> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.sendmoregetbeta.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # BETA Client Results: Gecko Climb - URL: https://www.sendmoregetbeta.com/beta-client-results-gecko-climb/ - Published: 2026-11-10T06:58:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-11-10T06:58:00.000Z - Author: Miura Hawkins - Tags: blog BETA believes strongly in not just providing a software solutions to climbing gyms, but to being a partner to those businesses and the operators. A partner to expand revenue, simplify operations, and creatively support the success and needs of the gym and its customers. BETA has had a meaningful positive impact on our clients, and from time to time we will present some case studies to showcase that impact. **Written by Ivan Ivanov** *Business Development at BETA* --- ## Background Jackson Bursill is the director and co-owner of [Gecko Climb, a climbing gym in Darwin](https://geckoclimb.com.au/?ref=sendmoregetbeta.com), which opened its doors on 1 August 2025\. When the city's climbing gym at the time closed in 2021, the idea of opening one himself stayed with him, and for about five years he kept searching for the right building, once or twice a year, until the right one became available. Jackson's vision was to create a comfortable space for the local community. Whilst climbing is at the heart of it, the 1,277-square-metre former furniture store that became Gecko Climb was designed to hold much more than walls: rooms for birthday parties, corporate and community events, yoga and fitness classes, and a café. Jackson does not take the word "community" for granted. He brings different people together, from families with children to single working professionals, by coming up with events that go beyond climbing, from movie nights to arts and crafts nights. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/0d/b6/0db6fa8e-7b3e-4e8a-9cc5-7a9011a9def4/content/images/2026/11/Climbing-Wall-Build-ICP-Gecko-Climb-Rope-and-boulder-walls.webp) ## A First in Australia ****Gecko Climb has been a BETA customer since before it opened its doors for the first time. As our first client in Australia, Gecko came to us with needs that our platform had not yet been asked to meet, and our onboarding process and flexibility allowed them to begin operations with minimal worries. We helped them so they could do what they do best - bring the Darwin community together and get them climbing.** ## **►** What Gecko was looking for Jackson was looking for a platform that would keep developing alongside his gym, rather than static software that never gets updated. He followed the roadmaps of the providers he spoke to, and what struck him was "just how much of what was on the roadmap from the first time I spoke with BETA had become part of the product". Whilst BETA's roadmap had turned into features, with some of the other providers "the roadmap page was the same and nothing had really changed". For if a roadmap stays the same over a year or two, a gym is effectively buying the software as it is on the day it signs up, and that was not what Jackson had in mind for the modern, fast-paced gym he was imagining. The second requirement was that as a new climbing gym, Jackson "was not going to be investing \[...\] in huge amounts of on-premises hardware" if he did not have to, and none of the other systems he operates require "on-premises hardware or storage". BETA, in his words, "is clearly built for the modern environment, 100% on cloud", which meant "a huge amount of saving there, not having to delve into those kind of legacy system approaches". The third need was specific to Australia, which we were able to accommodate. "Doing fortnightly billing was something that wasn't as common to a lot of your other gyms at the time," Jackson remembers, whereas "it's very common here in Australia", where people are paid every two weeks. As our first Australian client, Gecko needed a billing cycle that most of our gyms elsewhere did not use. After a few meetings and demos with our team, Jackson was given demo access to our system, so he could explore it freely and make an informed decision. Once he was convinced, we took care of everything else. ## Before Opening Jackson explains what it was like working with BETA and how it informed his business early on Whilst demo access and the support from our team helped Jackson choose a platform, equally it helped him shape what Gecko would offer. Exploring BETA "12, 24 months before we opened" led him to decide: "actually, you know what? We're going to offer all of these classes", along with "the ability to book your birthday parties on the website", "8-week-long intermediate boulder classes" and "a school holiday program". In this sense, the platform gave Jackson "the confidence to go \[with\] the full business plan that I had in my head and that was starting to materialise on the paper". Rather than holding some of these offers back until the gym had settled, he decided that "we're going to do all of that and we're going to do that in the first month after we open". Part of that plan depended on BETA adapting to Gecko. At the time, a gym membership in BETA was defined as a pass longer than one month. Whenever Jackson marked something as available only to members or passholders, the system "wouldn't detect any of our memberships", and he remembers thinking "this is going to be an issue, because all of our memberships are billed fortnightly". We adapted the system to recognise fortnightly memberships, and looking back, Jackson says: > ***"it's been nice to see the adaptations that were made to the system for us".