Main Street Mavericks Business Spotlight: Valley Rock Gym

Valley Rock Gym is located in downtown Corvallis. This new addition to the city was born from passion and necessity, and in the short time since it opened its doors, it has already found itself an essential part of the community.

Valley Rock Gym has over 8,000 square feet of climbing available and is attached to the Ants On A Log Cafe, a wellness cafe serving smoothies and healthy food options from locally sourced ingredients.

On day three of our Main Street Mavericks road trip across Oregon, we sat down with one of the owners, Johanna Garcia, to talk about climbing and small business.

Don’t forget to give them a follow on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube (where you can get a full tour).

Q&A With Valley Rock Gym

Tell us about yourself and your small business!

My name’s Johanna Garcia. I’m one of the managing owners here at Valley Rock Gym.

We’re located in downtown Corvallis, Oregon, which is a beautiful town in the Willamette Valley. We’ve been open since April of 2021, so going on three and a half years. We have four pillars: climbing, community, education, and wellness. And those are the four pillars that serve as the foundation for our climbing gym.

So we’re just trying to introduce the community to climbing, really focus on community engagement, and getting people involved. And it’s a wonderful spot. So come on by. We have 8,000 square feet of climbing. We have two youth-focused rooms, four autoblays, a fitness area, a fitness gym, yoga, and fitness classes.

What’s one challenge you’re facing, and how can the community help?

One challenge right now is we’re just lacking in space.

We’re a pretty small gym. We have 20,000 square feet. But we’re really popular in our community. So when it hits four or five p.m., and you get that five p.m. rush, everyone after work, it’s really busy. And so right now, we’re coming up against just like we feel like we’re bursting at the seams. And so we’re exploring opportunities for physical growth, expanding our building. And there’s a lot of different areas that we can go.

We can go bouldering, we can go ropes, and there’s just a lot of logistics that each of those options we’re gonna have to navigate. Figuring out both what the community wants and what the community needs are as well as like financially, how do we get it done? So a lot of things to think about, but definitely something that we’re looking forward to doing in the next few years.

What is one of your top pieces of advice for small business owners just starting out?

First and foremost, it’s a lot of work, but it’s worth it. If you have a dream, just do it. You’re just going to have to work hard and ask for help, and it’s going to work out.

Don’t be afraid to adapt. Growth can’t happen without the willingness to be flexible and to change. So just like a human, a business is an evolving thing, we’re always changing, we’re fluid. So embrace that. Then, the last thing is to find employees who are passionate about what you’re doing and include them in the process of growing your business.

Everyone has something to bring to the table, and as long as we’re willing to include them and listen, you can create an amazing team. That’s that. What is the best part of being a small business owner? I think just seeing the impact that your business can have. A lot of times, being a small business owner, you don’t get a lot of appreciation or credit.

There’s so much that goes on behind the scenes. Years of work are taken to lead up to the actual business being here. So just seeing the impact that your business can have on the community, both day and night. On a community, large community level, and then on an individual basis, it’s just like an amazing thing.

It makes it all work worth it. So even if you’re not getting the verbal Oh, this is so incredible or recognition for those years of work, just seeing the impact that the business can have on the community and individuals is amazing. And then I think the other thing is just community, like being a small business, you’re naturally going to have a smaller team of people, a smaller community of members.

And I think that lends itself to creating a much more intimate environment where people can really get to know one another. A lot of intentional energy is brought into this space. People are very positive, inclusive, and welcoming, and I think that’s something that you don’t necessarily find at massive, large-scale gyms.

So that’s something that I’m like really proud of: being part of a small community and part of a small business in Corvallis.

What are some misconceptions you think that people have about being a gym or being a gym owner?

I think at first, people would be like, you must work all the time. And I think in the first few years, that’s definitely true. We worked. Our butts off. It was so hard. We also opened right when vaccinations were rolling out and Covid.

So, we were navigating a lot of uncertainty that first year. There was a ton of growth. A lot of unknowns, like our team, were amazing in terms of all of us working together to make the first year a success. Yeah, it was a pretty incredible and hard year. And at this point, I finally found a really nice work-life balance.

So I now have time off. I feel like I can leave the gym, and we have great managers in place that I trust, and we have a great team. So it took a few years to get there, but yeah, I think people probably assume yeah, you’re working all the time. And yes, that was true. But I think we like put a lot of work into creating a really solid foundation that now gives us the freedom and flexibility. So happy to finally have that now.

What’s your favorite thing to do here and move your body?

I love climbing. Bouldering and moving on the walls are my favorite activities. I do have to be conscientious about when I choose to do it because being a business owner and working in the place that you also climb in can be hard to balance.

