GARY: Next on Start Up, we head to Fort Worth, Texas, to meet up with Skyler and Vanessa Brooks, the owners of The Blok Climbing Company, a premium indoor bouldering gym and climbing community.

All of this and more is next on Start Up.

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SARAH: I never dreamed of being an entrepreneur.

My goal was to get any free first aid kit in America.

JONO: It's been an awesome journey for us.

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♪ GARY: My name is Gary Bredow.

I'm a documentary filmmaker and an entrepreneur.

As the country faces uncertainty, small business owners continue to persevere, pushing the economy forward with their unrelenting drive and determination.

We've set out for our 12th consecutive season, talking with a wide range of diverse business owners to better understand how they've learned to adapt, innovate, and even completely reinvent themselves.

This is Start Up.

♪ The indoor climbing gym market in the US is a rapidly-growing segment within the fitness and recreational industry, fueled by increasing interest in rock climbing as a sport and activity.

Indoor climbing gyms offer a controlled environment for climbers of all skill levels to practice and improve their climbing abilities, making it accessible to a wider audience.

With a focus on safety, community building, and innovation, the indoor climbing gym market in the US is poised for continued growth and expansion.

Today I'm heading to Fort Worth, Texas, to meet up with Skyler and Vanessa Brooks, the owners of The Blok Climbing Company, a premium indoor bouldering gym and climbing community.

From what I know, Skyler and Vanessa decided to relocate from California to Texas and went all in on this incredible family business.

I can't wait to learn more, and maybe even try a little climbing myself.

♪ ♪ What is The Blok Climbing Company?

SKYLER: We're a bouldering gym, indoor climbing.

Specifically here, we're bouldering.

It just means you're climbing without the use of ropes.

That's primarily what we are, but I mean, beyond that, we're kind of like a community hub, social space, kind of centered around climbing.

GARY: We're gonna go back to the beginning, get the origin story, so tell me a bit about yourself.

SKYLER: I was born and raised in Southern California.

I went to Arizona to go to school for engineering, aeronautical engineering.

I moved back to California.

My wife was starting her teaching career and I was kind of looking at other pursuits, realizing that engineering wasn't the field that I really wanted to get into.

I started searching for something that I felt passionate about and I started doing all sorts of recreational activities to fill my time, just going to a traditional gym, golfing.

Eventually I came across climbing.

It's a gym called Flowstone.

And I went there for the first time with my wife and my brother-in-law, just to try it out for something to do and instantly fell in love with it and immersed myself.

The pandemic hit and I started climbing outside 'cause we could and all the gyms were closed down, so I was so like attached to climbing that that's all I wanted to do, so I built like a home wall in my backyard just to be able to continue climbing.

We were climbing outside.

GARY: Did anything pop into your mind like, "I wanna do this for a living?"

SKYLER: It was the pandemic where the sort of back of a napkin, you know, scribblings of what this potentially could be started.

I was really just, I kept putting one foot in front of the other down this road, knowing that it was just a pipe dream and something to keep my mind busy, but you know, I thought deep in the back of my mind, I thought if I did keep making the necessary steps, maybe eventually it would come to fruition.

GARY: Yeah.

SKYLER: Eventually it did, which is kind of funny.

GARY: What was your initial thought and feedback when he's like, "I think we can do this."

VANESSA: I always say like it wasn't my dream, but it was kind of my turn to sit back and then let him pursue his dreams.

Teaching was always my dream and so he supported me through that, through the hard days of teaching and now it was my turn to kind of support his dream, but it's something that has evolved into just becoming the whole family's dream.

♪ ♪ ♪ GARY: It started with a napkin.

SKYLER: Yeah.

GARY: What was the next step forward?

SKYLER: I started working with a company for climbing wall consultation.

It's like a business development package they offer.

GARY: Yeah.

SKYLER: That was the first big step and that was the first major financial commitment, but that was one where it was $6,000 and that was a amount of money that I was willing to part with to just see if this thing could happen 'cause it was the next logical step.