*** Alongside the software, Gecko received our support through the onboarding process. Getting a system "up and running" sounds like one task, yet in reality "there's probably about 60 different subtasks that we knew or had no idea would need to be done", according to Jackson. From about six months out, Steve from our team set up a project plan with every timeline on it: "right, this is your opening date. This is when we're going to get this done by". Jackson describes this as having the project "reverse engineered \[...\] from our opening date", and he puts it down to experience: > ***"\[BETA\] have supported many more people through gym openings than I will ever experience. So you actually held a lot of the key knowledge”*** Many of the modules were set up "all the way back in February", six months before opening on 1 August, "because we had to for some of our foundation membership signups". The foundation memberships Gecko had been taking "five, six months before we opened" were "all set up correctly and started working on day one". Although building a gym in a remote city like Darwin gave Jackson plenty to worry about, he remembers that "of any of the things that were giving me stress, BETA was not one of them at all". ## Opening BETA was able to ensure smooth opening operations, despite the smashing success and heavy traffic Gecko experienced on Day 1 By opening day, Jackson "had an intimate understanding of the system and how it was going to respond". That understanding was tested quickly, as he remembers "a couple of thousand people" came through the doors in the first three or four weeks. At the end of that first month, he remembers "how grateful I was". The plan Jackson had shaped with his demo account was also done well. "Within just a couple of weeks," he recalls, "I remember looking at our booking calendar and you couldn't have found more than a one-hour slot at any time of the seven days of the week that didn't have something on." School group bookings, yoga, Pilates, fitness classes, birthday parties, the school holiday program, and intermediate and junior coaching and squad all ran from the first weeks, just as he had decided a year or two before. > ***"We didn't have any crashes. We didn't have anything going wrong because Steve and the \[BETA\] team had helped us set everything up and do the configurations".*** ## 12 Months On BETA became more and more useful for Gecko, and Jackson took full advantage Twelve months after opening, Jackson believes "there's probably not a feature in BETA that we haven't used or implemented in the gym at various points". This is partly his own approach, for "whenever I see something, I go, 'That'll be great. Let's try it. Let's see how it works.'" Equally, it shows how much the platform has improved in that time, and in Jackson's view "our member experience has only, I think, accelerated even since we opened". ## Less Admin & Fewer Missed Payments BETA is about more than just processing transactions at the front desk for Gecko. BETA helps save time, reduce admin, and smooth out processes for Jackson and his team Birthday parties show where the time savings come from. Customers go to Gecko's website, "click a button" and see "which slots are available on which weekends all the way out until 2028", then book, "pay for it then and there" and fill out a short form with the details. The system sends them reminder emails "at certain intervals leading up to that date", so when staff "rock up on a Saturday or Sunday morning", the calendar already tells them the name of the birthday person, "how many people are coming and if there's any dietary requirements". According to Jackson, this "saves a huge amount of admin for us". However, ease of use matters to Gecko for another reason. The gym employs 23 members of staff, yet "we've had 50 people work for us in the last 12 months", which Jackson puts down to "just general turnover". New staff therefore need to be ready quickly: > ***“To get someone on the front counter ready and checking people in, it takes us probably an hour to train someone on even quite advanced stuff in the program”*** ## Feedback that becomes part of the product Jackson made asks, BETA delivered The clearest saving came from payments. Early on, when a member's payment failed because of an error or insufficient