The Wall Walkers Journal
Entry 004 — The Reality of Running a Gym
Opening Wall Walkers wasn’t the finish line—it was the beginning of long days, hard lessons, and a shift from working harder to building simple systems that solve real problems.
Opening day is a strange moment.
You spend months, sometimes years, working towards it.
- Planning
- Building
- Ordering equipment
- Painting walls
- Setting climbs
- Installing systems
Then one morning you unlock the front door, welcome your first customers and think…
“We made it.”
The truth is, you haven’t.
You’ve just started.
Looking back now, opening the doors wasn’t the finish line. It was the day the real work began.
From Open Until Close
When we first opened Wall Walkers, our opening hours were from 7:00 am until 9:00 pm every single day.
There was just one small problem.
There weren’t enough people to run those hours.
So we did.
My wife and I were there from open until close, day after day.
- Cleaning
- Checking people in
- Answering questions
- Making coffee
- Setting routes
- Fixing problems
- Ordering stock
- Replying to emails
Then, after everyone had gone home, we’d often continue working on the business itself.
It wasn’t unusual to arrive home completely exhausted, only to start planning the next day before going to bed.
People often ask what it’s like starting a business.
The honest answer?
You discover you’re capable of working much harder than you ever thought possible.
Not because you want to.
Because you have to.
There were plenty of nights where we were completely exhausted. But the doors still had to open the following morning.
Customers were still coming. The gym still had to operate.
You simply keep going.
Working Harder Wasn’t the Answer
Eventually, though, something became obvious.
Working harder wasn’t going to solve every problem.
Some problems required better systems.
Like many new business owners, we believed we’d thought of everything before opening.
We’d built systems. Processes. Workflows. We had plans for how things would operate.
Then the real world arrived.
And politely informed us that many of those ideas weren’t nearly as good as we thought they were.
One of the biggest lessons we learned was that designing a system in theory and using it in practice are two completely different things.
You might spend three days building a feature because it seems like a great idea.
Then you use it for the first time and realise…
“I never actually need this.”
Meanwhile, the one button you press fifty times a day doesn’t exist.
Reality has a wonderful way of exposing unnecessary complexity.
The Gym Became Our Testing Ground
Every customer interaction taught us something.
Every awkward workflow highlighted another opportunity to improve.
Every repetitive task made us ask the same question.
“Why are we still doing this manually?”
Over time, we stopped trying to build impressive systems.
Instead, we focused on building useful ones.
The difference is enormous.
- Useful systems save time.
- Useful systems reduce mistakes.
- Useful systems make life easier for both staff and members.
Most importantly, useful systems disappear into the background.
People don’t notice them.
They simply work.
Solve a Real Problem
Looking back now, I think that’s one of the biggest lessons Wall Walkers has taught us.
A system should exist to solve a real problem. If it doesn’t solve a problem, it probably shouldn’t exist.
That philosophy still influences almost every decision we make today.
Whether we’re improving our membership software, refining our operational processes or introducing something entirely new, we try to ask ourselves one simple question.
“Does this genuinely make the business better?”
If the answer is no, it doesn’t matter how clever it is.
It’s probably not worth building.
That way of thinking has shaped Wall Walkers far more than any single piece of technology ever has.