GARY: So you're willing to lose that six grand to realize no, this is the wrong path for me.

SKYLER: Yeah.

GARY: Tell me a little bit more about the course.

What did it include?

SKYLER: They kind of walk you through pro forma and business development, all the things that people that haven't opened a climbing gym before are probably missing.

GARY: Specific to climbing gyms?

SKYLER: Yes, it was a climbing gym consultation, yeah.

It made us realize that there was a path forward to financing this business in terms of the startup cost of it all and hearing from them what these numbers are, we realized we can make this work.

GARY: Wow.

SKYLER: And that was kind of the moment where it was no longer a pipe dream and we realized there was a clear path forward.

GARY: So at that point, what happens next?

SKYLER: All the consultation was happening while we were still in California.

Realized we couldn't make the project happen out there just in terms of like red tape and cost to get the project up and running.

Started looking across the country for other cities that made sense, both for opening a gym, but also city that we just wanted to live in.

GARY: So you were so all in on this dream and this vision that you're willing to uproot your family and physically move your place of residence to follow the business dream.

SKYLER: Yeah.

GARY: That's about as all in as you can go.

SKYLER: Yeah.

GARY: Okay, why Fort Worth?

SKYLER: We were visiting a few places around the country we thought we might wanna move, so we started taking short trips to just see the area and see if this is where we wanna be.

Here in DFW, we heard about these things called the Stockyards over in Fort Worth so we decided we had extra time so we came over here and fell in love with the city and then also realized at the same time that it was a great market for bringing a new climbing gym, being there was only one here and there's two million people in the county.

We both just loved it so much that we realized that's where we're headed.

GARY: Walk me through the hunt for the money.

SKYLER: I had the pitch deck put together and I was aware, they trained me in the consultation course that I was gonna get a lot of nos, so I was prepared for that and they actually did say that you should start with some of these bigger banks.

GARY: Okay.

SKYLER: Because they're gonna tell you no regardless, but it gives you the experience of dealing with these types of talks.

GARY: And hearing no and dealing with it.

SKYLER: Yeah.

GARY: That's awesome.

SKYLER: That way you have more in your bag when you go to these regional banks that might be more apt to finance your project.

And then it was a good 30 or 40 nos.

GARY: 30 or 40 nos.

SKYLER: Many, many lenders we spoke to, a lot of 'em just are unaware of climbing or we had no experience in the industry.

Eventually I refined the pitch deck and started dialing in like what points were working and trying to focus more on those when I was speaking with the lenders.

GARY: How much money were you trying to raise?

SKYLER: All together, was just shy of a million dollars.

GARY: Did you start to get a little discouraged at that point?

SKYLER: I was prepared for the nos.

I didn't realize it was gonna be that many, but my mindset the entire time was, if I continue to get nos for the next 10 years, that's fine.

My wife's still teaching.

I'm raising our daughter.

We're in a new city that we love.

Our lives are fine.

We're not like fully banking on this thing to work and that's kind of how we set it up, but I just knew that if I stopped trying, the yes would never come.

GARY: Tell me the circumstances around finally getting a yes, where did it come from and was it everything you needed?

SKYLER: The SBA lender that we eventually acquired the financing from, and it was a very long, it was like it, I always say it was the longest job interview of my life because they were the first ones that gave us a letter of intent.

That's when the chicken before the egg thing started happening where we had a letter of intent, which means we have a lender that's technically- GARY: Willing to lend it.

SKYLER: Yeah.

But we had to make all the other things fall in line first.

Another several dozen nos from landlords until we eventually- GARY: Several dozen more nos.

SKYLER: Yeah, and that was the scary thing 'cause the letter of intent had a timeline.

GARY: Oh no.

SKYLER: So the clock was ticking.

GARY: Tell me about finally finding this place.

SKYLER: We had secured another building that was closer to the local university here at TCU.

