In late 2022/early 2023 I, Aaron, purchased The Climbing Company from the previous owner Chris Peisker. Along with all the paperwork he provided me (which I thoroughly enjoyed going through because I’m a nerd like that), he gave me a couple of really cool nuggets that I’d love to share here.

First up, here is a brief “history” I asked him to write down, and it has been kicking around deep in my Google Drive folder ever since so it’s high time I brought it out!

A Brief History of the Climbing Company

 The Climbing Company began in November, 1988. The four founding members were Louise Shepherd, Heather Phillips, Phil Wilkins, and myself, Chris Peisker. It was the first rock climbing school to be based at Mount Arapiles, and one of the few operations in Australia to offer multi-pitch climbing, particularly as a central part of school programs.

We were all experienced rock climbers, and our capacity for judgement was gained through our own hands on experience. We saw a need to create a school where we could share our knowledge and techniques, and guide people safely into climbing.

Despite my initial conservatism there was no lack of demand and within six months of operating we had more work than I could of imagined.

The activities we have and still do offer to this day cover the whole range from  starting out to advanced self-rescue and learning to lead on trad.

In 1993 Heather and Phil left the Climbing Company, leaving Louise and myself  to run the business. In 2010 Louise left, and I now remained as the sole owner.

Over this period,  the Climbing Company has kept to its initial vision, introducing climbing to thousands of school students and private customers.      

Chris Peisker, 9 January 2023

One thing I noticed when I was going through paperwork was, Chris never really “got” computers as such. He uses emails, and invoicing software, and that’s it. Everything booking related, even financials were literally on paper. But that didn’t mean he did a bad job at paperwork – on the contrary as a trained accountant myself, I am qualifed to say I was extremely impressed at how thorough his records were once they made it onto paper. There were General ledger entries, there were Invoice trackings, there were address books, there were weekly tallies and monthly reports.

Here’s one example. This is a bar chart that Chris made of pre-COVID numbers of guides operating on rock each year. “Sub” appears to be where he sent guides out to work for another operator under his license. You can see the clear growth of the number of activity days just in this graphic alone!

Like I said, going through Chris’ paperwork was, for me, quite a breezy exercise. I enjoyed digging deep into the data and extracting a story from all the numbers and figures. Sure, there was a reasonable amount of chaos in it all, but having spent 5 years as an auditor for small companies all around Victoria, SA and Tasmania, this company was by far not the worst I have seen in terms of record keeping!