Living The Dream - Bursting the Bubble!

You love climbing. You spend all of your spare time doing it. You pretty much live at the climbing wall. It’s where your friends are. It’s your social life, your routine, your happy place. It’s your identity! You’re a climber!

You watch the owners. They seem comfortable. Nice cars. Confident. Calm.

They’re living the dream, right?

Getting paid to do what they love.

It looks simple. Just a big room. Some plywood. Some plastic holds.

It can’t be that expensive to build. It must be pretty cheap to run. They must be raking it in. Surely it’s a licence to print money.

‘It’s a licence to print money’

The reality

But appearances can be deceiving, and building and running your own climbing wall is nothing like it appears. It is not something to enter into lightly.

Costs are high, and margins are tiny.

Start with the building itself. In much of the UK, the average rent for a suitable industrial unit can easily exceed £100,000 per year. That’s before service charges or maintenance obligations are added, which might be as much as half again. Business rates alone can add tens of thousands more, particularly after revaluation. Commercial energy costs are high and have risen sharply since 2021, with large leisure buildings being especially exposed. Insurance premiums for climbing walls commonly reach £15,000–£25,000.¹ But there’s so much more!

For one thing, there’s the VAT. This is the quiet killer of service businesses, and the one they won’t tell you about. Of every pound someone pays to climb, around 16.7p is VAT that is paid directly to the government. Unlike retail businesses or manufacturing, climbing walls have very limited scope to reclaim input VAT. The data shows that VAT pressure is a major contributor to cash-flow problems in small leisure businesses.²

Payroll is even worse.

Unless you are in a perfect location in a major city such as London, Leeds, Brighton, or Sheffield, casual walk-in trade from climbers won’t come close to sustaining the business.

Entry fees alone just won’t work outside major metropolitan areas with high student populations. Smaller walls in rural towns have no choice but to supplement income with masses of children’s clubs, coaching programmes, and café and retail sales.³

All of those require staff.

For an average-sized wall, monthly payroll costs exceeding £45,000 are common once minimum staffing levels, coaching and senior management are included.⁴

What most people never see is the true cost of employment.

Once holiday pay, pensions, employer National Insurance, sick pay, staff training, cover and supervision are all included, the effective cost of an employee is typically between 1.3 and 1.5 times their headline wage.⁵

You want to pay people well; they deserve it, but you just can’t afford to!

The result is predictable. High turnover. Short-term staff. A constant recruitment treadmill. Many treat climbing wall work as a stop-gap before moving on.

Finding good people is hard. Keeping them is even harder.

Staffing itself becomes a major stressor. There’ll be safeguarding incidents, disciplinaries, and difficult employment decisions are unavoidable. You’ll end up having to dismiss people that you might really want to keep.

‘Costs are high and margins are tiny’

The climbing community is small, which makes these sorts of conflicts even more personal and even more visible.

But here’s the clincher.

At the 2025 Association of British Climbing Walls Conference, Jeremy Wilson, founder and CEO of The Lakeland Climbing Centres, argued that a financially healthy climbing wall should be aiming for profit margins of at least 10 per cent if it is going to survive. The point is not that climbing walls typically make 10 per cent. Quite the opposite. His point is that 10 per cent is the bare minimum they need to hit if they are going to be able to refurbish, repay debt, and keep reinvesting.¹⁵

Now compare that with one of the biggest climbing operators in London.

“We did make a profit last year in London with an after-tax margin of 4%, which has all been reinvested in centres. This year it will be less, with higher business rates, rent, salaries and employer’s NI to name but a few pressures - making continued reinvestment ever more challenging.”

Tom Hull, Managing Director of London Climbing Centres, quoted in Callum Taylor, ‘London’s Climbing Gyms: From Boom to Bottleneck’, Euro Climbing News.¹⁶

The two figures are not aligned! The contrast is sobering. One of London’s major climbing operators is reporting a margin far below the level the ABC conference was told a wall should be aiming for if it wants to survive.

Margins this thin mean that even a relatively modest fall in sales can turn profit into loss.

Seasonality can also have a massive effect on the bottom line. Do you want to climb indoors when the sun’s shining and the crag is dry?

Competition is perhaps the biggest concern, and dreamers don’t give it a second thought. But the reality is that it is not the positive driver of market forces it’s portrayed to be. A new competitor, even one in the next town, can be an existential threat to a wall.

The ABC’s own research backs this up. Nearly half of walls in the South of England report feeling that their market is oversaturated, and a third of operators identify competition from new facilities as a significant challenge. In fact, competition was actually reported as a greater problem than rising costs or the cost-of-living crisis.¹⁵

Jeremy Wilson describes the danger perfectly:

“Everything can be going well for years – healthy margins, happy customers – and then overnight, a new entrant arrives with something bigger, newer, shinier.”