It was like two blocks from the baseball park.

It was in a shopping center.

We had the lease agreement all redlined.

We'd worked through it all with our legal team, their legal team, and we were waiting for the executable copy, which we were supposed to receive by the end of that week and never heard from 'em again.

GARY: They ghosted you?

SKYLER: Yeah.

We got completely ghosted.

GARY: Crazy.

SKYLER: And yeah, so our lender was obviously aware of all this happening.

We let 'em know we were about to execute the lease agreement and then they ghosted us and we were past the deadline.

GARY: Oh, man.

SKYLER: So we had to go back.

That was a scary thing 'cause we had to go back.

GARY: What a gut punch.

SKYLER: Yeah.

And we realized, man, this might take us another year just to find a space.

Luckily this one, the landlord was local.

GARY: Like a private owner.

SKYLER: Yeah.

GARY: Not a huge company.

SKYLER: Yeah.

So it was a lot more human interaction with him and we could sell him on the concept, so we got keys to this building in March of last year and then we were- GARY: March of '23.

SKYLER: Yeah, March of 2023, and then we were done with construction, had our doors open November of 2023.

♪ ♪ ♪ GARY: Tell me about the business structure itself.

Who all is involved?

SKYLER: It's my wife and I and my parents.

GARY: Are your parents here or are they in California?

SKYLER: They're here, yeah.

GARY: Oh, they moved too?

SKYLER: Yeah, the whole family.

You know, when I was talking about it all the time, they were like, "We could probably do this and help you get this done."

It's just a great opportunity for us all to enter some venture together where we could utilize all of our own individual skills and tie it around my passion for climbing to make a business.

GARY: Are they active or more passive partners?

SKYLER: They're active.

GARY: They're active.

SKYLER: Yeah, so my mom, Tammy, she is kind of our director of finance or compliance.

My dad is a director of operations, but he's also the master craftsman behind these plywood shapes that you see on the wall.

They're referred to as volumes.

They're pretty expensive to purchase, but we actually build all of 'em out ourselves.

GARY: Awesome.

SKYLER: And then, yeah, my wife and I, my title's the director of branding, but I mean, we all wear a lot of hats.

My wife's director of marketing, so I just kind of am the general steering the ship and then we all kind of use our skills to make it all work.

♪ GARY: What was your initial thought when Skyler approached you and was like, "Hey, I think I wanna open a climbing gym?"

CLINT: We thought it was a great idea because we used to go along with them, all the kids, when they'd go climb and we, by going along with them, we understood the like huge underground niche that climbing was.

And then it became an Olympic sport in 2020 and we're like, "Okay, this is a go, let's do this thing.

We're excited, let's do it," so we did.

Call us crazy, but here we are.

GARY: Talk about working with family.

What does that mean to you?

CLINT: Oh, it's awesome.

Running a business obviously is difficult, but we do not let the stress levels of a business overcome the power of family.

We always keep that in check.

Family first, then the business.

It's truly great.

We couldn't be happier right now.

It's been a few years in design, a lot of hard work, but here we are living the dream.

GARY: Are you excited about the future?

What does the future hold?

I mean, you can take this thing really far.

CLINT: Yes, of course our biggest dream is to open up more gyms, expand more, even into other states, and this is our first one, it's taken off really great and we can't wait.

We're just waiting to dive right into the future.

♪ GARY: The moment I've been dreading/waiting for here.

Climbing 101, so we're gonna do the orange, right?

TAMMY: Yes, that's correct.

GARY: All right.

So what do I do here?

TAMMY: So the most important thing is you're gonna start with your two hands where the circle is, yes.

GARY: So both hands here to start.

TAMMY: Right.

GARY: Got it.

TAMMY: And then you're gonna place your feet either on those two or those two, whichever is most comfortable to you.

And then you're going to wanna reach with your hand, and then you're gonna do hands, feet, hands, feet.

And the most important thing is to look where you're placing your feet so that you make sure you get 'em securely, yeah, onto a hole.

