Bridge Climb Founder - Paul Cave

Imagine a business built around leasing an Aussie icon that takes 10 years of planning to get off the ground, and a entrepreneur so obsessed he won’t let anything stand in his way. Camille Howard talks to Paul Cave, chairman and founder of BridgeClimb, about the dizzying heights his seemingly impossible dream has scaled.

The view from the top of the Sydney Harbour Bridge is spectacular. Looking out for miles across the harbour, even on a wet morning it’s hard not to be impressed. Climbing even half of the 1,439 stairs adds to the sense of achievement. It’s no wonder Paul Cave, BridgeClimb founder, knew his idea would be a hugely successful business.

Like the view from the Bridge, Cave’s business history is impressive. From marketing and general management roles in B and D Roll-a-Door, founding and building the Amber Group over 22 years, and acting as non-executive director of Dominos Pizza, Cave is no stranger to hard work and carving a niche for himself.

After conducting a YPO (Young Presidents Organisation) World Congress in 1989, including a climb of that famous landmark, the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the seed for Cave’s next big adventure was sown. It would take almost a decade to get off the ground, but this self-proclaimed obsessive was up to the challenge.

It seemed simple: create a business around opening the bridge climbing experience to the paying public. It would involve leasing the bridge from the relevant state authorities, largely the Roads and Traffic Authority (RTA), and Cave reckoned on two years of careful planning and negotiations before getting underway. Estimations fell short and it took close to nine years before the first commercial step was taken on the Bridge.

“It could be a story about obstructive bureaucrats,” Cave says, as a way of explaining BridgeClimb’s chequered past, “but it could also be a story about enlightened bureaucrats, because some were enormously helpful and without them it would never have happened. There were people in the RTA, like boss at the time Max Moore-Wilton, who thought it was an interesting idea and that helped facilitate it.”

Not that he blames the less enthusiastic for the delay. “It was a pretty gusty call to ask the government to lease out the Bridge, which would probably cost about a billion dollars to replace today, so to lease it to a private individual was a big call,” he says. “It’s understandable that they wanted to know it was thoroughly researched, and we put a lot of work into the business plan.”

The First Step

Cave laughs when asked if he realised it was going to take so long to get approval from all the stakeholders. “If someone had said this was going to take 10 years, I never would have started it, so sometimes it’s good not to know.”

The driving force behind his persistence in his clever business idea was a personal interest in the Bridge. His father-in-law purchased the very first train ticket across it in 1932, and Cave still has the ticket, along with many other pieces of Bridge memorabilia. “That was really important to me.”