Adventure Rock
Wisconsin
Specs: The Adventure Rock legacy began in Brookfield, Wisconsin in 1998, following the success of a portable rock wall in an outdoor gear shop. According to Adventure Rock Co-Owner Eric Olson, “The rock wall was doing so well that it led to a climbing gym concept,” and thus the mixed-discipline Brookfield location was built, which Olson said was likely one of the earliest commercial climbing facilities in the country to be built from the ground up (as opposed to being built in a retrofitted warehouse or other existing building). “We think we were about the eighth largest [climbing gym] at the time in the United States, 26 years ago. We were a little over 10,000 square feet, so it shows how far the world has come since then,” Olson shared. In 1998, he and co-owner Craig Burzynski first bought into the business and are now the remaining owners.
Eighteen years later, after the Brookfield location was starting to feel too crowded, Olson and Burzynski decided to expand Adventure Rock for the first time. The pair first considered expanding the original gym and adding more climbing and gym amenities, but they switched up those plans after doing some further research. At the time, it wasn’t unheard of for members to drive 80 miles to visit the gym. When the team looked at the zip codes of its customer base, they found that the farther away members were from the gym, the less time they remained members. “So, we decided to go closer to where the majority of people were coming from,” Olson said.
Since the Brookfield gym is in a suburb of Milwaukee, the team wanted the second gym to be more centrally located. At first, Olson and Burzynski had been looking for an existing building, but all the sites they found seemed to need too much work or be too far removed from the city, so they opted for another ground-up build instead. “We found a location right where we were looking, zip code wise, in the River West area of Milwaukee,” said Olson. Located about 20 minutes east of the first facility, the mixed-discipline climbing gym is part of a four-story apartment complex.
It wasn’t long before the Milwaukee gym was approaching capacity as well. “We needed a relief valve for that gym,” Olson said, noting he and Burzynski determined it would be easier to find a third space than expand the second one. Because they were planning to construct the third gym nearby, the ownership team felt it wasn’t necessary to offer both roped climbing and bouldering this time around, and they believed the Milwaukee area could use more of the latter in particular. In 2020, Adventure Rock Walker’s Point opened to the public as a bouldering-focused facility.
Between Adventure Rock’s first gym opening and today, over two-and-a-half decades have passed, and much has changed since then. In the early years of Adventure Rock, Olson reported, the membership percentage of sales was around 18 to 20 percent, whereas it’s now around 50 percent. Olson attributed some of that growth to intentional design decisions: The team has been dedicating more space to climbing, yoga and fitness amenities and less space to birthday parties, for instance. Olson also noted some structural improvements the team has incorporated over the years, highlighting changes in facility size, cleanliness and lighting. “Listen to market needs,” Olson advised. Once new needs were on his radar, Olson said it always took a while to adapt, so he recommends starting to work on changes right away. For example, one way the team has been adapting to the COVID pandemic’s impacts is by reaching out differently to people less familiar with climbing, since new visitors have not been walking through the gyms’ doors as often as they had pre-pandemic. Lately, Adventure Rock has been hosting more non-climbing community events, such as block parties, open house events and behind-the-wall tours focused on introducing more people to climbing.
While expanding a climbing gym business, Olson believes keeping the community spirit alive is a top concern. “There’s no simple way to do it,” he said. At Adventure Rock, the team has been working to stay connected and aligned on core values by giving staff opportunities to work in multiple departments. “But more importantly,” Olson added, “it’s our members. Our members set the tone for who we are. We strongly encourage our members to climb at every facility. We invite them everywhere, and they’ve done the best at proliferating what got us started 27 years ago.”
Walls: Eldorado Climbing (Brookfield, Milwaukee); Walltopia (Walker’s Point)
Flooring: Strati Climbing (Brookfield); Flashed (Walker’s Point)
CRM Software: Rock Gym Pro
Website: adventurerock.com
Instagram: @AdventureRock
In Their Words: “Continue to invest in your staff. Especially when you’ve been around as long as Adventure Rock has been around, you quickly find that you or a small group of people can’t do it all. And so, we’ve relied on our staff, and it’s been hard because 27 years ago, Craig [Burzynski] and I could do it all: running the front desk, teaching classes, running memberships. We now need a whole team, and it was a hard transition to lean on them and allow them to do the things that they were the best at. But in hindsight, the thing that’s kept us around as long as we have is relying on our staff to do what they do.” – Eric Olson, Co-Owner of Adventure Rock
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.
