Been wanting to start a gun store and indoor range for a few years now. I’ve got about $300k in cash and could probably get a business loan.
Is this a viable business? Or will this be just a theft magnet for vibrant youth?
Opening a gun store. Good idea?
You have to really love it, because from what I hear you don’t make much money doing it. Very hard to compete with online purchases, and insurance to prevent the nogs from destroying the range is pricey
Serious answer OP: it's too complicated with too many variables and location-specific ones to give any generic answer. If you've already started your own business in the past this is a lot easier. If you haven't you should know that starting ANY business yourself is really really hard work. Tons of stuff has to be done yourself or carefully supervised yourself that has nothing to do with the business activity, from keeping the books to cleaning and maintenance, and that's in businesses with way less liability considerations. I'd really suggest seeing if some local community college or even state incubator agency is running a semester class you can take on business law, startup considerations and so on. You need to do your research and know how to think about it.
- What's the competition in the area look like? What's your competitive advantage?
Like, if there are already a dozen established choices what are you even doing? Remote areas will have different pluses/minuses.
- What FFL do you plan to go for? Do you plan to deal in NFA weapons?
More profit potential, whole 'nothing can of worms.
- Can you gunsmith and service well too?
- What are state/local regs like? Hostile/supportive?
- Construction permits? Local construction scene?
- To what extent can you minimize future costs using the building and for how much capital vs what you've got?
And on and on. You'll need a full written business plan. You'll probably want a lawyer to look it over and make sure you don't footgun yourself. All this before any inventory. It can be done but it's not trivial.
>Been wanting to start a gun store and indoor range for a few years now
What, did you contract FOMO during the Scamdemic? Even after all of this you're not supposed to expect profit for at least two years
no one with a brain buys from a store, so your business will be selling turkshit shotguns and sub-psa clones to criminals and morons
make a range instead.
put movie posters in the lobby and rent the post-samples of each star: rambo's m60. fnc from heat. tec-9 from falling down. etc
People do buy guns from stores particularly in rural areas, but hybrid operations are definitely the best. Really you'd want to combine a quality range, with rentals, and gun repair business, and then have the "store" aspect kind of be attached to that such that they all reinforce each other. Be a "destination" where someone will go regularly even without any specific need to buy. Then maybe something catches their eye on top. Be a really good business in terms of services too, shipping and receiving stuff. Ultimately though you need an angle.
Of course a lot of this is potentially more expensive.
How many years until someone goes all in on making a 'fun' themed shooting range with the targets moving all over the place? Was so disappointed when I got into guns and found out this wasn't a thing.
Do you guys remember those western animatronic games where they had like full metal guns that you’d shoot lasers at like a saloon scene with little targets all over. And if you hit something it would move and make a noise. Like hit the cowboys beer and he’d lift it up and drink. Or hit a bird and it would flutter and chirp. I miss those.
You gotta think about the logistics, dude. You can't use steel because there's no way to control the angles and you'll get ricochets, so you're forced to use destructible targets.
Imagine how much effort the Merchant's staff has to go through when you miss that bonus target and they have to replace all 50 targets so you can do it again. How much you think each target costs? You only have one guy doing it at a time and then 20 minutes of replacing targets, so it ends up costing you like 50 bucks every run. I doubt anyone is willing to drop $100 to shoot at an arcade-style range for 2 minutes.
Honestly making it .22s only could be a lot of fun.
>no recoil so fun for literally everyone
>not as much damage to frames
>cheap af
>good variety of guns to use
>all the targets are blank
>have 3-4 projectors on swivel mounts
>can choose projected target from tablet at shooting bench
>can submit whatever picture you want as long as it fits the dimensions
>upload pic related to shoot at
You could probably do it with normal indoor range target hangers and paper targets, just mounted to tracks that go side to side or whatever. Ought to be pretty quick to swap the targets out too.
>You can't use steel because there's no way to control the angles and you'll get ricochets
Are there seriously people on /k/ who have never heard of frangible ammo before? Come on anon.
homie I ain't paying $1/round for range ammo
lol wut? You mean 50cpr? Frangible is literally the cheapest 300bo ammo you can get right now.
