A Story of Local Entrepreneurship – CBJ Podcast with Mike Palmer and Mitch Eadens

This week on the CBJ Podcast, Scott Rennak sits down with Mike Palmer and Mitch Eadens, co-owners of The Knot gym and Cascade Specialty flooring, to talk all about the grind and unexpected twists that can accompany entrepreneurship in the climbing industry.

Before they were gym owners, Mike Palmer was a self-described “climbing hobo” living out of his truck and running early internet-marketing side hustles, and Mitch Eadens was running Palomino Pool Hall and The Backyard, two Gainesville, Florida institutions he built from a pool hall’s leftover tables at age 21. Fifteen years after climbing together in college, the two reconnected to take on the shuttered, structurally condemned Gainesville Rock Gym—a building with a mysterious foundation failure (rumored to be a sinkhole; actually decades of decaying organic fill from an old town dump).

What followed was a five-and-a-half-year odyssey: chemical grouting and demolition, a loan that fell apart over an unrelated IRS document, a pandemic-timed construction start and, finally, an opening day. In their conversation, Mike and Mitch walk through what that process had actually cost—in time, money and lessons learned—and how it shaped The Knot’s approach to community, staff pay and the member experience. They also cover how that same hard-fought experience led them into a new venture, acquiring Cascade Specialty, where they now consult climbing gym owners around the country through the kinds of problems they once faced.