Builder Profile
Our Builder Profile series highlights the history and goals of the people around the world who have, literally, built this industry from the ground up.
READY AND ABEE
Experientially-oriented ABEE continues to evolve while focusing on the many things it does well.
BY BOB CURLEY
Ryan Olson first climbed a ropes course while on an eighth-grade school field trip, where he met ABEE, Inc., founder Jeff Boeke. Olson was hooked immediately—on the spot, he told Boeke he wanted to work for him someday. By the time Olson was a high-school senior, he had begun to fulfill that wish. Eventually, he bought the company. Olson has been owner and president of ABEE since 2010. That step has allowed him to help others realize the potential of adventure education to foster team- work and creative problem-solving—a goal that has inspired Olson’s educa- tional and career choices ever since that fateful field trip.
For his high school senior project, Olson returned to ABEE to get trained as a facilitator, then guided a group of middle school and high-school students through the same Wisconsin challenge course (still extant at Rogers Behavioral Health in Oconomowoc) he had fallen in love with four years earlier. “It was really cool to see those kids experience what I had in eighth grade,” he says. Another formative moment for Olson came when a group came to the course with a woman in a wheelchair at a time when no courses were purpose-built to be accessible. “We worked through the problem and were able to get her out of the chair and 10 feet up in the air,” he says. “She was crying because it was the first time she had been able to look down on her chair after having been injured in a skydiving accident. That was a really powerful experience for me, to be a part of something so simple but that for her meant everything.” Earning a degree of understanding. College detoured Olson away from the ropes, but not very far. He attended the University of Wisconsin and earned a degree in recreational therapy with an emphasis on therapeutic recreation. “I never used that degree in a clini- cal setting, but use it a lot in the real world,” he says.
Olson spent several years as a college professor, teaching prospective phys- ical-education teachers about ropes courses, caving, rock-climbing, and oth- er outdoor activities. “I really enjoyed training future leaders,” he says. ABEE owner and president Ryan Olson, who first met company founder Jeff Boeke on a field trip in eighth grade.
FROM THE BEGINNING
READY AND ABLE
Olson was no fan of traditional school- ing. “I was an active kid; I had a hard time sitting in class and paying atten- tion to someone teaching. I wanted to be outside,” he says. During that first climb, he discovered that different folks shined when the educational laboratory took place in the outdoors. “Some of the kids who weren’t leaders in the classroom really stepped up to help” on the ropes course, he recalls. “It made you look at people in a different way.”
On a 2009 fishing trip with Boeke, however, the ABEE founder revealed his plans to retire the following year. “He said it was time to talk because he always knew I wanted to run the company,” Olson says. “So, in 2010, I left school and bought ABEE.” Boeke—a pioneer in the adventure park industry and a founding member of the Association for Challenge Course Tech- nology (ACCT)—stayed with ABEE in an emeritus role, working on some favorite projects and offering advice as needed. “He was my mentor for many years, and still is,” says Olson.
Stepping stone to higher learning. That discovery made a lasting impression.
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