David Alston’s Climb Out Of ‘Climb 1884’ Is The Entrepreneurial Lesson You Need
SAINT JOHN–Sometimes things work out perfectly–and sometimes you buy a former church for an indoor climbing gym and after months of work realize it’s not feasible.
For David Alston, a New Brunswick entrepreneur who’s made a career solving problems, his latest task will be selling a 138-year-old former church next month.
You’d think Alston’s latest venture, Climb 1884, a rock-climbing gym housed inside the church, would have come easy–but in business, nothing ever does.
The co-founder of Brilliant Labs and advisor to many Atlantic Canadian startups, Alston already co-owned the top-ranked aerial adventure park in Canada. He admits he’s enjoyed moving his business ideas into personal areas of interest, like climbing.
While the former church would have made the province’s largest indoor rock-climbing gym, with heights up to 42 feet, the idea was shelved this week due to overwhelming engineering challenges.
RELATED: Climbing Gym In Former Saint John Church Won’t Happen
Alston told Huddle that while the business plan for Climb 1884 received a lot of community support, the building, with all of its charm, proved to be a tough retrofit for the construction and materials involved.
He says a minimum climbing height of 25 feet was necessary for the plan. It would have required at least a four-storey structure that was open from top to bottom to deliver the type of experience climbers want.
Warehouses come in all shapes and sizes, though many in this part of Canada are limited to around 20 foot ceilings or less. Anything larger, Alston says, is already being used for its intended purpose.
“There’s not a lot of warehouses that go into the 30-foot range,” explains Alston. “I think if there was something out there [that’s] 30 feet, that would be really ideal because now you’re getting beyond just 25. Even within the church we had the ability to potentially go to 40 feet.”
Right business, wrong space
For Alston, the church backdrop was almost too perfect. Not being able to build the experience there means he’s not only forced the business idea to the back burner but now has a former church to sell.
“The normal stuff you have to do to an older building, in terms of getting it brought up to modern-day standards, the fixing of the roof and the brickwork — we did a lot of the work on the outside shell and we’ve opened everything up so we could have a fresh start,” he says.
He says whoever gets the space next won’t have to deal with the extreme building requirements he’s already undertaken.
Alston says the building won’t work for a climbing gym because the sheer amount of infrastructure required to build the freestanding walls was a big hurdle.
The work would have involved storing literal tons of steel materials in the old church, with further construction set to drive 3,000 pounds of force into the sanctuary floor, something Alston says it would not support.
“Even if we could technically do that, it would be a phenomenal cost to try to shore up the floor temporarily to try to pull that off.”
He says efforts to regroup lead to further setbacks. With costs beginning to creep up, this week brought the ultimate decision not to continue.
He says some planned work on the building still remains, and since giving notice that the climbing venture would not be happening at the site, he’s already had some preliminary interest.
“Even before eight o’clock that morning, I had already had a message from someone that I know who was already thinking of an idea that could be a good fit.”
Alston says the building will hit the market next month unless someone approaches him ahead of time.
If the current commercial real estate market is any indication, Alston feels the building will see a new buyer sooner than later. But that means a future home for Climb 1884 might have to wait.
“What was surprising was there’s just not a lot of land out there for sale right now in terms of doing something like this,” says Alston. “I mean, I knew the market was tight, I just didn’t realize how tight it was.”
Welcome to entrepreneurship
Under the assumption that things would eventually work out, Alston says he and his team were still working to make Climb 1884 happen into the beginning of May.
Alston says a prior commitment to document the planned transformation will still go ahead with Burdock Creative, though it may adopt a new narrative for the story, which currently has no ending.
Alston says that has many parallels to the road of entrepreneurship.
“When it comes to entrepreneurship, sometimes you don’t have what you expect to be ‘a happy ending,’ but there’s also a ton of learning that happens on the journeys that people take–and sometimes, like this one, it’s not always good news.”
“If we can share this story it can help entrepreneurs understand things a bit better. So, I think it’d be kind of a shame if we just kind of hit the stop button,” he says.
“There were a number of different signs that came up that kind of led us down this path. I thought that those signs were kind of the universe saying, ‘It’s going to work.’ But obviously, those signs were something different and maybe it was meant for something else. Who knows what the next chapter will be.”
Tyler Mclean is a Huddle reporter based in Fredericton. Send him your feedback and story ideas: [email protected].