“I cannot explain the magical power of a big wheel that turns an adult back into a 6-year-old, but somehow it does.”
Danny Walls, co-owner and CEO of the Atlanta-based Adult Big Wheel Club, made that realization in 2016 when he came across an adult-size Big Wheel-style drift trike and decided to buy one for himself.
“They’re kind of an expensive purchase, but you can’t be a 40-something-year-old on a big wheel by yourself,” Danny Walls said. “So, you have to have a second one.”
Danny Walls and his wife Marta didn’t buy a pair of big wheels to start their own mobile teambuilding events company; they bought a pair of big wheels to have fun. They took them for spins along the Atlanta Beltline, a 22-mile loop of trails, parks and future-transit connecting 45 neighborhoods in Georgia’s capital city, “and we couldn’t get to the end of the street without a car stopping.”
“They’d roll down the window and someone would ask, ‘Is that a big wheel for adults?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, it is.’ And people were simply amazed,” Danny Walls said. “They’d ask, ‘How can I be on one of those? Where do I get one?’ We couldn’t go more than 50 or 100 yards without somebody stopping us.”
And that gave Danny Walls an idea.
Building a Big Wheel Business
Because people often rent bikes and scooters on the Atlanta Beltline, and everyone Danny and Marta Walls pedaled past showed so much interest in their throwback trikes, Danny Walls thought about starting an adult big wheel rental company, running the business as a “weekend hobby” to make a little extra money.
“We explored that option for a month or two, then I started to realize I’m already working 40-45 hours a week, and I’m going to come sit here for nine hours on Saturday and Sunday and make maybe X the number of dollars?” he said. “I don’t think that’s worth it.”
Danny and Marta Walls were both working corporate jobs at the time and their experiences as “cubicle dwellers” who frequently attended industry conferences inspired them to take a different business approach.
“Whenever someone suggested teambuilding, no one could help themselves from groaning. It was never engaging or inclusive of everybody,” Danny Walls said. “Not everybody wanted to escape the room or throw an axe or build a bike. Not everybody is physically able to zipline; a lot of people are afraid of heights. It was hard to find any teambuilding in what we were doing, and I said, ‘There’s got to be something better.’”
Danny Walls researched corporate teambuilding offerings across the country and found the same “cookie-cutter companies” practically everywhere he looked, all offering slightly varied versions of the same thing.
“We wanted to create something that disrupted that and made an impact,” Danny Walls said, and adult big wheels became the answer. “We sat down at the kitchen table with a piece of paper and a pen, and we designed a game and a challenge that’s not based on physical ability, that’s not based on speed. It doesn’t matter if you’re 25 or 75, in shape or out of shape.
“We wanted it to look and feel like a race because we wanted to get people’s competitive spirit up,” Danny Walls continued. “But it also needed to be inclusive of everybody, it needed to be fun, and it needed to actually be about teambuilding.”
Out of that brainstorming session at the kitchen table came a one-of-a-kind teambuilding event challenge game that involves a 30-foot inflatable start line, 15-foot-tall checkered flags, game boards, buckets, game pieces, a PA system, music and more.
“It’s kind of like one, big, giant outdoor board game, if you will,” Danny Walls said. They first put it to the test at a local company Christmas party for 40 employees in 2017.
“We were inside their 100,000-square-foot-facility and the game was only on paper,” Danny Walls said. “We’d played it in the house a little bit on foot, but that was it, and we just thought, ‘Hopefully this will work.’”
When participants showed up in custom Christmas racing outfits, embroidered sweaters with their numbers and company logo, and helmets with lights and reindeer antlers, Danny Walls realized there was no room for “hopefully” anymore—it had to work.
“These people were really serious about this event. They had trophies set out. They had mini bottles of champagne. They were ready—and the concept wasn’t even proven yet. It was on a piece of paper,” Danny Walls said. “But it worked exactly the way it was supposed to. They loved it, and it was in that moment I thought, ‘This is something we can actually do.’”
The Adult Big Wheel Club and its signature big wheels teambuilding challenge took off in 2018, and Danny and Marta Walls have been turning adults working for companies including Chick-fil-A, Delta Airlines, Coca-Cola, ESPN and Salesforce back into 6-year-olds ever since.
[Related: 5 Teambuilding Ideas on the Beach for Your Next Event]
How It Works: Behind the Big Wheels
The Adult Big Wheel Club’s most popular teambuilding Big Wheel Relay Collection Challenge—as well as the additional teambuilding activities they have since added to their catalog—is centered around three core values.
“They’re the three things we really thought were missing from most teambuilding events, and they’re also skills people can actually use in the workplace, because I’m still not sure what my sales team was learning by throwing axes at a wall,” Danny Walls joked. “The three core values participants have to master at our challenges are communication skills, memory and how to be consistent with information.”
When groups (up to 320) show up to an Adult Big Wheel Club event, it looks like they’ll be pedaling around a typical teambuilding relay racecourse. They’re split into as many as six teams, each with their own designated color—and then things start to get interesting.
“There’s a game board. It’s about two-by-four-feet wide and it has 10 squares on it,” Danny Walls said. “Each game board lies flat on the ground, and teams have to complete the board by gathering the 10 items that are their team’s color. These items are in what we call the Challenge Zone, and the only way they can get the correct items for their team from the Challenge Zone to their game board is by mastering the communication, memory and consistency components.”
