Recruiting Firearm Instructors for Your Range

Here comes another important tip from the Personal Defense Network. We're here at the ancient city shooting range in St. Augustine, Florida. And I'm with Chuck Usina the owner. Now Chuck, when you built this range, you decided that you were going to have training as a part of it. How did you go about building your regular training cadre or maybe finding instructors or choosing through the instructors that were available were wanting to come out here and train? Well, when I first started, of course, people hear you're going to build a range. When you tell them it's going to be a training range you get a lot of people that come in and give you their pitch. They want to come teach. You need to do research. You need to check around. You need to find out about the different instructors what they teach, what kind of instruction they do. There's many different instructors. You've got people who just do NRA style classes up to your tactical training classes. You have specialized teachers who teach certain things along with the common classes. Also, I pretty much went through, try to do some research try to get some feedback from the web. See who had good feedback, who liked their class. And then personally talked to people that have been to these classes and try to find out who it was. You don't want to start and get a bad instructor not so much of bad, but one that just doesn't match with your ideas, of your range of how you want training done. And you don't want to start a relationship and cut it off. So you want to try the ones from the get go. So don't rush into it. Let them do a little bit of research. Find out about the instructors who you would like to bring in and find specialized instructors for different things. I was lucky in the fact that in this community I know a lot of people in this business and I have a lot of people in the law enforcement business. And in our instance with you and me Gary from DDG, is the one who said, "Hey, Rob Pincus would like to do a class down here". Can we use your range? And that's how we met. And it just from there, you know, it's worked out very well but with other instructors that aren't so well-known you have to look at them. You can't just take what they tell you. You have to get some feedback on them before you let them in. Just don't jump into fast and try to take any instructor just to get training going because bad training at a range will always be listed as bad range and it's just not a good thing to get started when you're first starting. Slow and steady is better. So if you're out there and you own a range and you're looking to expand your training maybe you just own a shooting range. And you're thinking about adding in a training component or if you're thinking about opening up a new range and adding training, or having training going on there these are some really good points. You want to make sure that you vet the instructor get some examples of his actual teaching. See some videos, maybe watch his class, talk to people who've trained with them. Talk to people, you know in your community or that you trust about the training. If they happen to be familiar with the guy, and don't rush into it don't try to offer kind of everything at once. Now, when it comes to offering multiple instructors cause you talked about something the idea of some instructors might be specialties, right? They're going to come in and they're just going to do the rifle class and you've got another guy who's going to do. You know, all the handgun stuff. You've got one guy who can kind of do anything. One of the things that I see a lot, is people worried about you know, territorial rights, right? Somebody's gonna say, well, I teach at that range and they're going to try to get that range owner to exclude other instructors now as a traveling instructor that's the end of the day for me because I don't have one home range. I need to be able to pop in and out of a whole bunch of different places. Obviously I love coming down here to teach. And you've got a lot of other guys, that I respect his peers in the industry that teach here as well. How have you dealt with that, that territorial issue? Well, once again, you can't overload your range. So you have to pick a couple instructors and let them teach. It works really good. If you have instructors that teach the same class but on different levels. So they can go, and we're lucky here We have instructors that go from, the one class straight into another one with increasing skill levels. So, you get a couple of instructors don't try to overload it. You can't let everybody come in. But when you get a chance to bring a national instructor in even if you already teach that, it's great. Because half the time, the local instructors want to take your class and they end up coming in and taking it. So, use the instructors that you have but don't exclude anybody. If it is a class that could be one offered that nobody else does. You can let them at least do that one class that they do. Don't say, well, you can't come here. Because I already have people that teach this that's not the idea that I take. I take the idea. Well, if it's the same curriculum as this one and I already have three people teaching it and we're going to offer it again, it's not going to work but, you're doing this in your class. And it's different from this. And people would really enjoy this. Then let's bring them in and let's try it. Well, let's do a class and we'll find out if people enjoy it. If they do, we might build a relationship to go further with it. So, the exclusivity really is topical. It's not territorial. If someone's the breaching guy then somebody is the breaching guy. If somebody is the law enforcement officer's survivor guy, then that's what that guy does. But you could have 10 other instructors doing their specialties as well. Oh yes. And you don't have to have just one instructor teaching combat carving because they have different styles of teaching certain individuals who's going to take a class or different skill levels and their different mindset. So if you get the basic civilian never been law enforcement never been military. You need to have a little bit softer touch with them instructing. Whereas if you get a person who's prior military or prior law enforcement or always been very athletic mountain climbing they can take a little bit of different treatment. So that you can move with an instructor that's more suited towards that. So having a diverse array of instructors that can fit the different needs of your different students is also an important facet. Right? Exactly. Because, like I said, one instructor usually cannot teach everything and usually won't teach everybody an instructor usually has a specific group of people that they target. And a lot of them that try to get too diverse then it becomes a conflict at the range. I get people that say I teach everything from concealed weapons classes all the way to, you know, tactical medical forward. Right. They can't do that because they can't be good at all of those. They're 30 years old and they haven't had enough experience in all of these things to do them as well as they need to do. So, they need to really pick one of these things and find an instructor who does fit that. And like I said the most important thing is you need to watch them. You need to take time out of your schedule. I know it's hard when you build a range you need to go watch your instructors before you let them come in. Yeah, incredibly important. You don't want that surprise as the range owner when somebody shows you a video of a class that was going on on your range and you say, oh wow. I never saw that before. Little too late at that point. Oh yeah. Because everything these days, shows up on YouTube. Oh, absolutely. And that's the death blow. If you get an instructor, not watching his class, and you have guys with magazines and guns walking and swinging them around, being unsafe, that will push more people away from your range and coming to classes for your instructor, it'll hurt both groups. So you really have to make sure about the integrity in the instructor and how they watch people and how they conduct their class. Excellent. I think that's a great point to end on at the end of the day, it all has to be safe. You need to make sure that your members are not going to get hurt in the class. You need to make sure they're enjoying the class you make sure they're getting quality instruction. And quite honestly, I would say that some of the range instructors that I deal with that are local guys are usually very open to the idea that some of the guys like me who travel around are coming in. As you said, they are not territorial. I almost see that as a big red flag. If some guy is saying, no I teach here and no one else can come in. That may be a little bit of an issue that we want to look into a little closer both in the instructing industry and also as a range owner. Right. You don't want any instructor trying to do that if you do get rid of them. Because they're going to stop... My main purpose for having the training range here is to provide good training for people. And if I can't and I only have generically named Bob training as the only guy I have here. I'm not going to offer the diverse good training that my members want in any end it's going to hurt both that person and me because the people can only take the same class so many times. I agree. Absolutely. Well, listen, this information if you are that range owner, if you are that range manager or you're thinking about developing or training range the information that Chuck's putting out is incredible. Take a look at his website, ancient city shooting range. I appreciate you sharing this insight. You know, it's a very big industry and there's a lot of people all over the world and especially all over the United States that need this information. You've got a lot of experience doing it. Appreciate you sharing it with us. Thank you, sir. - Thanks. Be sure to check out the Personal Defense Network for more important tips, just like that one.