Can’t Find 9mm?

Stop Whining And Try Something Else!

Written By B.A. Stear

2021

Back in my graduate school days, I found myself in a management class at the University of Colorado Boulder. There the professor held a pen in the air and then proceeded to drop it. It fell abruptly to the floor and she asked the class a question: “What made the pen fall?” The class responded overwhelmingly with the answer: Gravity. “Wrong,” she said, “it fell because I released my grip.”

The point of the exercise was to help us determine what factors we can control in business and what factors we cannot. It’s a lot easier to not let go of the pen than to reverse gravity. Focus on the factors you can control.

The ammunition shortage is not within your control, but modifying your business model is controllable.

The ammunition shortage of the past year is a great example of this lesson. It’s nearly impossible to find a pallet of 9mm at a reasonable price. Ranges are now faced with a dilemma — spend your day tracking down this elusive item or come up with a way to make up the lost ammunition revenue. I would argue the ammunition shortage is not within your control, but modifying your business model is controllable.

Our ranges in Denver were faced with the same challenge. Initially our response was to spend time trying to find ammunition, but the eureka moment came when I remembered the falling pen. Ranges make money in a variety of ways, mainly from selling range time, memberships, retail items and classes/courses. If you can’t generate the same revenue from your retail items because of low inventory, you should be looking at what other revenue streams you can control. Adding one or two additional (i.e., new) classes weekly could help offset the lost revenue from the 9mm shortage.

Your Most Profitable Revenue Stream

Here’s how to break it down: Add up all the 9mm sales from the “before times.” In 2019, for example, your total 9mm revenue was, say $100,000. If you run at a 50% margin, this means you spent $50,000 on 9mm (product cost) and made $50,000 of profit. You now know to offset the 9mm profit, you need to add another revenue stream generating at least $50,000 in profit. What is the most profitable revenue stream in our industry? Classes!

Typically, classes with a high student-to-instructor ratio are very profitable. For instance, in a class of 10 students and one instructor, the profit margin might be north of 85%. If you want to generate an extra $50,000 in profit using this math, you’ll need to sell about $60,000 worth of classes.

Spread across 12 months, you’ll need to add another one or two classes equating to $5,000 in monthly revenue ($1,250 per week). In our area, attending a basic pistol course will cost about $125. If 10 students sign up, you just generated $1,250. If you can replicate this for 50 weeks, you just made up for not having 9mm available to sell.

Getting Creative

I’m not saying adding another basic pistol course is the way to go, but there are some creative courses available that are very popular. I know Ultimate Defense Firing Range & Training Center (udrange.com) just outside of St. Louis offers a class on how to survive a carjacking. Creative course content such as this is a fun and lucrative way to increase your total business revenue, and if you’re not the creative type, a lot of this curriculum is available for purchase. Last time I checked, Ultimate Defense had around 12 curricula you could purchase (including the carjacking course!) to use at your own facility.

If you currently run a range you probably already have qualified instructors in-house. Challenge them to come up with new classes that can be produced easily. Their ideas could turn into easy solutions for long-term revenue gains. Curriculum developed in-house will generally not require outside certifications (which cost time and money to maintain). By asking around, we discovered a lot of our instructors are ammunition reloaders, so a workshop on handloading ammunition was easy to develop.

Adding classes (especially non-live-fire classes) should help offset low ammo inventory, but searching for more ammunition is still important. After all, not having enough ammunition to provide students during your core classes presents its own problems, and not renting guns because you’re out of ammo also kills that revenue stream, too.

Classes represent a significant source of untapped revenue for many facilities.
Get creative with class offerings — and challenge your team to develop easy-to-implement (and fun) concepts!

Watch Out For Scammers!

In the event you do find some ammunition at a reasonable price, be warned many scammers are out there who prey on scarcity. It wasn’t long ago when disposable surgical masks were $1 each and companies promising to have millions available suddenly appeared (but you had to prepay and wait for a shipment never to arrive). This is happening right now with ammunition.

Here are a couple tips learned over the past year. If you do find a “new” distributor with ammunition, always ask for some range references that have actually received their ammunition shipments. Always look to network with your industry partners and find out what’s working for them. You can also check to see how old the online reviews of the company are (avoid anything less than 12 months old), and also verify with the state where they’re incorporated to see if they have an active sales tax license and are registered with the local Secretary of State. If it sounds too good to be true it probably is.

There are also many areas with local ammo manufacturers who may be overlooked but could prove to be a valuable resource when ammo is scarce. Standing in line outside of sporting goods stores isn’t ideal, but if the box of ammo convinces a customer to sign up for a membership or fills another seat in your classroom it could be worth it.

In the end, if you do have to prepay for your order (either full or partial), be sure to use a major credit card capable of disputing the charges if the ammunition shipment never arrives. The extra 3% fee is a cheap insurance policy. If they only accept PayPal, run away immediately. If you do need to pay inflated prices, try to avoid overbuying ammo in these times because when prices normalize you don’t want to be stuck with a bunch of overpriced ammo.

Focus On What You Can Control

Hopefully these ideas help you stay happy and healthy during these challenging times. I would argue even without the ammunition scarcity, it’s still smart business to be looking for ways to increase your revenue across all of the areas. Eventually when things stabilize, you’ll get the ammunition revenue back along with the revenue from the fun classes you added. In the meantime, focus on the factors you can control!

B.A. Stear is the founder of Shoot Indoors Franchising LLC, a Colorado-based company that supports a growing number of shooting range franchises under the Shoot Indoors brand, and the designer of the patented Taper-Range.

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