Riders take turns going around the course, entering the Challenge Zone to collect items or gather specific information while other team members stay back and work to figure the game out. The key to the challenge is that every team member must have exactly the same information to navigate the challenge zone and complete their game board correctly.
“There’s no need for speed; it generally slows groups down. And the way we design the game is so not everybody has to ride the big wheel to compete in the challenge. It’s not about physical ability,” Danny Walls said. “It’s about collaboration, accuracy, efficiency. The teams that truly work together, that communicate the most effectively, they’re the teams that are going to win.”
At the end of every Big Wheel Relay Collection Challenge, Danny and Marta Walls fill out a teambuilding scorecard based on how participants performed across the Adult Big Wheel Club’s three core values, giving companies detailed takeaways to help identify team strengths and weaknesses.
“After hosting hundreds of events, you get into the nuts and bolts of those core values, and you notice cues—I call them subcategories—of those things that make it easier for you to see what participants excel at and where they need help,” Danny Walls said. “We have a clipboard and check off columns as they go, taking notes so we can put that into a PDF and presentation for the client to say, ‘Hey, this is where your team is at based on all of these skills that were needed to master the challenge. They excelled here, but here may be some areas for improvement.”
Danny and Marta Walls have a fourth “hidden” teambuilding value, and it’s that while teams are working toward communication, memory and consistency of information during the Big Wheel Relay Collection Challenge, they are also having fun.
“‘Put those skills into the workplace,’ I tell them, ‘and I guarantee your work is going to get done more efficiently, more accurately and your team will have a better, cohesive working environment,’” Danny Walls said. “Work will get done quicker. Your clients will be more happy. Management will be more happy, and that’s our goal—to make sure they are a better team when they cross the finish line.”
[Related: The Z: The Benefits and Appeal of Competitive Socializing]
A Big Success
As they approach the 10-year anniversary of the Adult Big Wheel Club, Danny and Marta Walls are working toward growing their business while appreciating how far they’ve come since 2016.
In January of this year, they participated in the Playoff Fan Central event inside the Georgia World Congress Center, which drew 20,000-plus college football fans ahead of the College Football Playoff National Championship game January 20.
“We also completed our first cross-country event for Chick-fil-A's NEXT convention in San Diego—10,000-plus attendees over three days—and it was kind of like our rock-star moment,” Walls said. “We’ve done large-scale events for them before, but this one had the most moving parts—six or seven tractor trailers, flights, hotels, 400,000 square feet in the San Diego Convention Center, a custom-built track. We had about 1,100 riders over a three-day period, and it was so much fun.”
The Wallses are currently working on a proposal for a student welcome day event this August with the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. They’re also hoping the Adult Big Wheel Club will be featured again in the 2025 ESPN8 The Ocho event—a special four-day, 54-hour program block on ESPN Inc. networks that showcases “seldom-seen obscure sports.”
“Everybody’s been bowling, but nobody’s done this,” Danny Walls said. “It’s about choosing something different that still checks all the boxes and delivers on ROI. It’s purposeful, it’s engaging and it’s fun.”
[Related: 3 Unique Teambuilding Activities in Milwaukee for Your Next Event]
Additional Offerings
The success of their Big Wheel Relay Collection Challenge so far has the Wallses considering bigger business opportunities that could take the Adult Big Wheel Club to the next level. While they work on growing their company, they are also focusing on growing their list of offerings.
“Once somebody sees the big wheels, that tends to be all they want,” Danny Walls laughed. “But we have a lot more to offer. There really is something for everybody.”
The Adult Big Wheel Club’s exclusive Big Wheel Relay Collection Challenge is also available in a non-big wheel format, tailored for indoors and more of an office-like setting.
The Adult Big Wheel Club also offers custom company trivia, a new take on a classic quiz game in which the Wallses work with clients to create customized questions based on the company and the industry it’s a part of, designing topics centered around company culture, mission and product offerings as well as pop culture, music, history, science, geography and more.
“We have a 10-foot projection screen, a giant PA system, music videos. We include imagery, we incorporate prizes into it,” Danny Walls said. “There’s like a gameshow aspect for them to get the questions to us. They don’t just raise their hands. There’s a path they have to follow on the floor to get the questions to us for extra points.”
The Adult Big Wheel Club also offers workshops on everything from sales to international diversity and inclusion to hierarchy disruption. Workshops can be combined with teambuilding events to elevate the experience but can also be booked separately. For larger groups, the Adult Big Wheel Club offers the opportunity to book workshops in a speaking format, too.
“We also offer custom fundraising events, which we are really excited about this year,” Danny Walls said. “I think companies could do something really great with these fundraisers as a CSR component. It does take a little bit more planning, but we give them a template based on how much money they want to raise, and then we work with them to design a fundraiser format based on their goals.”
However a company decides to work with the Adult Big Wheel Club, Danny and Marta Walls guarantee a unique experience no matter what.
“It’s going to be brand new, something they’ve never done before,” Danny Walls said. “And we guarantee it will be fun!”
To learn more about the Adult Big Wheel Club, visit adultbigwheelclub.com.
