-Which form of business structure would you choose if you were starting your own shooting sports business?
If I were to start my own shooting sports business, which I plan on doing, I would form an LLC or limited liability company. This allows me to shape the company in a sole proprietor fashion without the liabilities falling directly on me like with having just a sole proprietorship.
- What challenges do you foresee for setting up your own shooting sports business?
Usually, one of the biggest hurdles someone has when starting a shooting sports business that has a range for live fire activities is the startup cost. Using companies like Action Target makes the actual setup process easy but costs a ton of your initial startup capital. However, you can opt to build the range yourself if you’re good with a welder and know the basic setup of this type of facility. Having worked with two different facilities, both taking these different approaches, I can say that building the range yourself saves a ton of startup costs and gives you the ability to make the range operation as simple or complex as you like. Action Target systems are complex and use computers and microchips that read exact distances and can-do things like timed drills with turning targets but with this technology comes problems that cost even more money to repair or replace. Rigging a simple motor to a pully setup and welding the carrier boxes yourself is as simple as it gets and though you sacrifice the ability to do some of the cool things, repairs are cheap, and you have a better understanding of the systems having built them yourself.
- What challenges do you foresee for managing a shooting sports business?
Managing a shooting sports facility has its own set of challenges. Once a facility becomes popular and you get more and more contracts and customers, the business has a lot of moving parts. Managing my current facility here in Texas feels like home and though the business grows year over year, it still has not reached the scale of the facility I managed back in Maryland. My old facility ran at an almost 24/7 capacity with police contracts in the early mornings, a wide customer base during the day and security contracts running shoot quals late night into the early hours of the morning. If you start a shooting sports business that becomes popular, then staffing becomes a challenge. It’s relatively easy to manage a small facility with little staff and limited hours but running one that operates 24/7 becomes difficult.
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