Sunday, April 25, 2010

The Crack Has Been Sent!

On the wall opposite our lead cave is our full-height finger crack. Since we opened 4 weeks ago, some pretty good climbers have had a go at it, cramming their fingers and toes into the crevices, and trying to reach the top without falling. Today, for the first time, someone make it all the way. Mark Button, of Nottingham, UK, has become the first person to send the finger crack (on lead!). As a result has earned the honour of naming the crack. He has chosen to call it "Nathan's". Nathan is a friend of Mark's and the other evening they were sitting in a pub discussing this climb. Nathan said that if Mark sent the climb he should name it after him, and for some reason Mark has decided to take that advice. Hopefully that is worth a pint or two the next time they're back at the pub!


Mark Button, first to send "Nathan's",
our 36' tall finger crack climb.

Lost & Found

After only 4 weeks of operation, we have accumulated a surprising amount of stuff in our lost & found:

Clothing:
  • 1 pair of sandals
  • 3 pairs of socks
  • 2 pairs of shorts
  • 3 shirts
  • 3 sweatshirts

Other Gear:
  • 5 chalk bags
  • 5 water bottles: one with a wristwatch attached to it, another with "Myles" written on it
  • 7 combination locks
  • 5 keys
  • 1 Richard Scarry book
So it seems like a good time to announce our Lost & Found Policies:
  • We don't want to let this stuff just accumulate forever, so anything we find is ours to dispose of as we see fit after 30 days. We'll keep a This Month box and a Last Month box, and at the start of each month we'll clear out the Last Month box. Usable clothing will be washed and donated to a worthy cause (in some cases our staff!).
  • Loose chalk will be removed, since we ask that it not be used in the gym, and shouldn't be here in the first place. We'll use it to refill any refillable chalk balls we find.
  • Abandoned chalk bags will be kept and loaned out for free to customers who need them.
  • Locks can be claimed by anyone who can open them. We have started tagging them with where & when they were found, to help their owners identify them.
Please come and claim your stuff if you see it shown or mentioned here!

Sunday, April 18, 2010

Getting On Top of Things

Rock climbing is all about getting on top of things, but this post is about how we are getting caught up on a lot of the aspects of our business.

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.
Coming soon:
  • 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.
Other things we are thinking about:
  • 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).
Please let us know if there are other things you would like us to consider to make the gym better. If you see a problem, please let us know about it right away, and we will try to make thing right. And if you like the gym, please tell your friends!

Thursday, April 15, 2010

Media Coverage of True North Climbing

We have been fortunate to attract a fair bit of attention from the media lately, as we head towards our Grand Opening Celebration on Saturday (10am - 3pm):

  • Last weekend we were featured in the Globe and Mail. The half-page article is available online.
  • Yesterday I recorded an interview with my brother Peter of 680 News. We expect that to be broadcast on 680 Friday morning.
  • Breakfast Television will bring their Live Eye crew with Jennifer Valentine to the gym tomorrow morning. Excerpts should be available at Jennifer's Breakfast Television blog sometime shortly after that.
  • Toronto Post Magazine called a week or so ago, and will be sending a photographer over tomorrow. I expect there will be an article in an upcoming issue.
  • The Mirror will be coming in next week to talk and take photos, which should also lead to an article soon.

Monday, April 12, 2010

The HST is Coming - and Sooner Than We Thought!

This will be one of the least cool blog posts ever to appear in this space, but the issue is important.

On July 1st, Ontario will combine the federal GST (5%) with the provincial PST (8%) resulting in the new HST (13%). This has a significant impact on our business.

We currently charge the 5% GST on everything we sell, and the 8% PST only on retail sales (food, drinks, T shirts, water bottles, chalk balls, and equipment rentals). When the HST takes effect, we will be required to charge the full 13% on everything.

The HST will drive up prices on a lot of things that consumers buy, including memberships in our gym. The government is offering some other tax credits to soften the blow this year. And the change is supposed to be good for business, as it allows us to deduct the HST we pay on things used for our business, an improvement over the current GST credits. In the long run that will lower the cost of doing business, allowing us to hold the line on price increases or hire more staff.

We chose to post our membership prices exclusive of taxes specifically to deal with the coming HST change. Some may ask why, if this change is good for our business, we don't just absorb the price increase. The answer is that the change comes too late for this business. A climbing gym involves an enormous initial investment, and then has moderate ongoing expenses. I will recover my start-up investment gradually over the next several years, but everything I spent to build the gym was without the benefit of the HST deduction that will be available starting in July.

Now on to the real point of this post. I just discovered that the impact of the HST actually begins well before July 1st. As of May1st, we are required to collect HST on a pro-rated basis for all memberships we sell that run past July 1st. We're working out the details of how to calculate this properly (the amount of HST will change each day from May 1st to July 1st!).

We had planned to have a "Beat the HST" promotion in June, making sure people knew to lock in their memberships before it takes effect. Now we realize that promotion needs to start immediately. Annual prepaid memberships bought on or before April 30th will still have only the GST applied. The 8% difference adds up to $41.60 on a regular annual membership, or almost a month of climbing. So if you are thinking about buying an annual membership, the best time to do so is this month!

