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The Most Underrated Department in a Climbing Gym: Human Resources

Most gyms treat human resources as a cost-center that provides little value and no direct connection to revenue. The research says the opposite: a real people function is one of the highest-return investments an operator can make — especially now that the post-Covid climbing gym boom is over.


Ask most climbing gym owners where HR sits on their priority list and you'll get some version of the same answer: somewhere below route setting, membership sales, and fixing the auto-belays. HR is the thing you deal with when someone quits, someone gets hurt, or a paycheck comes out wrong. It's a cost, not a driver of revenue.


That instinct made sense when the industry was young and small. It doesn't anymore. There are now nearly 700 commercial climbing facilities in the United States, and the industry has added gyms every year since the first ones opened in 1987. But 2025 was the year the ground shifted. North American net growth slowed to 4.7%, and 73% of operators told Climbing Business Journal they faced worsening economic conditions, with one multi-location operator putting it bluntly: "the boom times are over, and profitability now requires real scale and infrastructure."


When margins tighten, the gyms that survive tend to be the ones that operate efficiently, and in a service business, your people are the operation.
HR is a critical function for team performance
HR is a critical function for team performance

Viewing HR as a Cost and Not a Value-add is Not Managing Costs, it's Expired Logic


Climbing gyms are usually founded by climbers, not operators. They grow out of a community, run lean, and rely on a simple truth: climbing attracts people who will accept lower pay for the privilege of being around the sport all day. "We're a community, not a corporation" becomes a reason to skip the systems that every other service business eventually builds.

That model is visibly cracking.

From 2021 through the first half of 2025, roughly 15 gyms unionized, and another dozen followed in just the next seven months, with campaigns hitting some of the largest chains in the country. Labor organizers have pointed to the same root cause for years: the industry has long counted on staff enthusiasm for climbing to justify low wages and poor support.

Whatever your view on unions, a wave of organizing is a symptom. It's what happens when compensation, communication, and management are neglected long enough that goodwill runs out. HR is precisely the function that addresses those things before they become a labor dispute or a wall of one-star reviews from ex-employees that your next great employee reads before applying.

Your Staff Experience Becomes Your Member Experience


Recurring revenue lives and dies on conversion and retention. In a climbing gym, both of those key activities are downstream of the people your customers and members interact with every day: the front desk that greets them by name, the setter whose problems keep them coming back three times a week, the instructor who makes a nervous first-timer feel safe enough to come back for a second class. Your staff experience isn't separate from your product. It is the product.

The research linking the two is overwhelming. Gallup's Q12 meta-analysis (the largest study of its kind), pulling together more than 183,000 teams and 3.3 million employees across 90 countries found that business units in the top quartile of employee engagement dramatically outperform those in the bottom quartile: roughly a fifth higher profitability and productivity, higher customer loyalty, meaningfully lower turnover, and far fewer safety incidents.

Read those outcomes again through a climbing gym lens. "Customer loyalty" is member retention, which is one of the numbers your entire recurring-revenue model counts on. "Safety incidents" is, quite literally, the metric your liability insurance is priced on. Engaged staff don't just feel better; they keep members longer, keep customers happier, and reduce risk. That's not a fluffy intangible. That's the P&L.


HOT TAKE: How you treat your staff is how your staff treats your customers


What Good HR Actually Produces

It Stops the Bleed of Turnover

Turnover is the most measurable drain in any people-heavy business. Both Gallup and SHRM estimate that replacing a single employee costs between 50% and 200% of their annual salary once you count recruiting, training, and the weeks or months before the replacement is actually useful. SHRM frames it as roughly six to nine months of salary for many roles. A front-desk hire or a new setter earning $16–25 an hour isn't cheap to replace once you add up the churn. The Work Institute estimates each departure costs about a third of that person's annual pay and, critically, that roughly three out of four departures are preventable. Gallup finds that more than half of people who quit say their employer could have done something to keep them. That "something": better management, clearer growth, fair pay, real onboarding is the HR function. Retention isn't a nice-to-have; it's the cheapest revenue you'll ever protect.
It Fixes the Leadership Problem That You Can Feel But Can't Quite Name

Gallup's analysis finds that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in team engagement — the single largest lever an organization has over how its people perform.