And as far as paying more we're talking some fancy motion dynamic projector target game thing, or at least popups. You'd be paying premium price for it one way or another. Maybe they figure out a good system for rapid motion hanging paper that costs more, so you can use whatever ammo but the rental price of using the range at all is much higher. Maybe being able to use steel makes the range itself way cheaper to operate, at the cost of requiring more expensive ammo. But they'll need to do something anon.
Frick you
>Frick you
>tips floor at a slight angle forward with an opening all the brass goes in
>ban any sort of bag attachment
now remember no stealin brass son runnin' ah honest bizness here :^)
That shits gonna get full of unburnt powder and you’re gonna have a range fire
Picrel plus metal targets and a reasonable distance and eyepro. If you want paint instead of a projector like anon suggested, simple spraypaint + metal stencils works fine if you paint them every x amount of rounds. Don't even have to do the full target, just the parts that get hit. Or the colors that get hit.
>1850 fps .22lr
Is it called the MEATEATER because it ruins meat? I use CCI stingers for small game usually and even those are borderline overkill imo.
That's what I always thought about that ammo as the one who posted it, too. Imagine how much fricking fragmentation is going to go on in that and how big the wound channel would be. And while yes, you can cut out the bad shot up meat, holy frick is powdered copper/plastic bullets going to do some damage. And just what I want in my meat, plastic and copper dust; I'd use lead instead.
>inb4 muh lead
At least it isn't powdered compressed lead and stays in larger pieces, even if small (hard to see or find) pieces exist. I do wonder, though, if it has good penetration. Maybe good for foxes or animals you're hunting just for their fur where you just want to do a frickton of damage to the chest and have minimal if any passthrough to preserve the pelt? However, it may be decent self defense ammo. Frangible as frick, though, so penetration may be shit. Wonder what it'd do out of a Beretta 21A compared to normal 1200fps hollowpoints? Even a gelatin test may be interesting.
I think lead 38gr 1200fps hollowpoints do the best for small game. Not sure for raccoons or foxes but I've taken groundhogs with no issue. Very few lost squirrels as well. Some do minimal damage, others I see straight through the wound channel (on squirrels). Just dumb luck, angles, and consistency of the meat of the squirrel. Goes well most of the time but there's some of those outliers where you wonder how the hell it didn't drop dead instantly.
why not wood or thick cardboard?
in California you can't ship ammo to your house so online ammo prices don't matter as much, but there's probably laws and taxes that make it harder for physical stores too
if someone has a FFL03 and a COE they can have ammo shipped to them. buying ammo at the store is a pain in the dick because they have to do background checks on you now. takes fricking forever to do each one. mfw i ordered ammo online at a sportsmans warehouse because it was cheap and went in person. holy frick it was 90 mins to get my fricking ammo and go because of the line.
Plenty of people buy guns in stores.
They probably make their money on ammo and accessories more than the guns.
Most people, believe it or not, are really bad at just looking up info on their own or doing any kind of research and would rather let the guy at the gun store just steer them the entire time.
Start a small tactical gear company instead. You can work from home in some cases. Get a 3D printer or learn to make bandoleers, slings, chest rigs, patches or plate carriers. Make something to stand out from the competition and shill your shit online.
depends on your location.
You'd be much better off creating a home FFL and doing transfers for the neighborhood.
Not home, have a separate building, but even a mobile home or simple small one story thing 50' away would be fine. But yeah, the real classic way to start this is usually to begin as an FFL doing some basic gunsmithing and transfers. The initial capital expenditure is low, the amount of inventory (frozen/risk capital) you're holding is low, and you can learn a lot of the regs and books in a fairly low risk way. If you're into guns you also amortize the costs a bit with value to yourself, as an FFL you'll save in time/speed on your own purchases. Make a small profit on that ignoring fixed license cost, and establish a bit of name and customer base, figure out what's popular.
THEN you can start thinking about an actual gun store. Preferably with partners.
9th post best post. Seriously, don't fall into the trap of jumping into a field with no experience, especially when you're feeling that money burning a hole in your pocket with inflation. Invest it in gold or stocks in the meantime, but don't, DO NOT do the dipshit move that so many people wanting to be entrepreneurs do and blow a quarter mil on keeping a place barely afloat for 3 years then having to write off the entire venture as a loss.
Anon this is a Ukraine board, go leave chuddie
Is there some kind of security standard for opening a gun store? Like some legal minimum or even a guideline in terms of locks, cameras, alarms, etc?
