A conversation with Duncan McCallum from The Ledge Climbing Gym, set to be the Highlands adventure sports hub for the growing mountain sports community, setting a national standard for bouldering, climbing, and adventure sports training gym facilities.
“It’s all about supporting people that really suffered over the last three or four years. The pandemic and the lockdown and how it affected kids have highlighted the issues of mental health and how important good mental health is for everyone.”— Duncan McCallum, The Ledge
Podcast excerpts. Interview by Drew Hendry
Drew: Who or what has influenced you most in your career, do you think?
Duncan: People who give up their time. My own personal journey with this project that we’re working on in Inverness, it’s been a long, long time coming. I wouldn’t have gotten to the stage it is at now without an enormous amount of sacrifice by the small team that I have around me. So, I think you need to be passionate. I think you really need to know your subject. I’m not into the making of money side and am much more interested now in building community and making sure that you’ve got a legacy that’s true to the roots of what you’re trying to do.
Drew: Let’s talk about the actual business itself. How is that going to work in the future?
Duncan: Inverness has about 80,000 residents. But then if you look at the catchment area of the inner Moray Firth, it’s coming up to about 137,000. So, we’ve got a really big pool of people, although they’re very dispersed.
Drew: People in rural areas are more likely to travel further anyway for these things.
Duncan: They are. And if you were looking at a town of 50,000 in central England where you’ve got lots and lots of climbing walls, that model might be slightly weak, but I think we’re probably looking at about 150,000 – 270,000 people within our functioning one-hour’s drive, which is going to be our evenings’ visitor. Then you create ambassadors, and those ambassadors can go back into the community and then it rolls on from there. So, it’s quite a long-term project, but it has to be supported by the strength of the commercial offering at the start.
Drew: So, you’ve got a timeline now which says that you’re building works ongoing and you’re looking to launch early 2023 and you must be thinking about recruitment now — why would people who are not already working for you, why should they come and work at the Ledge?
Duncan: We want to make sure that people buy into the vision of what we’re trying to do. Everybody comes into an adventure sport from a different direction, but they all have one key thing. It becomes a passion. And if you can share that passion with a five-year-old kid who’s coming in for the first time.
Drew: Exactly the answer to who’s a great employee for you. That’s someone that shares that passion. This podcast is about good business and getting to the heart and soul of business. What’s at the heart of your business?
Duncan: Passion, enjoyment, fun. I think it’s pretty creative. If you look at how we are going to approach what we’re trying to do. I think one of the reasons that we’ve been quite successful in raising the social funding at the moment is that we’re looking at a very well-known problem but coming at it from a different angle. It’s really important for us to offer something that’s slightly different that takes them away from the standard governmental delivery of a service. It’s about being part of something that creates a lovely group of individuals back in the community.
Listen to the full Podcast to learn more about The Ledge charity, its vision and its values, and how they will positively impact the community.