I try to climb in the morning when I don’t get distracted by employees asking questions. But if I want to socialize, and I think a lot of people love bouldering because it’s a very social sport, then doing it in the evening is also fun. You get to just engage with everyone else who’s here.

What was your background before you opened this small business?

I don’t really have a business background. I actually have worked for 10-plus years in the outdoor industry, working as a climbing guide, an outdoor educator for NOLS, and just spending a lot of time in the backcountry.

I lived a very nomadic lifestyle. I was on the road a lot. I would spend a month or two in the backcountry. Then, go climb for fun and go back to work with groups of all backgrounds. And it was an amazing lifestyle. It was also really exhausting. And there wasn’t a lot of stability involved — both financial stability and not having a house — your house is on wheels.

I craved both stability and a sense of community, and then I had a longer impact and saw an impact on the community over time. With the work I was doing, I would invest a ton of energy into working with youth for a whole month, building this amazing community, and then having to say goodbye.

So that, over time, was pretty emotional. So, I moved back to Corvallis with my partner, and we saw that there was this void in this town. There’s a ton of climbers here, but there wasn’t a climbing gym, and so we started to embark on that project.

We realized very quickly that it was a massive project for two people in their mid-20s. We needed to collaborate on this. So we found a few other people in the community that had a similar goal — and then it was a team of five. Together, we were able to make this happen. And then we have two managing owners.

I’m one of them, and the director of operations, Morgan Foster, is the other. Then, two of them own the cafe upstairs. So, it’s a pretty cool collaboration that we have.

Do you want to speak a little bit more about your cafe?

Yeah, so the cafe is Ants on a Log Cafe owned by Sally Starker and Wendy Little, who are also owners of the gym, and their cafe is very much focused on wellness, and so they provide a lot of like cooking classes and nutrition stuff, and then all of the food that they have is gluten-free. They just have a lot of options, like dairy-free options, nut-free, and certain grain-free things, for folks that have dietary restrictions,

It’s definitely a really nice place to go. Their smoothies are my favorite in the whole town. The creamy carrot or the nutty strawberry

I think something that we really try to invest a lot of energy in is the community engagement piece. We have monthly events that cater to different groups every month. So we have a woman’s climb night, a queer climb night, a BIPOC meetup. We work with individual groups within the community to provide events like Casa Latino Sinitos and Corvallis Climbers of Color, and with all those events, we do a lot of work to decrease the financial barrier to access.

We have Family Climb Day, which is 50 percent off. And then we have a Community Climb Night, which is for anyone, no matter what your background or identity, and that’s also five dollars a night. So, no matter who you are or how you identify, there’s a night that you can climb for $5.

It’s pretty rad. We make it affordable because climbing is a sport where there is definitely an economic barrier. And so we do our best to make it accessible. We also provide scholarships for all our youth programs, climbing teams, and summer camps.

What’s one of your proudest moments as a small business owner?

One of our first-ever women’s climb nights. It was in October.

We held off the first few months because of Covid. There was like a risk. There are a lot of restrictions on how many people we could have in our gym. So once that was lifted, the gym was open. Anybody could come in. We had our first-ever women’s climb night, and there was a line down the block and around the building of women coming here.

We ended up having a hundred and twenty women coming to climb, and it was just like this, aha, like holy moly moment. This is amazing. Climbing in a woman’s space. Since then, we’ve had women’s affinity nights. It’s every March for International Women’s Month, and we can repeat this 100-plus women in the gym.

So it’s just incredible to have those spaces where you can be with people that you identify with. It’s pretty amazing. So that was a huge proud moment for me.

What’s next?

So yeah, right now, it’s one of those things where, like, we finally do have that work-life balance. So we’re pretty content with what we have going on here. And yet, as we do know, there’s a need for the community to grow. We do want that to happen. I just think there, there are a lot of variables to think about, the cost of materials is really freaking high right now, interest rates, all that stuff. So, there are a lot of things that we just need to work on before we move in that direction.

The ideal would be to do an expansion of some sort, either a rope expansion or a bouldering expansion, and just provide more space for our members while still keeping the intimate nature of our gym.

Vendor Round-Up

And which of our vendors and partners are assisting Valley Rock Gym on their small business journey?

What do you use for your website services? GoDaddy. We use them for our email marketing, too.

What POS do you use? Approach — they are newer, and so we’ve been involved with them growing and providing feedback.

Who do you use for payroll? Gusto

For scheduling: When I Work

Who do you use for business banking?  Capital One and Oregon State Credit Union

What do you use for accounting software? We have a local accountant at Ten Key Remedies that we love.