>Is there some kind of security standard for opening a gun store? Like some legal minimum or even a guideline in terms of locks, cameras, alarms, etc?
I wouldn't be surprised if some jurisdictions have them, but in general it's more that it's an "emergent" thing, in that if nothing else you will need insurance and the insurance company will refuse to cover something that's high risk. They'll have demands on what to do. How they figure that out will itself depend on location, as well as on total inventory etc. Ultra low crime rural locations up 3 miles of dead end dirt road and a half mile driveway with the owners living in the house right there mostly holding repair stuff is going to be a different risk profile than a big store in the middle of a city. You may also in some places be held legally responsible (or at least face enormous hassle/loss of license) for "negligent" storage practices. And on a purely practical matter for most places if they had all their inventory stolen they'd be be dead as businesses or damn close. So high incentives to figure it out. And honestly morally if you're running a shop as a business, are lazy with shit security and some criminals steal a bunch of your guns and go do crime with them you should feel bad.
Anyway this is something a lot easier to come at from the building up vs trying to "retrofit it" afterwards. For example one of my favorite cool gunsmiths/shop has their entrance underground and all their gun inventory, offices and such there, then stairs up to a smaller first floor with some non-guns stuff and demo area but it has zero doors, it's all stone with very thin slit windows with bigger ones outside. It's located with solid elevation as well. Has a great aesthetic/cave feel, also obviously it's enormously cheaper and safer to try to secure and protect from not just theft but fire or flood vs a normal fully above ground drywall/stick frame building. And basement areas can be surprisingly cheap vs above ground, vapor seal has gotten very good in the last decade, plus there are other advantages. Cheaper to maintain environment (heat/cool), and cool tax hax (only above ground counts towards property tax, much easier permitting).
That's another sort of thinking you need to run a successful small business: how are you going to have multiplier effects where you spend a dollar and then get high ROI and save more down the road as long as you're running it. But that takes capital, planning, thinking and experience as well.
I'm not sure about legal standards, but you definitely have to consider stuff other places wouldn't. One of my LGSs had seemingly really good security but still got burgled, the thieves cut through the roof and dropped down into the store. I think they had motion detectors and alarms went off but the perps were gone with a bunch of guns by the time the cops arrived.
Guns are definitely theft magnets more than most stuff. Very high resale and obviously direct black market value, particularly since plenty of criminals treat guns as semi-disposables. Ammunition as well, and there is zero tracking on that, nobody is going to blink at boxes appearing fore sale. Also just plain a ton of value in concentrated form to go walking out the door.
Even if the law didn't care, you'd be a fool to not take it seriously.
Buy and run a food truck instead. Srsly
make it a food, gun, and ammo truck and park outside ranges and gun clubs
I've had a similar pipedream for a few years. I'm in the LA area and surprisingly we have a few good gun stores that specialize mostly in modern tactical firearms, but there are a lot of richgays here that are into hunting, clay shooting, etc. and nowhere that really caters to them. I think a high-end "boutique" store with a classy vibe and a good selection of fine sporting guns, plus in-house stockmaking and smithing services, could actually do pretty well, with bonus attributes that it'd be a lot more ban-proof than other gun stores and it'd deter a lot of the riffraff other stores have to deal with.
>fudds'r'us
Hey, fudds have money and messing around with five- or six-figure guns all day sounds pretty nice to me.
>start a brick and mortar retail store in 2023
I don't see anything wrong with your idea OP. I say sell everything you own and take a 2nd mortgage on your home and give it a try. What's the worst that could happen???
Your business will either die young or live long enough to become the villain. If your range is successful, people will be posting here about how you make them leave all their brass, ban steel case, and have "women's shooting nights".
I've thought about it in the past, and I realized it wouldn't work out. I can't compete against the online sales nor the big chain stores that are popping up in more locations. In my experience, the only real local gun stores have existed since before online shopping became the norm, and the number of those stores keeps dropping. There's practically no way to get customers to chose your store over the big box store or the LGS that they have shopped at for 20 years. After that, do you really want to deal with the average moron coming to a gun store? You might meet some cool people, but it's mostly going to be answering the same moronic questions every day, hearing the same false bullshit repeated over and over again, and suffering through the political rants of old guys.
