Name: Martin Petersen
Title: Co-Owner and CEO of Boulders
Location: Denmark
Behind the Desk…is an ongoing series of interviews with professionals from around the climbing industry. For this installment, we spoke with Martin Petersen, CEO and Co-Owner of Boulders. The first Boulders gym opened in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 2010, and the business has since grown to 11 open locations throughout the country, with another gym in the works. The tenth facility opened its doors two months ago, on May 22nd, and the eleventh facility opened just last week, on July 17th. (More details about the two gyms can be found here). As Boulders was nearing the finish line on these latest gym projects, we sat down with Petersen to hear more about his thoughts on expanding a climbing gym business, essential gym amenities, member retention, and keeping the community feel alive.
STEVENS: Do you have any advice for gym operators looking to expand?
PETERSEN: Make sure existing gyms are financing the expansion. Growth only based on debt can be very dangerous. Our expansion is super healthy.
How has your business been preparing for expansion of late?
We’ve geared up massively. We now have more marketing hires, for example, and an internal financial guy. Before that, we outsourced the bookkeeping and other financial stuff. And a year ago, we hired a new, extra CEO. He was already a part of the group of owners. We are three owners: me, Ole [Mørk] and Frank [Vilstrup]. Ole is the new CEO…
I think the next step for us will be to hire a person to construct the gyms, because right now that’s me. We are hoping to construct a lot of gyms this year…But we need someone other than me to run the construction sites…The problem with the construction sites is that everything is geographically spread out. I’m just coming home from Copenhagen today, and I have two kids and a wife, and I also try to climb and work out at times. So, it’s just to have someone else run around the country and do all this stuff. Because for the construction sites, even though we’re using Walltopia [for the construction of our climbing walls], we internally need to construct the changing rooms, the cafes, the storage spaces, hold wash, training area, lounges, all of that signage, everything else. So, the projects are still quite big and they require that you are on site a lot. So, we need someone else to do that in the near future.
How do you know your business is ready for expansion? What does that look like for Boulders?
For us, it’s a financial thing and whether we can find locations, because it’s been incredibly difficult to find good locations. If there were a lot of available decent or good locations and if we had all the money in the world, we would be ten times bigger already. That’s really the bottleneck for us. As soon as those things fall into place, then we’re ready to expand. Otherwise, we feel like we’re sitting on our hands.
What does a good location look like for you, in just a few words?
Something near the city center…Some busy streets, roads leading into the city, and universities.
You mentioned amenities—for example, having a cafe. Are there any big offerings that you have found in recent years that are really important to include when opening up a new gym?
I think as climbing progresses and as our membership base is getting more and more experienced in climbing, you need more training amenities, like Kilter Boards, MoonBoards, spray walls, and not a huge training area but some weights, some weight training, and some functional training. And then for everybody, also new climbers, you need a cool lounge space, and you need to facilitate in some way that people interact socially with events and workshops. That’s important.
How do you retain customers? How do you help climbers and members stay excited enough to keep visiting the gym and continuing their membership?
Having cool events, making sure that people know each other and feel like a part of a community, because if they do that then they rarely churn. Also, if we can help them to keep improving their climbing and their gains, that also helps encourage them to stay on.
We also have some more technical things, like a loyalty program, where the longer you stay the better discount you get. For the gym we opened in May, we invited everyone who has been here for two years or more to a pre-opening event before we opened the gym to the public; we had free beer and soda and held a cool party for them. So, we have some cool stuff in our loyalty program that’s designed to encourage people to stay on, and it’s possible to pause a membership and still keep your loyalty progress.
What do you think makes your gyms unique?
I always hear that our community is super strong. We also try to facilitate it in the way we hire people. Hiring staff is based on their ability to be a good host and not on anything climbing related. And for all the events we do, we always hear that the community is the biggest driver.
Then another thing we have that I don’t really see anywhere else is our level of focus on sustainability. There are a lot of gyms that mention sustainability with, for example, the selection in their cafes. They claim sustainability, but we actually build sustainably because we do all our gyms in bamboo panels. That’s the most sustainable type of panel instead of plywood that you can use. It costs more, but fortunately it’s green and also looks amazing.
Are the walls, for all intents and purposes, basically the same as plywood walls, or is there a difference when you’re smearing on it, for example? What does that look like?
Yeah, no difference. It’s safer because the panels are way stronger than traditional plywood, and the use is the same. There’s no difference for the climber other than it looks amazing…It has a warm, rich brown color. To me, it looks super nice and very natural. It’s nice when we claim sustainability that it also looks sustainable.
Are there any other ways your gym works to be sustainable?
Yes. All light sources, for instance, are LED light sources. So, we use about one fourth as much electricity on lighting compared to our very first gym, where we just used the lighting that was there…Then we changed to LED lighting and cut our usage in half. We also pay for green power—you can pay a bit extra for it in Denmark. And that doesn’t mean that you get power from a windmill or from solar farms, but you buy a quota so that when all the quotas are bought, then the state is inclined to make new sustainable energy to fulfill all those quotas.
Also, our cafes, of course, are all organic. We have very few products like light soda that are not organic, but other than that everything is organic and typically fair trade…I think the biggest factor, though, is that we construct the gyms sustainably. It’s also FSC-certified wood.
How do you maintain your community feel as you’re expanding, especially since you’re expanding all over the country and not just throughout a city?
Inherently, bouldering is social because we are all clumped together on the same mats, looking at the same holds. New climbers, strong climbers, beginners—anybody—they climb side by side and quickly get to talking about the solutions. So, the sport itself helps, but we also try to facilitate it with our lounge areas and our events. Typically, we use or reuse our existing crew and have them join the crew of a new gym to make sure that the new crew is being trained, they understand our way of thinking, of talking to customers, and our huge focus on being a good host—helping with problems, smiling, asking how it’s going, trying to learn people’s names and learn their coffee orders, and all of this. The crew is a very big part of it. Also, in terms of the way we market ourselves, our language is very down-to-earth, very local, very friendly. But most important for us has been fostering that sense of community in our day-to-day interactions.
