In this interview, Anthony Vicino recounts his journey from operating a high‑end climbing gym that failed due to a late business‑model pivot, to rebuilding his life through personal growth and a new manufacturing/e‑commerce venture that generated seven‑figure revenue. He explains how market dynamics forced a delayed shift from a private‑club model to community memberships, illustrating the danger of pivoting too late. Vicino adopts the Navy’s “behind the power curve” metaphor to stress the importance of making cuts and strategic decisions before a crisis deepens. He delves into the emotional fallout of the gym’s collapse, describing shame, damaged friendships, and the Buddhist “two‑arrow” concept of reacting to failure. Recovery came through intensive self‑work, mentorship from a seasoned entrepreneur partner, and a pivot to producing climbing holds, where aligned equity incentives proved crucial. He reflects on his financial evolution—from living in a van with $1,000 to hitting $100 k and later $1 M—introducing the idea of a personal “money thermostat” and an identity shift from being a money‑accumulator to a money‑creator, which bolstered his confidence and sense of financial resilience.
Chapters
We were running really low on cash flow at this point, and we're like, we can't maintain this entity as a private club. That's how it was really structured, is like this high-end premium experience for really high-end climbers. But, um, Minneapolis is not a great demographic for that business model because we don't have a lot of rocks, so we don't have a lot of people attracted to climbing. There's actually— our main competitor is here in Colorado, right? And so we were drafting off a lot of what they were doing. But fundamental problem, which is like market dynamics matter. Where's— yeah, where's the best place to sell hot dogs? It's like outside of a stadium for full of hungry people, not in the middle of a field with nobody, which is what we had. So we opened it up, we made a pivot. We said, okay, we're going to grand open this and we're going to invite the community into the gym. We're going to sell memberships and we're going to pivot the model. But we had waited way too long for that. At that point, it was like this needed to be done 6 months prior for it to have any hope. And so we just, we made the pivot and the decision too late. It's like you're driving towards the cliff and then 100 feet from the edge, you decide we need to turn. It's like, yeah, but now you're in a skid. And you're still going off. And so if anything, it's like the lesson there is when you decide to pivot matters, and the sooner is usually better.
Yeah, definitely. We have a phrase in the Navy called being behind the power curve that has been adopted in entrepreneurship. And the reality is if you realize you're too low coming into a carrier landing and you can go engines full, you know, go into afterburner, but you're never going to catch and be able to, rejoin the glide slope and it puts you in a really dangerous situation. And this happens so much, right? In entrepreneurship is the best time to make cuts in a failing business were yesterday.
Yeah.
And the next best time is right now. And it's, it's really hard to recognize when you're actually behind that curve.
Totally. We did a piece of content a couple of years ago. So going into 2020 of like, okay, we're in crisis mode. What do you need to do as an entrepreneur right now? Because you don't wait until you've started bleeding out. You need to make the cuts before you see the bullet coming. You're like, okay, I'm going to get hit by that. And you need to start making the cuts. You need to start reserves. You need to start making those hard decisions before they're forced upon you, because if you wait until they're forced upon you, you're already behind that power curve, as you say. And it's like once you're behind the 8-ball, you don't get in front of it. You usually— you just don't.
What are the emotions going through your head or as you're facing that, the proverbial cliff? What's that like?
That one was really difficult because everything that I had done in my life up to that moment was really me-centered. And it's one thing when you fail and it's your thing, but in that particular instance, I felt as though I had been entrusted with my friend's dream, that they recognized they didn't have the skill, the capacity to fix themselves, and that they were asking for the help. And I told them that I could, and in reality I couldn't. And that was one of the— probably the very first times in my adult life where I felt I had really let down people who loved me and were relying on me. And it did a lot of damage to that friendship. Like, one of my closest friends, I was the best man at his wedding. It did a lot of damage to the relationship for a lot, long time. Not because he was angry, not because there was negativity, but because I carried so much shame that it made it very hard for me to connect again in the relationship. Because when you look at somebody that you love that you feel like you've wronged or you hurt, like, they become a mirror for you. And so every time you see them, they reflect back to you that your failure. And so you can either run towards that and stare hard in that mirror and say, I can't fight the dragons that I refuse to acknowledge, and say, I need to look at this until it no longer causes that pain and process it. Or you can do what most people do and what I did for a period of time, which was, let me just ignore it and go this way. And like, our lives just kind of drifted apart, and they've drifted back together now, and we're very close many years later. But it was just self-inflicted wounds. Like there's the initial wound, right? Like as they say in Buddhism, or there's two arrows. The first arrow is the event and you don't get to decide what that is. It hurts. But the second arrow is what you decide to do about that. And I decided that I was going to take that second arrow and just like shove that in my gut for good measure. And it didn't help. Yeah, didn't help at all.
Yeah. How do you recover from that? What does your next venture look like?