I'm not sure I'd say that. There are several successful LGSs in my area, two of which are relatively new (one is about 5 years old and the other around 10) and another that's been around for ages but has been successful enough that they just moved into a huge fancy new building. Admittedly this is in an area that lacks really big chain stores - nearest are Bass Pro and Sportsman's and they're both an hour or more away - but we do have smaller chain places here, with generally lower prices than the LGSs, and people still choose the latter because the service is so much better and they're more convenient.
OP if this was the 1980s or 1990s I would say go for. The sad fact is the current environment is hostile and desperately trying to thwart gun sales and ownership. So not only do you have normal business pressures like inflation and a struggling economy but also federal FFL harassment. if that wasn't enough know most banks will not lend to a business in the firearms industry (even if its retail sales).
It might possible but I'd hate to see you lose your nest egg.
This is part of why my dream is starting a high-end sporting arms store as mentioned in
. I'd be dealing mostly with manual action guns that are ban-resistant and a wealthy clientele that'd be able and willing to deal with increased registration costs or whatever bullshit gets implemented, plus inflation etc.
open a pizza store
This is actually good advice. A Little Caesar's will generate a pretty decent ROI as long as you don't completely frick it up
That pizza gave me strong diarrhea and you have to wait in this incredibly long line just to get served. It's packed, it's hot, it's loud, and your stomach will hurt after just eating one slice. It's not even that amazing.
Profits will be small if you aren't the only place in town, like 15 to 20% margins on average. Don't open a brand new range, you'll lose your ass in construction costs. It's better to buy a used indoor range and refurbish it. Be prepared to pay a lot in insurance against people shooting themselves and also theft.
After running a non-/k/ related business for about a year:
1. Insurance is actually really cheap for the bare minimum.
2. No matter how great an employee sounds, they will be shitty within six nine times out of ten. Be VERY careful hiring. It sounds like a good idea when you need help but never hire "this buddy of mine" for anyone.
3. Save about $50K for marketing. $50K is the sweet spot. If you need to spend less, try as best you can to at least get 10K in marketing done. I spent...jesus frick...alot of money, and it did save my ass in the long run.
Now on a /k/ related business note:
Talk to local Law Enforcement, prison guards, Firemen, etc. You'd be surprised at what they need, but can't find very often. Apparently buying boots online is hell. Same goes for vests and inserts.
A /k/-gay anon on here owns The Firing Pin, LLC here in Bergen, NY. His entire staff frequent /k/ on the regular; Constantly talking about /k/ to customers and spouting memes.
Based, I could get that vibe from some of the dudes. I hope they rebuild soon, the old building was comfy.
I want to get my FFL to do NFA transfers, just so I can get access to and play with dealer samples.
Don't do it. Open up a machine shop or a business that makes parts. Gun stores are a terrible soul destroying retail business.
Opening a physical shop for anything today is likely not a good idea considering you're competing with online sales that can have lower prices due to not needing to cover property lease and as many employee salary costs. You'd be mostly dependent on the range bringing in enough people to cover overhead. I wish I could say it was a good business to go into but there's a lot of cost and regulations. If it's what you know a lot about and you think your business model would be profitable go for it.
>Opening a physical shop for anything today is likely not a good idea considering you're competing with online sales
Depends on where you are, some states and municipalities make online sales a lot less practical. If you're in CA you can probably keep a gun store going just on ammo sales since you can't buy online.
You have to be an FFL to sell ammo in CA and being an FFL there means you have to register with the DOJ and waive a lot of rights. Basically state or federal police can search your entire residence and business at any time. They harass gun sellers more than gun owners believe it or not.
Get yourself a workshop and an 07/02 and just do it as a hobby. Enjoy cheap and quick NFA. You will be much happier.
$300k in liquid cash and you want to open a brick and mortar where you have to sit on inventory sometimes for years at a time?
You are going to make the most amount of money from buying and selling used guns, also by selling accessories, you won't make a lot of money from selling used guns.expect to make between 40k to 50k yearly, like the other guy said I would just open up a firing range since it would be more fun.
All of my local gun stores stopped doing online transfers because PSA dabbed on their profit margins. The last time I was in a store the owner seethed at me for ordering milsurp from gunbroker instead of buying it through them. Thankfully, I have plenty of garage FFLs to choose from.