CWA Blog Archive-The Making Of The 2018 Indoor Climbing Industry Report

The Making Of The 2018 Indoor Climbing Industry Report

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This article explains why and how the CWA produced its groundbreaking 2018 Indoor Climbing Industry Report, the industry's first comprehensive benchmark study. It opens by posing questions the industry couldn't previously answer: how many check-ins does the average climbing facility have each year, or which programs do the most successful gyms offer? Until 2018, nobody knew. CWA President &amp; CEO Bill Zimmermann frames the motivation: one of the traditional roles of a trade association is to help members understand benchmarks, but with no publicly-available data, the CWA couldn't answer many inbound questions it was getting. That gap drove the CWA to embark on a year-long process in 2018 to collect and analyze data from across the industry, a big step given that the climbing industry had existed and grown for decades without good baseline information. The article makes the case for benchmark studies by pointing to mature industries: benchmark studies allow business operators in fields like hospitality and fitness to understand their market positions and make decisions accordingly. Such studies give stakeholders valuable insights, help them understand how they're performing compared to others, make them better prepared for vendor negotiations, and help identify ways to increase revenue (the text continues). The throughline is that the 2018 Indoor Climbing Industry Report filled a critical, long-standing data void, giving the climbing industry, for the first time, the kind of benchmark information that mature industries rely on to understand performance, negotiate, and grow. Because climbing had grown for decades without baseline data, operators couldn't answer basic questions about their own performance relative to peers, and the CWA couldn't fulfill a core trade-association role of providing benchmarks. The year-long 2018 data collection and analysis effort addressed this, delivering the insights that let operators understand their market position, benchmark against others, prepare for vendor negotiations, and identify revenue opportunities, exactly the advantages benchmark studies provide in established industries like hospitality and fitness. Zimmermann's framing positions the report as the CWA fulfilling its fundamental purpose of serving members with actionable data. For the industry, the article documents a milestone in its maturation: the creation of foundational benchmark data that transforms operators' ability to make informed decisions, marking the climbing industry's transition toward the data-grounded business practices of mature sectors and establishing the CWA's ongoing research role.

Asset Caption

This piece explains the making of the CWA's 2018 Indoor Climbing Industry Report, the industry's first benchmark study, which filled a decades-long data void. President Bill Zimmermann frames providing benchmarks as a core trade-association role; the year-long effort gave operators the insights, on performance, negotiations, and revenue, that mature industries like hospitality and fitness rely on.