The problem is that most businesses fill those roles badly. Gallup found companies pick the wrong person for the manager job 82% of the time, typically by promoting the strongest individual performer (the best setter, the most senior desk lead) and hoping management skill comes with the title. Only about one in ten people have natural talent for leading. This isn't an argument that your head setter shouldn't lead; it's that "great climber" and "great manager" are entirely different skill sets, and someone has to own selecting and developing managers on purpose instead of by default. That owner is HR. Left unaddressed, this is exactly the "poor leadership" that quietly caps a gym's culture and pushes good people out.
It Supports Better Hires & Faster Productivity

First impressions matter, and they compound. Research from Brandon Hall Group found that organizations with a strong onboarding process improve new-hire retention by 82% and productivity by over 70%. Yet only about 12% of employees say their company does onboarding well, and nearly one in five new hires leaves within the first six months.

Structured onboarding is one of the highest-leverage, lowest-cost things a people function does. Setting people up for success from the start with clear metrics and the resources to get their jobs done is gas on the fire, and its a core function of good HR
It Turns Engaged Employees into Actual Revenue Growth

Professional development and an employee engagement strategy isn't only "nice", it's a proven driver for growth.

Gallup's research on strengths-based development which means putting people in roles that fit what they're naturally good at, a core HR responsibility, found it can drive up to 8% higher revenue per employee and as much as 59% higher revenue growth potential.

In a gym, that's the difference between a setter grinding through problems they resent and one building the routes that get members posting on Instagram, and between a desk staffed by clock-watchers and one that actually converts day-pass climbers into members.

Climbing Gym Human Resources is an Insurance Policy


There's a risk story layered underneath all of this. A climbing gym is a safety-critical, liability-high business subject to the full weight of employment law: wage rules, classification, harassment claims, wrongful-termination exposure, injury documentation, and as the unionization wave shows: labor relations. A single wage claim, a botched termination, or a serious injury lawsuit tied to an undertrained employee could cost more than years of a competent people function. Good HR is risk management that happens to improve culture at the same time. It's preventative while also supporting growth of your business.

What HR Should Actually Mean for a Climbing Gym


None of this requires a bloated department or a 40-page handbook nobody is going to read anyhow. Right-sized HR is simply the operating system for your people, and it can be achieved in many ways:
  • A clear compensation philosophy and an operating cadence to support it: Pay decisions are consistent and defensible instead of ad hoc. This can be the single biggest thing that defuses the resentment and confusion around pay.
  • Recruiting, interviewing and hiring practices that support the business need: Hiring for the traits each role actually needs, not just stoke for climbing.
  • A real onboarding + ongoing training and development path: Onboarding well is key, but it should not stop there. Ongoing re-training, knowledge and skill development for everyone, not just the route setters
  • Deliberate manager selection and training: The people you put in charge are chosen for the ability to lead, not because of their expertise as an individual contributor. Make sure your managers can manage and lead, then supported once they're there.
  • Simple feedback loops: Regular one-on-ones, exit interviews you actually read and take action on, employee engagement surveys and more can all have a real impact on being informed

In a single-location gym, Climbing Gym Human Resources might be one owner with good systems and a few focused hours a week. As you mature, you can bring in outside support or hire someone. In a growing chain, it's a dedicated function. Either way, it's a deliberate org design choice not an afterthought you make when someone hands in their notice.


THE BOTTOM LINE

HR isn't overhead you tolerate to stay legal. It's infrastructure that compounds value. Better hiring lowers turnover; lower turnover protects the member experience; better managers lift engagement; and engagement shows up directly in profitability, retention, and revenue growth — the exact metrics under pressure now that the industry's boom has cooled.


The gyms that treat their people function as a growth strategy will out-retain, out-earn, and out-last the ones still filing it under "cost to avoid." The research has been clear for a long time. Your margins are finally making it impossible to ignore.


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