Finding a Range to Teach At for a Firearm Instructor

Here comes another important tip from the Personal Defense Network. We're here at the Ancient City shooting range with the owner, Chuck Usina. Now, I have the privilege of training here a couple times a year. We come down, we do video clips, but I know that you don't let just anyone come out here and train. What's your advise to someone who's an instructor, who wants to form a relationship with their local range so that they can come out and teach, and apply the skills that they've been developing as an instructor to the students that might be members or might even be from outside of the club.

How do you go about forming that relationship? Well, I'd say the first thing you do is go out introduce yourself. Take him a syllabus of your training. Every, a lot of instructors are worried about their training but it's not so much what's written on paper, it's how they do it. So, the owner needs to know what you're training.

Not everybody is you, or a national instructor that you go, okay, I feel comfortable to let you come in. A range has to worry about bad training, reflects badly on the range. So, you need to take him a video, take him something to show exactly what you're training, and how. Besides that, if you just have a good attitude when you go in, it's great. When I have somebody who comes in and says, you don't know how much I can help your range out by letting me come here and do this, it kinds turns me off immediately, because they're kind of full of their own self and I'm worried how that's gonna come over in their class when they teach.

So, you're looking for someone who, a, has an actual curriculum, has already had a plan that they know how to teach, that they wanna teach, they know what they wanna teach. You wanna see a sample of how they teach, you wanna see that video. Right. Would that also work if they invited you to a class at some other facility first, or? That would be great.

Or is it a lot easier to show up with a video? I have done that before. Okay. I have gone, I've had people come here when I first opened, they wanted to teach, I have just showed up at their class. They didn't know I was there.

I showed up, I saw what they were doing, and we'd say, yay or nay, to let them come here. And when I didn't let some come here, I did tell them why. I want them to know why. A lot of them have become very good instructors and very good in other areas of forward or right here. Down south there's one in particular, he's really worked his way into the civilian market and he's doing very well.

But at the time I didn't feel comfortable and that's my decision as a range owner I have all the liability here. Absolutely, so once you've made that introduction you've presented the material that you want to teach and hopefully you've been able to give some kind of a demonstration or provide a video. If you get a no, I think it's fair to ask why because that will let you know what you need to improve or maybe you guys can come to some agreement, or maybe there was a misunderstanding or maybe you just gonna decide as the instructor that that's not the range that you're going to be able to work with or maybe even that you wanna work with. But having that conversation is really the starting point. It is, it is it really is, because things need to be clarified on what they want to do, sometimes it's just a matter of fact that I already have two instructors doing the same class.

And I don't like overloading the range with this class because all the instructors, they starving. Sure. And you don't want them all to have five people in a class, you want them to fill their class. So that's the other aspect I have to look at, how many carbine classes can I do in a year? I can't do it every month.

Right. You're never gonna fill them all they're a little bit longer more expensive. So that's another aspect but some are better than others, and sometimes you want somebody to come and to teach a particular skill set so that's how I make my decision on this. So you might have a specialty class where you were able to say, "hey okay I get it. I can't teach, you know, CCW and home defense and women defense and vehicular counter ambush and all that stuff.

But you are the only guy in town for vehicular counter ambush and that's gonna be what the range let you come out and teach." Right. And many specialized classes have their own day and its great, breaching. Somebody wants to do a breaching class, not a lot of people do them. That's a great class for people to do but when you do get into the common classes there's a lot of people doing it, so if you specialize in a class sell that one. You might end up working into doing the carbine cause another instructor might drop, cause he's not getting enough students and people love you in particular and I want to come to Rob's class.

And they will come to your class and so you've rolled into that position at that point. So another fact would be that if you can get you're foot in the door just by teaching anything maybe even by being a range officer maybe just by helping out, whatever you can do to establish yourself in that community might eventually lead to you being able to use the range. Exactly. Okay. And then the last thing is I wanna know from your perspective, how important is the résumé?

In other words when you, when some guy comes in and says, "well, I was this, I was this, I was this, I took this class I took this class." Is that incredibly important or is that not important at all, where is that? It's not as important to me if I see a video of them or if I go to a class and I see what they're teaching, you know fundamentals. Because literally lets take one of you're instructors, who was in the military two years, three years, got out civilian life, wants to instruct. They came and took your class, they clicked with it they work really good with it they do the class very well. I don't view him any worse than somebody who's been fifteen years doing this, but they're really teaching fifteen year old stuff that's really not applicable any more.

So for me, the new guy is just as good as the other gentleman whose been doing it for years. So the résumé is important to let you know what kind of background somebody has but is not the end all for my decision on whether somebody can come in or not. And I think that makes perfect sense I agree that at the end of the day the résumé may help with the marketing, may give your foot in the door a little bit again but at the end of the day if you can't teach or you can't teach well, that range officer or the range owner probably shouldn't let you out there to do even, to run that class. Right, right. Well great, Chuck I really appreciate that.

That's important information. If you're an instructor, or you're interested in becoming an instructor or right now you're thinking, "I'm, I'm got a very successful business but I wanna form new relationships." All the advice that Chuck gave you comes from his years of experience, running an amazing range down here and working with a lot of instructors. Again, I feel privileged to be able to train here and I know a lot of the other instructors who get to come to the range feel the same way. Thanks a lot. Thank you Sir.

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