There's, there's two aspects to that one, which is The relationship side, that just took time. That took a lot of self-work. Entrepreneurship, I think, is the best personal development program in the world. It's, it's great if you choose to stay in it long enough. Like, you can't grow unless you grow. You are always the big constraint in the business. And so thankfully, for whatever reason, the universe put me on that path of like, learn how to grow through this process of entrepreneurship. And so that eventually brought me back to my friend and brought him to me as well. But the next endeavor was actually, it's really interesting, at that same time, my best, one of my other friends, he had another business that was also in the climbing space. This is the manufacturing company that I'm like still very involved with all these years later. And some people are just, they're just like put in your life, I think, at the right time for the right reasons to teach you whatever it is that the universe wants you to know. And he was like, he brought me into his, this thing. He's like, hey, come help me with this thing. I was like, you literally just saw, like, because we were in the same building. The gym was here, the manufacturing business, they were not connected in any way besides that they're in the same building. I was like, you literally just saw me drive this into the ground. He's like, yeah, yeah, but let's do this thing. I was like, okay. And what that allowed me to do was actually to heal through this relationship with my other friend who had seen me go through this, didn't judge it, and also helped me realize like that it's okay. It's okay to fail. Like that's, that's just part of the game. So the next thing that I just jumped into was the manufacturing e-com. We produce like rock climbing holds, rock climbing equipment. And, uh, honestly, I probably wouldn't still be in entrepreneurship if not for my partner in that business because he is like the most truebred entrepreneur I've ever met. Like he's the type of guy who's just like walking down the street, you'll see a baseball glove on the, on the side of the sidewalk and he'd be like, I bet I could sell that. And you'll just like, he'll sell it like an hour later. You're like, what the heck? And he just like has that skill. And I wasn't really that. I was playing the game of business and it was working at times, wasn't working at others. But having exposure to him really gave me a new perspective of what it means to like fail forward and not like, as Winston Churchill says, to go from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. And I was like, holy crap, if he can do this, I can do this. And like, that was pivotal for me at that moment.
And where are you from a financial perspective at this point? Was the gym loss devastating to you from a personal perspective? Perspective?
No, from a financial perspective, I had no incentive with that one. I was really helping them. I didn't take equity or anything. I took a salary. But at that point, I had, I'd sold the window washing business. I had, for me at that time, going— you have to understand, like, when you go from living in a van with like $1,000 to— if you never had more than $1,000 in the bank account, the day you have like $100,000 hit, you're like, I'm a rich man. I never have to work again. And so I left with a little bit of money from the first, that first business, feeling like I don't have to do anything, I'm good. And so with the gym, I had no financial stake, so when it failed, I didn't lose anything. Which, the other side of this too is like, in hindsight, don't trust somebody with your business that doesn't have like a financial motivation. Like incentives, as Charlie Munger says, is everything. Like, you show me the incentives, I'll show you the outcome. And, uh, my incentives, they weren't aligned enough for me to take it as seriously at that time as it needed to be. So then when I went to the, the next business, my partner and I, we came up with equity split there to recognize the work that he had done up to that point. And then for me coming in, like, if we add growth, what slice of that do I get? That became big money for me where I was like, holy crap, now we're, now we're no longer talking about 6 figures. Now we're talking 7 figures. And like, that's truly transformational for me at that point.
And what was it like coming into that amount of money? I mean, it, you know, obviously with, with van life, you've, you've learned, uh, to live quite simply. What changes for you as that, as that amount of money comes into your life?
It's interesting because everybody, I think, has a number in their mind. Like, when I hit that number, it's going to be okay. Any number above that, you stop paying attention to it. Like, we talk about money thermostats. Like, you have a baseline number that you consider normal. When you go to a steakhouse, you go to a steakhouse and you're like, oh, it's a $20 steak. That's— I'll pay that every time. Some people go to a steakhouse and they're like, $70 for a steak? That's way too much. Some people are like, $1,000? Sure. We all have a number in all different domains of our life that we consider normal. Above that number, it becomes uncomfortable. Below that number, you don't even think about it, right? It just becomes like, uh, it's yeah, whatever. $5 for that bottle of water. Easy. For me, that number really was like, for whatever reason, $100,000. Like as soon as I passed $100,000, money no longer became like this really macro interesting thing. So from $100,000 to $1 million, it became, oh yeah, that's cool. Just another, like more money, but like doesn't functionally change my life because I don't have a lot of material needs. And then when I hit $1 million, there was an identity shift that occurred where I was like, oh, I'm not that person that I was before. And that was like the big transformation was now thinking of myself as not the person who has accrued money, but the person who can accrue money. And that is like there's a confidence shift that comes once you realize you have the ability to make money, then it's a skill that can't really be taken from you. And for the first time in my life, that's when I felt like nothing can ever break me financially again because I know I can always make it back. It's interesting given everything that's happened this year.
