Tap Into Your Team’s Strengths

No business escaped the trials and tribulations of forced closures and customer panic last year. It was a painful and uncertain time. On the other hand, it was a remarkable opportunity for innovation and growth.

Innovation in our industry is critical to keeping it on par with other unrelated commercial industries. Until the nascent arrival of new business owners in the past 10 years, our industry had a very traditional outlook. Many new businesses, like ours, are innovating in key customer service areas to provide new takes on old tricks. 2020 was a particularly resourceful year for Shoot Smart and our team.

We utilize a leadership team of senior employees from a variety of segments in our business — managers, inventory, marketing, sales and gunsmithing — to stay fresh and find new opportunities. We have a strong focus on data and thinking ahead, making us agile. This isn’t to say we don’t struggle with traditions and implementing change, but we’re constantly engaged in conversations about how we can improve efficiency, profitability and customer service. More importantly, we also encourage our lower-level team members to make suggestions and follow through on improvements.

Here are some examples of recent initiatives that helped us succeed over the past couple years.

Targets: More Bang For Buck

One of the simplest ways to add profit to a gun-range business is right under your nose. Much of what customers purchase are high-cost items with variable margins. Think: ammunition (when it was readily available) with varied margin ranges, or guns, with traditionally small margins. Lane rentals, while significant, aren’t easily controllable — you usually can’t easily add an extra lane rental. But targets provide an underrated opportunity to add profitability at scale.

Most targets sell for $1 to $3 each at our three stores, at a cost of roughly $0.15 or less on average. (Generally, costs are lower on the most popular red and green silhouettes.)

Annual lane rentals for us vary, but exceeded 102,000 in 2020. So, selling targets at an average of $2 each would generate $200,000+ in revenue.

In 2019, we had an internal leadership meeting focused on ways to improve profitability. An area the team identified for focus was target sales. Could we improve our average sales per lane rental and add bottom line profit? For each additional target sold per lane rental, we could expect $0.90 in profit. With a little more than 100,000 lane rentals, we could raise the bottom line by nearly $100,000.

Something we implemented after the meeting was target bundles, an idea spawned from the range manager’s experience working with our customers. Whereas in 2017 we might have sold one or two targets per lane rental, we’re now bundling four or six targets for the price of three or four — doubling or tripling our sales volume. And this extra revenue goes straight to the bottom line. Funny how a piece of paper can be so valuable!

Lane Rates

Perhaps one of the best, most recent insights to come from a team member was a Feb. 2020 suggestion we change our hours and rates. At Shoot Smart, we charge weekday and weekend rates and set weekday and weekend hours. Our lane rental sales volume is greatest on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, often greater than Monday–Thursday combined.
Therefore, our rates and hours reflect the increased demand and the increased costs of manpower on peak times (but only on Saturday and Sunday). For many years, however, we treated Friday as a weekday … until last February.

An up-and-coming assistant store manager made a bold suggestion for how we classify Friday. She proposed Friday, a heavy day for membership traffic (members typically don’t pay lane rentals during their visit), should be reconsidered a weekend day. Many customers visiting on the day have Fridays off, working four-day weeks. To offset the lower revenues from members and handle the volume of non-members, she believed Friday should have weekend hours and rates.

With some coaching from senior management, the assistant manager put together a business case (in Excel) demonstrating the profit advantages of both an extra hour and the higher weekend rates. (The basis, by the way, was members would gain an extra hour — removing them from lane use later in the day while having no effect on member rates, while walk-in customers would little notice the added costs.)

The bottom line: There were few downsides and we had been leaving money on the table.

Now, our customers are served Monday through Thursday (weekday rates) from 10:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. and Friday through Sunday (weekend rates), 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. To date, there are no known complaints.

Don’t Get Left Behind

The key to success in good and bad times is to be innovative, flexible and agile. If your business is anything like mine, no two days are alike. Every day should be a new opportunity to rethink a product, service or process. Engaging your team (and even your customers) in innovative thinking, risk mitigation and planning is good business sense.

Your frontline team is at the junction of your ideas and your customers’ experiences; trust them to know what’s working and what’s not. With their input, you can be nimble and forward thinking. Without them, you’re going to be left behind.

Jared Sloane is the operations director at Shoot Smart, with three locations in the Dallas–Fort Worth area.

Click To Read More Shooting Industry April 2021 Issue Now!