Friday, April 9, 2010

Our Grand Opening Celebration

We'll be celebrating our new gym with a Grand Opening Celebration on Saturday April 17th from 10am - 3pm.

But wait, didn't the gym already open a few weeks ago? Yup. We launched the gym March 27th with our Tour de Bloc bouldering competition, and then threw the doors open with free admission for climbers the next day. That was our welcome to the climbing community. Since then we've had a steadily increasing stream of climbers coming through our doors and enjoying Toronto's newest indoor climbing gym. Climbers have been enjoying the top-out bouldering, scaling the stalactite, sitting atop the natural boulder, playing on the slacklines, and some have even tried to conquer the full-height finger crack (no successful ascents so far though!).

The Grand Opening Celebration on April 17th is our chance to introduce ourselves to the broader community, especially those who live in neighbourhoods near the gym. It's being held a few weeks after we opened for business because we needed that time to get photos of people enjoying the completed facility, put those into our brochures, and get them printed and distributed in time to announce the event.

On April 17th from 10am - 3pm the gym will not be available for climbing. This allows us to welcome visitors to come in and look around without needing to sign a waiver as is usually required. We'll have some demonstration climbing going on in a few roped-off areas, to show everyone how the joint works. We plan some slacklining demonstrations, and a few other things to keep people who drop by interested. We even have a few raffle prizes.

So if you have not yet seen our shiny new gym, please drop by on Saturday the 17th. If you have been wondering what this indoor climbing craze is about, come see for yourself. If you're a climber and have friends or family who don't understand why you do this, bring them along. We're proud of our new joint and want to show it off!

Normal operations will resume at 3pm, after the Grand Opening Celebration.

Monday, April 5, 2010

The First Week

Our first week operating as a business (instead of being a construction site!) is now behind us. It was a very good week. We started with a bang with the Tour de Bloc comp, followed immediately by a very busy day last Sunday (free admission will do that!). The rest of the week was of course not as busy, but we are starting to steadily build up a membership base. Over the course of the week we got caught up on a lot of things:
  • Almost all the routes are now up, including route tags, and we've filled in a lot of the boulder problems we intend to have up.
  • All the waivers (several hundred of them!) that were signed have been entered into our computer system. Thank you desk staff!
  • We're getting some sleep, and even the odd day off work!
As we worked through the week we figured out and refined a lot of our processes. We'll continue to do this, and try to make things run as smoothly as possible, to make things better for both our customers and our staff. There may still be a few bumps here and there, and we appreciate you bearing with us as we figure everything out. We still don't have our membership cards in use (they seem not to be recognized by our barcode scanner, and we're working with the card supplier to get that fixed), so for the time being members and 10-pass holders will still need to check in at the front desk. And the web site is still a work in progress. Let us know what you expect to find there that you cannot, and we will respond.

The feedback we have had so far has been overwhelmingly positive, which makes us feel pretty great. There have been some suggestions though on things we can improve:
  • Some of you want rental lockers for storage of ropes and other gear between sessions. We have ordered 60 lockerettes (6 small lockers in each column), which should be in place within a few weeks.
  • Some of you want us to stay open until 11pm each night. We will probably extend our hours, but first I'd like to see our work schedules settle down a little, and make sure we are really on top of everything within our current hours. The managers are working much longer hours than I want to see, and I'm hoping that gets better over the next few weeks. So please be patient with us, and we'll get to this in a bit.
  • Some have asked for weights to be added to the training area. We're thinking about this one. I have some concerns about where they would go, how much room we would need to set aside, and how to be sure they can be used safely, and kept out of the hands of young children. I'd like to hear more details about exactly what kinds of weights are needed to help us figure out what to do about this.
  • A few people have asked us to provide rope buckets. This is not high on my priority list right now. Some think it makes more sense for each climber to provide their own means of carrying their rope around (I use a Mad Rock rope bucket, which I like a lot). I have a slight concern about these cluttering up the gym, and adding to what our staff need to keep an eye on. It's not a big deal either for us to provide them, or for climbers to get their own, but we're focusing on bigger things first.
  • I heard some concern on the forum about the slacklines being in the way. So far that doesn't seem to be a problem, but we're keeping an eye on it. We have added padding to the posts, and we have the option to take them down, or reconfigure them as a single line running parallel to the north tall wall. If they start being too much in the way at busy times, we'll consider not having them up all the time.
Please keep the feedback coming. I have told the staff that our goal is to delight our customers. That's a big step beyond merely satisfying them, and it's something we take very seriously. If there is something wrong with the gym, please let me or my staff know about it right away. And if you like the gym, please tell your friends. Word of mouth is the best form of advertising.

Thursday, April 1, 2010

Holiday Hours

We have a couple changes to our normal hours for the coming holiday weekend:
  • On Friday, the power will be shut down from 6am-6pm throughout much of Downsview Park for electrical work. As a result, we will be open only from 6pm-10pm that day. We're thinking of it as making up for missing Earth Hour last Saturday when we had our Tour de Bloc comp hitting its climax around that time!
  • On Monday we will be open all day, from 10am-10pm to give people more time to climb if they are off work for Easter Monday.