Every business has an origin story.
Some begin with spreadsheets and business plans. Others begin with a market opportunity.
Wall Walkers Bouldering began with something much simpler: a passion for climbing, a curiosity for business and a question that wouldn’t go away.
Looking back, I think I’ve always been interested in building businesses.
Long before Wall Walkers existed, I was fascinated by the idea of creating something from nothing. I studied business management, enjoyed learning how businesses operated and was always drawn to the challenge of solving problems. To me, business wasn’t just about making money—it was about creating something valuable that people genuinely wanted and building it into something sustainable.
At the time, though, I had no idea what that business would be.
Then life took me overseas.
I met my wife and together we discovered a real passion for climbing. It quickly became something we genuinely enjoyed doing together. It challenged us physically, gave us a reason to keep improving and introduced us to an incredibly welcoming community.
When we eventually returned home to Brisbane, we expected we’d simply continue climbing.
Instead, we discovered a problem.
There wasn’t really anything close to us.
Every climbing session meant a drive of forty minutes to an hour each way. It wasn’t impossible, but it certainly wasn’t convenient enough to become a regular part of our lives.
The more we thought about it, the more one question kept coming back.
Why doesn’t our community have something like this?
That question slowly became an opportunity.
The exciting part wasn’t imagining ourselves owning a climbing gym. It was imagining what one could look like if we built it ourselves.
But excitement was quickly followed by fear.
The moment we started taking the idea seriously, it suddenly felt like everyone else must have been thinking exactly the same thing.
Were we too late?
Would someone else build one first?
Had we missed our opportunity?
It’s funny looking back because even today, whenever we start something new, there’s always that same feeling. The moment you stop dreaming about doing something and actually begin walking towards it, everything suddenly feels more real—and a lot more intimidating.
So instead of rushing in, we did what most aspiring business owners do.
- We started planning.
- We looked at costs.
- We researched the industry.
- We asked ourselves whether this was something we could realistically achieve.
Slowly, the impossible started becoming possible.
One of the things that gave us confidence was realising how well our skills complemented each other.
My wife is a landscape architect and designer. She naturally thinks about spaces, flow, aesthetics and how people interact with an environment.
My background was different. Business management, IT, real estate and problem solving had shaped the way I approached challenges. I enjoyed building systems, understanding operations and figuring out how businesses could work more efficiently.
Individually, neither of us had built a climbing gym before.
Together, we realised we might just have enough of the right skills to figure it out.
There was still one enormous decision to make.
We weren’t wealthy.
Like many young couples, we’d managed to save some money. It represented years of work and discipline.
We had a choice.
- We could use it as the beginning of a house deposit.
- Or we could invest it into building something we believed in.
Looking back, choosing the climbing gym over the house probably wasn’t the decision most people would have made.
For us, though, it felt like the right one.
It wasn’t a decision based on certainty.
- There were no guarantees.
- No proven blueprint.
- No promise that the business would succeed.
Just two people who believed their community deserved a climbing gym and who were willing to take a chance on themselves.
That decision became the foundation of everything that followed.
At the time, we thought the hardest part would be finding a building and constructing some climbing walls.
We couldn’t have been more wrong.
In the next chapter, I’ll share what happened after we committed to building Wall Walkers—and how we discovered that creating a climbing gym meant learning an entirely new industry from the ground up.
What I’d Tell Someone Starting Today
People often think the hardest part of starting a business is having the perfect idea.
I don’t think that’s true.
The hardest part is deciding to begin.
You’ll never know everything before you start. There will always be risks, unanswered questions and reasons to wait a little longer.
If we’d waited until we understood climbing wall engineering, Australian Standards, insurance, staffing and everything else involved in running a gym, Wall Walkers would never have existed.
Sometimes you have to trust your ability to learn, back yourself, and take the first step.
Everything else can be figured out along the way.