Every business eventually reaches a point where it has to ask a difficult question.

Do we keep doing things the way everyone else does?

Or do we build something different?

For Wall Walkers, that question was about operating hours.

Today, people often associate us with being a 24/7 bouldering gym.

But that wasn’t where the idea started.

It certainly wasn’t because we thought it sounded innovative.

It started because we had a problem to solve.

More Value, More Flexibility

From the day we opened, our goal has always been the same.

Deliver more value to our members while building a sustainable business that could continue serving the community for years to come.

As a smaller gym, staffing was one of our biggest operational costs.

We’d already experienced the reality of trying to cover long opening hours ourselves, and we knew that simply employing more staff wasn’t a sustainable solution for our business.

At the same time, we knew our members wanted more flexibility.

• Some people wanted to climb before work.
• Others wanted to climb late at night.
• Shift workers had different schedules.
• Parents had different schedules.

Everyone lived different lives.

We found ourselves asking a simple question.

Why should access to climbing be limited by our opening hours?

Stepping into Unknown Territory

That question led us down a path we hadn’t expected.

We started researching.

Surely someone else had already done this.

We knew 24/7 fitness gyms existed.

But when it came to bouldering gyms, we struggled to find anyone in Australia operating the way we imagined.

At the time, it felt like we were stepping into unknown territory.

Whether we were the first or not almost became irrelevant.

What mattered was that nobody could show us how to do it.

We’d have to work it out ourselves.

That was both exciting…

…and slightly terrifying.

Designing Around the Difficult Questions

The biggest concerns didn’t come from our members.

They came from exactly the people you’d expect.

• Insurance.
• Safety.
• Risk.

I still remember the conversations with our insurance broker.

To be honest, they were excellent conversations.

They challenged every assumption we had.

• What happens if someone gets injured?
• How do people get help?
• How do you know who’s in the building?
• How do you make sure only authorised people have access?

They were difficult questions.

They were also the right questions.

Rather than trying to work around them, we decided to design the entire system around answering them.

Managing Risk More Carefully

For me, safety has always been the biggest concern.

It still is.

Whether the gym is staffed or unstaffed, people are climbing.

There is always an element of risk.

Going 24/7 didn’t change that.

It simply meant we had to think much more carefully about how we managed that risk and how we could make sure members had the support they needed if something went wrong.

Why Existing Technology Wasn’t Enough

As we explored existing technology, we found plenty of products that solved parts of the problem.

• Membership software.
• Access control.
• Payment systems.
• Waivers.
• Booking platforms.

Each one did something well.

None of them did everything we needed.

The more we looked, the more we realised we’d end up stitching together half a dozen different systems, each with its own subscription, each with its own limitations, and each introducing another point of failure.

That wasn’t the direction we wanted to take.

So we made another decision.

We’d build our own.

That journey deserves its own story.

But it became one of the biggest investments we’ve ever made in Wall Walkers.

The Moment We Knew It Worked

Looking back, there was one moment that told me we’d made the right decision.

One day I walked into the gym and saw someone climbing.

I’d never met them.

There were no staff on site.

They had discovered us online, purchased a casual pass, completed their waiver, gained access and started climbing.

All without ever speaking to us.

For the first time, I stopped and thought:

“This actually works.”

Not because the technology worked.

Because the experience worked.

The systems had quietly done exactly what they were designed to do.

That’s when I realised this wasn’t just a different way of opening a gym.

It was a different way of making climbing more accessible.

24/7 Access Isn’t Our Identity

Today, I don’t think of Wall Walkers as a “24/7 gym.”

I think of us as a bouldering and calisthenics gym that happens to be available 24 hours a day for our members and casual visitors.

The 24/7 access isn’t our identity.

It’s one of the ways we deliver on our mission of making climbing more accessible to more people.

Looking back, that’s what this decision was really about.

• Not reducing staff.
• Not cutting costs.
• Not being different for the sake of being different.

It was about asking a simple question.

How can we create more value for our members?

Everything else followed from there.