Tips for a Successful Climbing Gym in 2026
- gheverly
- Feb 2
- 6 min read
Last week, we posted about our 2025 insights and 2026 predictions. We had one key takeaway from 2025:
It is much easier to open a nice gym in a good location than it is to build and scale a good company.
And one key insight for 2026:
2026 will be about performance, plain and simple.
The combination of those two things points to a real need in our industry for operators to level up and set themselves apart as an employer, a climbing gym, and a business. Read more below on how to do it believably.
What it Takes to Rise to the Top: Be a Successful Climbing Gym in 2026
Every business owner is trying to figure out what it takes to set themselves apart from both direct and indirect competitors. This is true in the climbing gym industry as well. The market globally is getting more competitive, the customers more educated and discerning, and the global economy is squeezing most consumers to make more diligent choices with their expendable income.
So how can you make sure that you run a successful climbing gym and rise to the top of the list when potential guests and members are making their purchasing decisions? What about when potential employees are on the market for a new job? The job market is about as wild as the economy is right now. How can your climbing gym's employer brand stand out and attract top talent?
Not surprisingly the answer is multi-factorial. But gone are the days of opening a nice gym and filling it with cool artwork and new holds and hosting a couple fun events once a month. Real sustainable success is increasingly requiring more. If your business is weak in data analytics, strategic revenue planning, if you don’t have a strong performance-based HR function, you are likely to be left behind regardless of how good your product is.
Put simply, if you want to win, you're going to have to invest and you're going to have to try hard. Gone are the days of just opening your doors and letting the rest fall into place.
What the Heck is "Strategic Revenue Planning"?
Does your climbing gym have strategic control of your revenue, or does your revenue just happen and you react?
When we talk about a "sales function" at Rise Above we don't mean running a member promo or asking your front desk staff who you only hired for operational work to sell memberships. (Although those things can certainly be aspects of a performant sales function.)
If you feel like you spend more time reacting to what happened in your bank account last month than you do planning for the upcoming year or quarter, you might want to consider taking revenue planning more seriously.
Strategic Control of Revenue means having a forward thinking and proactive plan to achieve revenue success. Time and time again, we see successful climbing gyms have a revenue plan. This starts with goal setting and ends with tracking the right metrics (see data analytics section below) to inform necessary adjustments to your strategy and tactics.
Strategic Revenue Planning is a fairly complex and multi-factorial process and it takes time and practice to get good at it. It takes careful review of data trends and truly trying to understand your market and your customers over time.
What Can I Do Now?
There are some pretty simple things you can start doing immediately to get the flywheel spinning on proactive control of revenue:
Get your team together and set goals. Make sure they are ambitious but achievable
Let your team build the plan to achieve those goals
Consider how to incentivize the right people for success
Be prepared to invest in tools or other resources to achieve your goals
Make sure you are looking at data to track your success
Rinse and repeat!
As mentioned above, it takes time and practice, but if you commit to it, you can learn an enormous amount about your customers and your team. And slowly you will start to feel more like you have control of your revenue.
Data Analytics: What to look at why
Membership, membership, membership…
If you're like most gyms in North America, membership is your largest revenue stream by a lot (this varies a bit overseas where day use is #1 but those operators sure want membership to be #1). So if you can ferociously attack and monitor any one thing in your business, it's your ability to grow your active membership.
To get more specific with it, here are the data you absolutely need to be tracking at least monthly:
Qualified Visitors - The number of qualified guests that visit your gym (qualified means qualified to become a member. So for example, maybe they live in a certain postal code and are 18+ years old)
Conversion Rate - The rate at which you convert those qualified visitors into members
Churn Rate - How successful you are at keeping those members
Understanding these lead indicators will ultimately help you take control of what is probably around 50% of your total revenue (and also likely heavily influences other revenue streams like classes, retail, etc). Ideally you want to see how these numbers change over time on a month-to-month basis.
As you can probably guess, these 3 metrics ultimately tell you the underlying story of your active member base. Tracking those 3 metrics closely will enable you to put processes, activities and tools in place to influence them, hopefully growing your member base positively month-over-month.
Personnel as a Percentage of Revenue…
Believe it or not, this one easy to get metric can tell you a lot about your climbing gym's financial performance. It is one of our favorite metrics to discuss with our clients. Our favorite thing about this metric is that unlike the member metrics above which can be a huge pain to get when using most of the software in our industry, this one is easy. You for sure have your total revenue, and you for sure have your total payroll. Now just divide them to get your personnel costs as a % of that total revenue.
Here is what we typically recommend to include in "personnel costs" to get a good understanding of what your people are costing the business:
Salaries, wages, & sub contractor pay
Commissions, bonuses and other variable compensation
Payroll taxes & fees
Why does this metric matter? Because it's a really good indicator of whether or not you are getting what you need from your people resources. And because there's a near 100% chance that if you are reading this, your personnel is your largest expense and much like membership being your largest piece of the revenue pie, you should be managing your largest expense SUPER carefully and strategically.
We have seen around 30-35% ratio for personnel to revenue for a mature climbing gym (3+ years in business) is right.
A few learnings:
If your ratio is too high, first look at your leadership costs. Almost universally we have never found the ratio to be off because front line staff are overpaid. It is almost always because the management structure is either too large, or not being managed well enough to produce the revenue justifying the expense.
You might be able to find some savings by looking hard at your staff schedule, but it's not super likely to move the needly substantially if it is something you have already been diligent about. Again, it is far more likely you have too many managers/directors/coordinators, or are not getting the level of performance and return out of them.
Which leads us to....
Performance Based HR Function: What it looks like & Why it Matters
What is "performance based"?
Often times, when we think of Human Resources, we think of administrative duties like running payroll or managing a 401k. Maybe the next layer is supporting recruiting and onboarding. Unfortunately, this is where HR in our industry tends to stop. Most owners view HR as a cost center with no direct ties to revenue. Some operators outsource HR or have someone with no formal HR experience running HR in order to keep liability down. After all, employees need someone to submit grievances to, right? And who will be in the room when you fire someone?
If this sounds like HR at your organization or if you have no HR function, no offense, but you are doing it wrong.
Human Resources, when done well, can be a critical part of company productivity and operations. A good HR function can and should support:
Aligning internal communication to company goals
Supporting leaders, managers & teams in navigating work place dynamics
Building, enacting and maintaining performance metrics, compensation strategies and accountability structures
Advising leadership on culture, workplace dynamics and people needs
Why Does it Matter?
If you can envision the above at your company, you can probably easily imagine why a strong performance based HR function is not only helpful, but critical to sustainable success. It matters because it makes a stronger employer brand that attracts better talent. It makes the employee experience better which helps you retain that talent. It supports high performance which makes your goals more achievable.
It is, in our opinion, the single most overlooked and undervalued business function in our industry today.
Simply put, "performance based" means an HR function that is held accountable to ensuring and enabling high performance from teams and individuals in accordance with company values and goals, not just running payroll and making sure your handbook is up to date.
2026 is going to be about performance, and more performance., More gyms are opening, the market is getting more educated and competitive. Build a great company that can keep up now.
Comments