GARY: Oh man, okay.

TAMMY: I think you can do it.

GARY: Now this is where the heart starts racing a little bit.

The blood pressure goes up.

TAMMY: Well, as you're going up, Skyler's gonna help you.

GARY: Okay.

TAMMY: He'll tell you if you know how to get where your feet need to go.

GARY: Copilot, all right, here goes nothing.

♪ ♪ ♪ SKYLER: Perfect.

First boulder.

GARY: First boulder, whoo!

Couldn't have done it without you guys.

♪ Talk about when you guys first opened and the dream became a reality.

VANESSA: It was really surreal once people came in and I was like, "Wow, people are here to climb at this gym that we opened."

And it's still really cool every day to see people post videos and just share their experiences and see friendships made here at the gym.

GARY: Talk about the challenges around owning and running a membership- based business.

VANESSA: We kind of know the amount of money that is promised, I guess, each month, and then hoping that our marketing efforts for day passes will help getting people to bring their friends in and hoping that those day pass users then turn into memberships.

I guess making the effort to have those day pass people have the best time that they can here.

GARY: Sure.

VANESSA: Offering things like bouldering 101 for people who wanna get into climbing.

That's a big hurdle for a lot of people is like they wanna get into climbing, but they just don't know where to start.

GARY: Right.

VANESSA: And they don't know how to do anything and so they feel very intimidated because it's a very, like you're kind of on the spotlight sport where you're like people... GARY: Right.

VANESSA: Are watching you.

GARY: Yep.

VANESSA: And so as someone who's not a great climber, you're like, "I don't wanna look stupid."

GARY: Exactly.

I just went through that myself with trying climbing for the first time.

VANESSA: Yeah, but it is, someone told me that before they were like everyone in this building is struggling, everyone's just struggling on their own thing, and I thought that was really cool because it's something that I get very self- conscious too about people watching me and that's something that I've had to overcome 'cause I'm like, "Eh, like who cares?

Doesn't really matter."

GARY: Exactly, everyone had to start at some point.

VANESSA: Yeah, exactly.

♪ ♪ ♪ GARY: What made you wanna give The Blok a try?

ASH: I wanted to try something different so the gym that I was going to was more corporate.

My very first day I felt like I was wanted at the gym, which is like a great feeling, you know.

GARY: You wanna feel welcome when you come in.

ASH: Right, right.

GARY: Like you're part of it.

ASH: You walk in and you feel like you're part of a family, which is great.

GARY: From a technical standpoint, what makes this gym stand out?

ASH: My favorite things would be the way that they kind of communicate with their community of seeing like, what kind of climbs do you guys wanna see?

Or what kind of leagues do you guys wanna see?

So it makes everybody feel like they're part of like making this gym a whole.

♪ GARY: Tell me a bit about where we're going right now.

SKYLER: Yeah, so Mineral Well State Park, it's the closest outdoor climbing crag for ropes.

GARY: What are the big differences about climbing outside versus in?

SKYLER: Obviously indoors there's a lot of safety measures in place with our padded floorings and ropes and there's a lot of checks and things.

Outside, it's up to you to make sure you're staying safe.

GARY: I have an urge, like I wanna do it.

SKYLER: Yeah.

GARY: I don't know if that's a similar feeling to what you had the first time you climbed or what, but it's gravitated toward it, you know what I mean?

SKYLER: Yeah, it's easy to get hooked on it.

It really brings out your inner child.

That's part of why I fell in love with it.

You're staying active, you're staying healthy, building a lot of strength in ways that you didn't know you could, but it's also just a lot of fun.

GARY: All right, we are here.

I am excited.

Excited to try my luck on an outdoor climb.

SKYLER: Let's do it.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ What exactly do you do with The Blok?

MIKE: So I started off as a customer with The Blok.

We came in shortly after they opened.

My wife and I were their first annual members and we started hanging out a lot.