Jeremy Wilson, quoted by the Association of British Climbing Walls, ‘Can Climbing Walls Make Money?’¹⁵

We had a wall open up 15 miles away that took nearly 20 per cent of our trade, almost overnight. It could easily have ended us. Recovery took years. We’re still reeling from it!

This reveals the underlying structural problem. Climbing walls have extremely high fixed costs. Rent, rates, insurance, debt servicing and minimum staffing levels don’t scale down when attendance drops. Just because the weather’s nice and everyone is climbing outside doesn’t mean your staffing drops off too.

Economic models of leisure businesses like climbing walls show that even small shocks in demand can rapidly push otherwise viable operations into loss.⁷

But what most would-be wall owners don’t appreciate is the depreciation.

Busy walls degrade faster.

Safety mats compress and break up, holds polish, volumes crack, holds chip, and panels get filled with screw holes. Success accelerates depreciation. The safety mats might cost you £100,000 to install, but you should be prepared to replace them in 5 years! Your expensive and beautiful climbing wall itself eventually needs substantial refurbishment or replacement.

And this is precisely the problem identified by the ABC report. A wall can look profitable in its early years while quietly failing to reserve enough money for what comes later.

“I see lots of walls making money in the early years after opening but then struggling as they have not set aside money to meet future costs.”

Jeremy Wilson, quoted by the Association of British Climbing Walls, ‘Can Climbing Walls Make Money?’¹⁵

That is the danger. A wall can appear viable on paper while accumulating a huge future replacement problem.

The personal cost

As a director, you will make very little money personally, and yet you will pour everything you have into the business anyway.

You will put your savings into it. You will put your home at risk. You will borrow money from family on promises of success.

This isn’t some caricature of the naïve entrepreneur. The ABC report itself describes climbing walls as ‘passion projects’ funded by things like life savings, or the ‘bank of mum and dad’.¹⁵

Many small business owners also use personal guarantees and family loans to fund their initial build.⁸

Work begins the moment you wake up and ends only when you fall asleep. The culture of long hours among small business directors is well documented.⁹

Relationships suffer. It puts strain on family life. Business owners face significantly higher rates of stress, anxiety and burnout than PAYE employees.¹⁰

Of course there are exceptions. Not every wall is struggling. Some people strike it lucky and build in the perfect location. These walls can even make a substantial profit. Boulder Brighton is the perfect example. They are a comparable size to us, but their daily footfall figures are potentially as much as eight times ours.

But success creates its own problem.

A visibly successful wall attracts attention. Investors notice. Other operators notice. Suddenly everyone wants a piece of the market.

What looked like evidence that the area could support one successful climbing wall gets interpreted as evidence that it can support three.

The Personal Touch

The climbing world is small. Climbing walls are rumour mills. Stories spread like wildfire. It’s all Chinese whispers. Owners spend years responding to narratives they didn’t create.

Then there are the haters. An ex-employee. A disgruntled customer. Suddenly you are no longer a real climber; you’re just the greedy boss. The sell-out. The corporate villain. Studies on reputation in small businesses show how negative word-of-mouth can have a disproportionate impact.¹¹

Of course, prices must rise every year just to stand still. Rent goes up. Minimum wage rises. Pay scales have to follow. Customers resent it.

We even had local groups of climbers attempting to boycott our wall, spreading claims of greed and vast profits.

And yet the industry itself is now saying that walls need substantially healthier profits if they are going to survive long enough to refurbish, reinvest and pay their staff properly.

Profit is not greed. A wall that never generates enough surplus to replace its mats, refurbish its climbing surface, improve its building and survive a bad year is not cheap and virtuous.

It is financially fragile.

The Wrong Market

If you have personal capital and want to invest, you’d be far better off choosing something with decent returns than putting it into a climbing wall. ISAs, index funds and government bonds all offer better investment and without requiring you to run a leisure facility every waking hour.¹²

The problem with the UK climbing-wall market is not that climbing has suddenly become unpopular.

That would actually be easier to understand.

The more worrying problem is that supply has continued to expand while demand has flattened.

The ABC’s research says footfall has nearly recovered to pre-Covid levels, but is now starting to plateau. Overall visits have risen slightly since 2023, while both small and extra-large walls are seeing declines in numbers.¹⁵

That distinction matters.

A sport can be growing and still have too many venues.

A climbing wall market can be busy and still be overbuilt.

And opening another climbing wall does not necessarily create another climbing wall’s worth of customers.

“I don’t believe more gyms create more climbers. I think more gyms dilute a very niche sport.”

Dave Culver of BlocFit, quoted in Callum Taylor, ‘London’s Climbing Gyms: From Boom to Bottleneck’, Euro Climbing News.¹⁶

The ABC report describes the same problem as ‘overbuilding’ combined with falling footfall. Its concern is not merely that walls have to share customers. The resulting price competition can deprive existing operators of the money they need for long-term reinvestment.¹⁵

That is the vicious circle.

