Crux Climbing Center Pflugerville
Pflugerville, Texas
Specs: The first Crux Climbing Center opened in 2016, a mixed-discipline climbing gym in South Austin, headed by founders Kevin Goradia and Matt Twyman. Goradia, Crux’s CEO, described the first year of operation as a bit shaky but “after that, things just took off,” he said. In late 2018, the team wanted to build a “supersized” roped gym and, during the search for a space, “stumbled upon” a spot for a new bouldering gym, the home of their Central Austin location that opened in 2020. “The location was too good to pass up, amongst other things,” Goradia added. The vision for the new roped gym was still there, however, and in late September that vision came to fruition with the soft opening of Crux Pflugerville, the business’s third gym in the area.
Crux Pflugerville is a mixed-discipline climbing gym located in North Austin. “North Austin is a great place to live,” Goradia said. “That area is booming, and it has kind of been neglected. So, we decided that it was time to build something.” Originally, Crux’s third gym was going to be built in the neighboring city, Round Rock—Goradia even bought land there in a business park. However, it was important to the Crux team to have a coffee and beer component at the third location, which the businesses in the park worried would disrupt their operations. So, Goradia sold the land, found the Pflugerville plot about three years ago, and since then the team has been charging forward with the project. They opted for a ground-up build in the interest of having more control around various design aspects. For example, the team chose to include space for a coffee shop that is leasing out the shop, and they designed a courtyard that will host Spicy Boys, which Goradia described as a popular food truck in the area.
The Pflugerville location offers 22,000 square feet of roped climbing and bouldering surface, with roped walls 58 feet tall and three roped lanes dedicated to various widths of crack climbs. The training room is semi-open, with a 2024 MoonBoard, hydraulic Kilter Board, 20-degree and 40-degree spray walls, and comp walls. The gym incorporated a kids’ room into the design, which features walls over 30 feet, auto belays, boulders, a warped wall, and a climbable three-dimensional hanging structure. The gym also has a sauna, training classroom, free weight gym, and yoga studio. “It’s similar to all our other gyms,” Goradia said, “just supersized.” Something new the team did add, at the request of members, was a coworking space—a separate area in the gym with four different working pods, which Goradia said “are booked out every day.”
Crux Climbing is also set to open a Houston location in 2025. Goradia felt Crux had the capacity to open multiple gyms at the same time in the business’s current growth phase. While half his family lives in Austin, Goradia grew up in Houston and felt he needed to be closer to home. “We decided to open something that’s pretty close to my sister’s house,” he added. Now, Crux is moving forward on that bouldering gym project, which is expected to be completed in Fall 2025.
Throughout the expansion of Crux, it has been important to Goradia and his team to stick to their core values. Goradia said one factor that has helped them to do so is having a smaller management team, all members of which are friends as well as coworkers. But what has helped Goradia the most is climbing in the Crux gyms. “I build these gyms, and I want to climb in them,” he stated. “I try to climb as much as possible. I think that plays a huge role—all our managers and employees are big into climbing.” Goradia added that on top of climbing in the gyms, another factor that has helped Crux grow over the years is hosting community events monthly, rather than yearly. “We have free beer, free food, vendors,” he explained, “and we did that starting from the beginning.” Goradia said he enjoys getting to know members of the Crux community and the connections the gym cultivates. “I love climbing,” Goradia told CBJ. “It just so happens that all my friends are either my co-workers or members of the gym.”
Walls: Vertical Solutions
Flooring: Habit
CRM Software: Approach
Website: www.cruxclimbingcenter.com/pflugerville/
Instagram: @CruxCCPflugerville
In Their Words: “Make sure your product is viable. Maybe you have a good month. Maybe you have a couple of months that are great. To me, that’s not quite good enough. You need to have at least a year or two under your belt, in my opinion, before you start expanding. And then on top of that, you have to have good systems in place. I’m very good at certain things, but terrible at a lot of things. And so, I fill that team accordingly. Make sure that team is good, because if you don’t and you’re having to do a bunch of things, you’re just going to burn out immediately. And I find that happens to a lot of gym owners. They want to save money here and there because they don’t want to pay an employee and so they end up having to do the work. But you’re just burning out. Another thing is don’t be scared to spend money. I know a lot of gym owners in the past, the whole thing is make your money back and then spend it on whatever. That’s why a lot of these other gyms unfortunately have either left us or are struggling to make it because a lot of them refuse to invest, reinvest in the company. So, anything that we make goes right back into the company.” – Kevin Goradia, Crux Climbing Center Co-Founder and CEO
Naomi is a personal trainer and a routesetter who has also worked at climbing gyms as a youth team coach. After starting college at Colorado State University in 2017, she wanted to make new friends and found climbing, fell in love, and now climbing dictates most of what she does. Naomi earned a bachelor’s degree in Ecosystem Science & Sustainability, and when not climbing she enjoys baking, gardening and crafting.