We love the people, we love the gym and you hang around enough they let me start kind of helping out so I've been helping out with various things, coaching and just sitting the desk and so forth.

GARY: Have you always been an avid climber?

MIKE: I've been a climber for 35 years.

GARY: Climbing for 35 years, you've had a lot of experience in different environments.

MIKE: Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

GARY: How would you rate The Blok in terms of what they've done and what they've built as a business?

MIKE: I love The Blok.

The people there are fantastic.

The Brooks family is wonderful and I'm just so happy that they've allowed us to join with them.

It's my favorite gym I've been to.

GARY: What are some of the main things that, I'm thinking about giving it a try, some of the main tips?

MIKE: Keep your weight on your feet as much as you can.

Everybody wants to grab things, that's our nature.

We walk on our feet all day long.

If you try hanging on your arms for very long, it's gonna be real quick session so use your feet, place your feet, get your weight over your feet, press it out.

♪ GARY: What does the future hold for The Blok?

SKYLER: A lot of improvement on the vision that we had and figuring out what's working.

And now that we've been open for about six months now, we've got to learn what our community likes, what they don't like, so we're kind of now hitting the ground running with this sort of transitional phase between building our gym and now running our gym.

GARY: Fine tuning.

SKYLER: Yeah.

So improving the experience that we're offering and keeping more people coming in and falling in love with it.

GARY: Any advice to another husband and wife team that wanna go into business together?

VANESSA: You gotta be very understanding of each other and be willing to let things go.

Your house might be a mess and your kid might have crazy hair for the day and just being okay with it and just understanding that everything is a phase.

GARY: Are you happy?

How does it feel to have accomplished something that started on a napkin to we're sitting here having this conversation now?

SKYLER: Yeah, I mean, I fell in love with climbing because of the experience that Flowstone offered and I wanted to bring that experience to more people, so to get to see people falling in love with climbing the way that I did is more rewarding than I could have imagined.

Like every single day, like watching a lot of our new members, membership base is brand new to climbing, and even though there's been another gym here for several years and many in the metroplex in general, for them to find it here and for our experience to resonate with them the same way that my experience at Flowstone resonated with me has been fantastically rewarding, also incredibly stressful financially and otherwise.

GARY: Was it worth it thought?

SKYLER: Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't change it.

If I could do it all again, I would and I mean, yeah.

It's been very worth it.

♪ GARY: Skyler and Vanessa have turned their passion into a thriving business.

And what's even better, is that they have the opportunity to share this incredible journey alongside the people that they love most.

Going all in on a climbing gym, especially in a new city, was incredibly risky, but with the support of family and a failure-is-not- an-option attitude, it mitigated that risk and their unrelenting persistence is starting to pay off.

And although I know very little about climbing, they must be doing something right because people cannot seem to get enough of this gym.

It was such a pleasure to meet Skyler and Vanessa and the rest of the team at Blok, and I think that I may have actually found myself a new hobby.

For more information, visit our website and search episodes for The Blok Climbing Company.

Next time on Start Up, we head to Dallas, Texas, to meet up with Stacie Stewart, the founder of BWI Contractors, a company that builds residential and commercial properties in the Dallas - Fort Worth area.

Be sure to join us next time on Start Up.

Would you like to learn more about the show?

or maybe nominate a business?

Visit our website at startup-usa.com, and connect with us on social media.

♪ ♪ We've got a long road ahead of us ♪ ♪ A long road ahead of us ♪ Got a long road ahead of us ♪ ♪ Before we pay our dues ♪ We've got a long road ahead of us ♪ ♪ A long road MAN: That's good, there you go.

GARY: Oh!

That was not easy!

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JARRED: We have a mission, and we call it sweat and do good.

BRANDON: The more we're able to grow our business, the more we're able to give back to our community.

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Amazon, a proud supporter of Start Up.

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Learn more at colonialpenn.com or by calling 1-800-372-8383.

Colonial Penn is a proud supporter of Start Up.