More walls.

More competition.

Discounting to attract the same pool of customers.

Smaller margins.

Less reinvestment.

Older facilities.

More pressure.

Then somebody builds something newer and shinier next door.

There’s also been a major structural shift in the industry in the last year or so. Private equity firms are entering a sector that was historically dominated by independent operators. The ABC highlights Verlinvest’s acquisition of The Climbing Hangar and the private-equity-backed Climbing District’s purchase of Stronghold and The Arch in London. Wilson expects further consolidation and the emergence of a handful of national operators.¹⁵

That doesn’t mean every acquisition is bad or that larger operators can’t run excellent walls.

But it does mean the industry is changing.

Even the big players are discovering that scale doesn’t abolish the underlying economics.

I predict that over the next two years we will see more independent climbing walls closing and an overall reduction in the number of walls.

It’s already begun.

The Arch climbing centre in Acton is a paradigm example. A historic cinema converted at huge expense. Despite being in a densely populated London borough, it reportedly averaged just 80 climbers a day! Losses were substantial. The site was effectively being subsidised by the company’s other locations until the business eventually closed only a few years later.¹³

Other major walls have already succumbed to competition pressure. Even Parthian in Manchester, a giant in the industry, closed its doors after facing increased competition.

Climbing walls are poor assets. They are custom-fitted to buildings, and they can’t simply be relocated. Fit-outs have little to no resale value, and removal itself can cost substantial sums.¹⁴ There is no get-out clause.

Many smaller walls outside major cities now face the same pressures.

Rents and wages rise, but prices cannot continue to rise indefinitely.

Margins tighten.

Reinvestment gets postponed.

Eventually something gives.

The perfect location myth

There is a persistent delusion amongst would-be wall owners that population somehow automatically generates demand.

Don’t delude yourself. This is just plain false.

‘Not every town can support a climbing wall!’

The reasoning often goes like this:

“I love climbing. I live in a town without a climbing wall. I know lots of other climbers here who have to travel to climb. There are plenty of people living here, so this would be a good location for a wall.”

A familiar version of the would-be wall owner’s argument.

Don’t be daft!

This reasoning generalises from a tiny, self-selected sample and ignores the things that actually determine commercial demand. Demographics. Student population. Disposable income. Travel tolerance. Existing competition. Alternative leisure activities. Outdoor climbing. Customer acquisition. Retention.

And there is an even more dangerous mistake.

People look at a successful wall and infer that its success proves there is room for another one.

Sometimes it proves exactly the opposite.

Wilson puts the structural problem better than I can:

“Few climbing walls have a long-term competitive advantage. If you’re doing really well, someone will eventually build nearby. Success itself attracts attention.”

Jeremy Wilson, quoted by the Association of British Climbing Walls, ‘Can Climbing Walls Make Money?’¹⁵

That sentence should be pinned to the wall of anyone considering opening a climbing centre.

Not every town can support a wall.

And a town successfully supporting one wall does not entail that it can support two.

‘Happiness is achieved by learning to want what you have, not by having what you want!’

Love the wall you already have. Don’t try to build your own one simply because you love climbing and think it would be nice.

Driving further to go climbing used to be normal. Walls were scarce. That was just part of the culture.

Don’t commit commercial suicide chasing a dream that could damage not just you, but the whole climbing ecosystem.

Given the current economic climate, over the next year there might be many more wall closures across the country. Don’t automatically view that as a gap in the market opening up.

Sometimes a closure is the market telling you there was too much capacity already.

If a wall closes in your town, it is not necessarily a sign that you should build one instead.

There have been some crazy proposals recently for enormous walls in areas with minimal populations. One such example is the monstrous project near Crawley.

If built, I think it would have a serious risk of failing. Worse still, it could damage existing local walls before doing so.

There’s just not enough demand for everyone to have a centre.

If someone builds a climbing wall in every small town, eventually no one will have a climbing wall.

‘Not every town can support a climbing wall’

Owning and running a wall can feel like a dream come true.

But it’s an uphill struggle lived under constant financial anxiety and personal pressure.

Perhaps it is not a dream come true at all.

Perhaps it is a tolerable nightmare.

If you want to keep climbing, support your local wall.

Don’t try to build another one.

Sorry to burst your bubble!

Sources

¹⁵ Association of British Climbing Walls, ‘Can Climbing Walls Make Money? Insights from Jeremy Wilson’s Keynote at the ABC Conference’, 2025, pp. 2–3. abcwalls.co.uk.

¹⁶ Callum Taylor, ‘London’s Climbing Gyms: From Boom to Bottleneck’, Euro Climbing News. https://www.euroclimbing.news/articles/london-owner-opinion

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