on a case study.
Sessions are small enough that a facilitator can watch each person practice and coach the delivery. Between sessions, Coach Taylor keeps the thread going.
- Session size
- 25 max
- Length
- 2 hours
- Format
- Live
- Where
- Teams
What it looked like for one company
Three people from the floor became supervisors. Nobody had to be hired from outside.
A fifty-person manufacturer was about to recruit supervisors from outside, at the price of three recruiting fees and the months it takes a stranger to learn the plant. Instead, three experienced operators went through a leadership program built around their actual shifts: feedback conversations they were avoiding, handoffs that kept breaking, a schedule dispute that had gone on for months.
All three are still supervising, and the recruiting never happened. We are not going to put a percentage on what that was worth, because we cannot show you how it was measured. The company is not named here.
Organizations whose people have learned with Thrive
More than a hundred first-time leaders at John Ball Zoo have been through Fundamentals of Leading People, alongside teams at manufacturers, schools, food producers, and a regional health plan.
Where and how
Grand Rapids, Michigan. Delivered anywhere.
Sessions are live and virtual on Microsoft Teams, so a plant in Ohio and an office in Arizona sit in the same cohort. Write to hello@thrivetalentdevelopment.com or start with ARIA below.
Talk to ARIA
Ask what you would ask us.
ARIA works the way a good first call works. She asks who is involved and what should change, recommends the closest starting point, quotes the real price, and hands you to a person when you want one.
Start with one of these
Prefer a person? Say so in the conversation and the team follows up, or use the contact page.