After 3 weeks we have had over 1,000 visitors to our new gym, and our membership is growing nicely. We have figured out most of our processes (and thank you for bearing with us as we did so; we know we made a few mistakes but we think we have corrected them all!). Here's a short list of what we have caught up on recently, and what will be coming in the near future:
New last week:
- New lockers arrived last week. These 60 small lockerettes (6 in a stack) are available for annual rental for $50 plus tax. Note that, like our annual memberships, these will become subject to pro-rated HST starting on May 1st. The 102 larger lockers in the change rooms remain free, and are for day use only.
- More ottomans! The colourful foam cubes from Asana have proven very popular. They are comfortable, light, and easy to move where you want them in the gym. Some people have even discovered that they can be used as another falling sport, stacking them up and trying to clamber on top of the stack. We added another 10 of these last week, after getting an electric carving knife to cut foam with!
- Training area: we now have two hangboards and a chin-up bar installed, along with the campus board and adjustable system board.
- Our brochures have been printed and are now available at the front desk.
- Gripped magazine is now available for sale. We should be getting Climbing and Urban Climber in soon as well, and the free Deadpoint Magazine when the next issue is out.
- All documents have been scanned in: this is a behind-the-scenes thing, but I think it's pretty cool. The software we use to manage the business (point of sale, customer records and monthly billing) is called Rock Gym Pro, and one feature it offers is the ability to scan in all of our waivers and membership forms. On the rare occasion when we need to go back and look at the form, we can now pull it up onscreen in seconds, instead of rummaging through a box for hours. We caught up on the scanning this week, and now have all of our waiver and membership forms digitally saved. This has already helped us quickly resolve a billing error that we caught this week.
- We bought a couple of removable shower heads for the showers, to help those who want an easier way to wash their feet. These will get installed this week.
- Membership cards: we had ordered membership cards with bar codes on the back, so that members and punch card holders can have an express check-in method by scanning their card as they come in. We had a little trouble scanning the bar codes, and spent some time showing the problem to the card supplier. They have agreed to reprint the cards. By the end of April we should be ready to start handing these out.
- Tape is coming: we will soon be selling climbing tape to help protect fingers and hands, especially useful for those attempting the crack climbs!
- We will be selling Odwalla juices any day now. Odwalla features fresh fruit juice smoothies and a very yummy chocolate protein shake.
- Lead climbing course: we thought that we had a little time before people would be asking for lead climbing classes. Our thinking was that experienced climbers already know how to lead, and the people just starting out will take a while before they get to that stage. We were wrong! We have already had a few requests for a lead class, and are working on finishing up the course plan so we can start to offer this, hopefully within the next few weeks.
- New routes! It's almost time to start changing over the first section of routes and boulder problems! Look for the Chopping Block list on the front white board as a warning of what routes are slated to be taken down.
- Many of you have asked us to extend our hours and stay open until 11pm on weekdays. This will probably happen, but first we need to get a few of us working a little less, before we add more hours to the schedule. I think we can do this in the near future, so stay tuned.
- Improved route tags: we're looking at ways to make the route tags a little neater, easier to find, and more professional.
- Improving the web site: we've been adding information and reorganizing the pages a little to try to help people find what they are looking for. We still need a lot more photos of the gym (it is surprisingly difficult to capture what the place really looks like in still photos), and will try to get a video walk-through posted as well. I would also like to improve the look of the site from the simple, spartan approach we started with. Anyone with experience with Drupal themes might want to drop me a line (Drupal is the content management system we use to create and manage the content on the web site).
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