funds, following it up was "quite a manual process", and Jackson remembers telling our team: "look, this is not going to be sustainable, what can we do here". Within six months of Gecko opening, we had rolled out automated follow-up emails and recharge attempts. Before that, Gecko had "an admin person working a couple of hours a week sending emails, following up, manually billing overdue memberships", and that process "is now almost entirely automated". When a payment fails today, the member receives an automated email and the system retries the charge on a schedule. Only those who still have not paid move into a category for manual follow-up, and "the number of people that fall into that group is a lot smaller than what it used to be". For Jackson, "that feature alone saves thousands of dollars" in missed payments. He saw it as "a category one feature", one that "any climbing gym who operates on our kind of fortnightly structure is going to be very keen to see rolled out". Smaller changes have mattered as well. On Gecko's waiver form, "it wasn't always obvious where to click that button or that you had to press that to add more than one child". A parent would arrive with “three or four kids”, "a bit stressed", having "forgotten to add their second and third kid to the waiver", and staff would have to send them back to do it again. We updated the interface "so that kids aren't being missed", and Jackson noticed the wording of the release as much as the change itself. As he remembers it, the message was that Gecko was "not going to miss any kids anymore", and his reaction was "Ah, yes", because it showed that "they've recognised that that was an issue". These changes show how Jackson experiences working with our team. Whilst at times he is the one raising an issue, equally our team sometimes points out “the things that we need to think about when we do these sorts of things that I haven’t thought of”. In his experience, we accept feedback and do not ignore it, but use it as a tool to become better. > ***"\[BETA\] comes back and it's like, yep, we're going to do this, we're going to do that, that's in the pipeline, and then within six months it's all done."*** ## Using Data Better access to data = informed decisions Jackson and his team at Gecko are able to make informed decisions thanks to BETA's reporting and data insights. They read the data with patience, setting aside the first three months, when "it's just kind of all a bit all over the place", and looking "from about six months onwards" to see whether patterns are emerging. Some of these patterns were expected. School holidays, for example, are "periods of significant busyness", helped by "the big rope wall with 11 autos". Others surprised him. "We never thought we'd see market penetrations that high within 12 months," Jackson says, admitting he "would have shut the laptop" had he put such a figure in his business plan, "because I would have been like, you're being ridiculous". What the data told him instead was that "Darwin, our city, was really crying out for something like this for a long time". The data also answered the question that had worried Jackson the most. Gecko was built for two markets sharing one space, and the same detail that went into "setting up BETA to create a really nice user experience both for casual climbers and members" went into the gym itself: "We didn't fill the whole thing up with heaps and heaps of walls and no space for people. It's a 50-50 ratio we went for." The one thing that "would keep me up at night", in his words, was how to stop Gecko "sliding into" a place associated only with young children, where "we would lose all of the adult market", or the opposite, where kids "wouldn't turn up because they think that it's only for really experienced adults". Twelve months on, Gecko has "a really big biphasic pattern that peaks at around age 8", with a "huge number" of 4 to 12-year-olds, and a "next group" aged 18 to 35\. Jackson describes keeping both a "constant balancing act", but one that is "essential for the survival of our business". ***As for what made the difference on our side Jackson puts it simply: "It's the team behind the product that really wanted to meet the expectations of the customers of the gyms and give people really awesome functionality."** ## Final Thoughts Opening a climbing gym in a remote city is not an easy task. Whilst Jackson had many things to worry about before the opening date, BETA was not one of them, and twelve months later the platform does much of the work his staff was otherwise expected to do, such as birthday bookings that run until 2028, failed payments that are followed up automatically, and new team members who can check people in after only an hour of training. ## Let's speak, and superpower your gym Book a demo and we will walk you through BETA, built by climbers for climbing gyms. [Book a Demo](http://sendmoregetbeta.com/?gleapBotId=6a99c4ba3efb670651e0ce74&utm%5Fsource=rev%5Fcode&utm%5Fmedium=blog)