Mid-Year Update: Rise Above Consulting's Climbing Gym Industry 2026 Predictions
- Pete Ward
- Jun 10
- 6 min read
Over the last three+ years Rise Above has had hundreds of discovery calls with gym owners, managers and leaders across the globe who run climbing gyms of almost every size and maturity level. This includes businesses that are single door operators, to multi-location chains, to well-funded institutional finance-backed international businesses.
Rise Above has contracted with 70+ clients globally doing everything from starting their first gym to building sales strategies, solving complex cultural crises, managing leadership and investors, launching their first pre-sale, developing compensation strategies, scaling their business to new markets and more.
The following insights are aggregated from our unique, first-hand look under the hood in the climbing gym industry
Rise Above's Climbing Gym Industry Predictions for 2026, A Mid-Year Check-In
Back in January, I wrote about Rise Above’s 2026 predictions for the climbing gym industry. Hindsight tends to make us all look silly for trying to predict the future, but things are moving quickly enough that Gavin and I want to take a mid-year look back at our predictions for 2026 - what we got right, what we missed and our updated predictions based on what we know now. Stay tuned at the end for a bonus prediction about where we see AI going with gyms in the coming year.
Prediction #1 - Market consolidation is real, but prices are coming down
Our first prediction argued that there are more buyers and sellers than ever, but that selling a gym at a premium price is a thing of the past unless you have a very specific value proposition.
Mid-Year Update: We nailed this one. So far in 2026, Rise Above has worked with two PE groups each in the EU and North American Markets. In each geography we were contacted by one of the largest groups in the space and a boutique firm, so it’s fair to say we have a good understanding of what buyers are looking for on each end of the spectrum.
On the other side of the table are sellers who are generally less sophisticated, struggling to turn a profit, and are therefore not in a position to command a meaningful valuation for their business.
In years past, a decent gym in a good market could command a high price by virtue of a promise for future growth. Now buyers need to see high performance in the present before they’re even willing to inquire.
Our January blog argued that “Increasing competition means that any argument for a high valuation multiple will be heavily scrutinized by potential buyers in a way that has not previously been the case in the climbing gym industry”. We can testify to this scrutiny first-hand.
Prediction #2 - Less professional operators and older climbing gyms will evolve or die
We’ll be getting the doom and gloom out of the way early in this blog. In January we predicted that “The older and the weaker gyms are starting to get squeezed out.” If you haven’t leveled-up and professionalized your operation, “you are likely to be left behind regardless of how good your product is”.
Mid-Year Update: In 2026, Rise Above is servicing more clients in more geographies than ever by a wide margin. Why now? Because many, many operators out there who opened with a dream and loads of good intentions misjudged the need for sophisticated and professional operations in today’s climbing gym ecosystem. And unfortunately, many of them are coming to us too late, and are either trying to sell or scrambling to fix a bad situation with no believable path to grow revenue.
The big chains that we know about are performing well coming out of a tough year in 2025, but if you don’t know your data/analytics/revenue strategy, and if you don’t have the ability to implement real business activities based on that knowledge, you’re in for hard times.
Predictions #3 & #4 - Segmentation will become the driving force for growth. And Segmentation and specialization will start to reveal winners and losers
Here we made two very similar predictions that future growth and performance would come from deep product specialization and the ability to serve a specific customer.
We argued that “In the past, climbing gyms wanted to be all things to all people: Kids go over there, strong folks go up on that mezzanine with a board, there’s a special room for yoga or whatever and everyone else goes in the main area. But that’s starting to change as the market segments into more niche services like board gyms, kids gyms and training gyms where each individual customer profile gets the full attention of the business”
Mid-year update: We might have been a little early or missed this one altogether. There are plenty of specialized gyms opening up (board gyms in particular), but so far, we’re not seeing them catch on the way we thought they might.
The first wave of board gyms is struggling and in some cases they’re starting to fail because the days are long gone when a new gym could just open the doors and people would show up.
Where we missed the mark was that simply segmenting will not be good enough. You have to know your customer, how to attract them and how to convince them that your specialized offering is valuable.
For my money, this relates to our second prediction above about having a high-performing business operation. If you open your gym without a plan and without the ability to understand/create/attract/capture your customer you will fail.
Prediction #5 - Successful new gyms will draw lessons from outside the climbing gym industry
Here we share the general background of a few of our newest clients “They are (almost universally) starting a second passion-based career after a successful first career in a totally different industry”
Mid-Year Update: Here, the trend continues and we’re seeing it internationally as well. Time will tell how these operators perform relative to the first-wave of operators who were born and bred climbers, but for sure the current wave of folks opening gyms come from more established business backgrounds than the first wave did.
So what’s the BOTTOM LINE?: Now more than ever, performance matters. Gyms that understand their data, their customers and how to drive revenue are succeeding.
Ok. What Do I Do To Improve? If you’re facing any of these challenges, here are three things to do to start leveling-up your gym’s professional evolution.
Get to know your data. Your data is your goldmine of information about what is happening in your business. Get to know it, and understand what activities influence the data
Don’t wait until things get bad to think about how to improve. If things are good, or even great now, TAKE ACTION. Think about how you can amplify successes and address weaknesses. Build strength in your organization while you have the time, money, flexibility and resources to do so.
If you’re thinking about building a specialized offering, do your homework. Make sure you know who your customer is, that there are more than enough of them in your catchment area, that you have a believable plan to attract and keep them, and most importantly that you can create your own customers and are not reliant on another gym to make customers for you.
There are also some great resources out there to help. Pour a strong cup of coffee and check out the following:
First, check out the Rise Above Resources page. Everything there is free if you enter your email address. There are good resources for business planning and sales.
Next, check out the Climbing Gym Management Series at the Climbing Business Journal. You need to be a member of the to access these, but it’s well worth the investment. If you’re struggling with revenue, I suggest starting with “Sales Strategies to Launch Strong and Keep Growing”.
Finally, here’s our mid-year updated prediction that needs to be said again and said loud: AI will not save you, it will amplify your current condition. If you’re a subject matter expert in your field, that’s great, AI can help you run your business. But you can’t use AI to fake it and believe that you will succeed and you cannot outsource your cognitive load to AI. You must be good enough to do the job yourself before you can outsource it to AI.
If you read this far, thanks for taking the time out of your day! We’ll check in again at the end of the year and see how the next six months track relative to our predictions.
Let us know what you think, what we got right, what we got wrong and where you think climbing will go in 2026.