Hey guys as I sit here sipping some whiskey after a rough day at work I'm just thinking about better opportunities. it has been a dream of mine to open my own gun shop. My current job is starting to get to me and I feel burnt out and borderline depressed everyday I step foot into the building. I use to love what I did but now, between budget cuts, under staffing and pressure from my boss it has become a living hell.

I know it will not be easy and I have heard the gun business isn't a great one but I'm not in it to make millions, I just want to be able to make a living and actually enjoy what I do for work again. My brother text me the other night saying he has a "crazy idea" and we should open up a gun store and it got me thinking again.

I am a very "mechanical hands on person" and he is great with financials and numbers.I love talking to people about firearms and try to learn what I can. I also like to inform the ignorant or under informed. I am people friendly and like to help people out.

I would love to start a "full service shop", including reapairs/maintenance,NFA, accessories, " new sales" and have thought about getting my 07/02 SOT, etc. I am very centrally located in my state and IMO there are very few "great shops" in my state. Most of them you walk into and the customer service is sub-par and you feel like a number when you walk into one of those places. Growing up my favorite gun shop was Riverview guns sales (the one that sold firearms to Nancy lanza, sandy hook shooting, etc,etc) walking into there was always great they said hi with a smile on their face and asked if they could help you with anything but now it is a shadow of its former self.

What are realistic expectations for opening a store? I want to hear stories of success and failure. I'm getting to the point where I don't mind risking it all to live out my dream. If anyone has experiences please share.

I would suggest that you look for a different business.   Profit in a gunshop is marginal at best.  

I closed my gunshop/ pawnshop last month.   It was a fun 5 years and I did cover expenses and even made a bit some months.   However the gun side never was profitable.  

I will not tell you that it can't be done, but the margins are very slim and overhead is pretty high, depending on the specifics of your location.

Reality,  if there are no other shops in your area, you may be ok.   Unfortunately, most gun people are cheap and will buy from an online shop and think they are doing you a big favor by paying you $20 for a transfer.  

Everything you will try to sell will be available online at your cost or less.   People will come to you let you teach them about whatever you are selling and them go online and buy it.  

Many people on ARFCOM will claim that they6 will pay a local guy a "little" more than the online cost, except they also have local sales tax and "reasonable" profit to most is 5-10% more than online.   Never enough for you to stock the variety of accessories that they may be considering.    

My monthly overhead ran nearly $10k a month.   Figure how many guns at $40 markup and $20 transfer that it will take to cover that nut.  

Ammo is available online from many vendors  for less than your wholesale cost from distributors and Wal-mart is sell at or below your cost.  


Bottom line,  I suggest you look for something easier if you want to start your own business.

If you're serious, you've got some homework to do . . . https://www.sba.gov/writing-business-plan

ETA: Financials and business viability aside, if you go through with this you'll quickly learn that guns attract a maddening assortment of doofus's, dweebs, dunderheads and dirtballs. Yes, there are some great customers, too, but you'll soon swear that most gun people are either idiots or madmen.

About 10 to 15 percent of the people who approach your gun counter are salt-of-the-earth folks that you would feel privileged to start a new country with. Another 15 to 20 percent of the people who will enter your store are genuinely shopping for a gun and are honestly seeking advice and guidance. You'll even get a few folks who rely on a local shop to supply everything they need for their hobby and they appreciate the service you provide. In this Internet age, that's a rare individual, though. Any enthusiast knows who carries what and where to get the best prices. They will buy from you when it suits them but don't count on loyalty. Anyway, there are some good customers. Enjoy these folks. They are the ones you open the door for.

It goes rapidly down hill from there. Spend very much time behind a gun counter and you will soon really dislike most gun people. About 5 to 10 percent are blatant liars and thieves. Probably 20 percent will make you think that somebody forgot to lock the door to the insane asylum. Another 20 to 30 percent will convince you that some people just shouldn't have guns. Easily 40 percent are just there to waste your time. These are the people who hold a mistaken belief that you care what guns they own, have owned, seen or heard about in their lives. They talk for no purpose other than to consume precious oxygen. They will ask questions and not listen to answers. They seek advice and then ignore it. A good number of the people who want to examine your inventory are just there to bust your balls. They are God's gift to gun traders and want you to know it. Another group fancies themselves as part-time gun dealers. They will flat out tell you that you should sell them a gun at a steep discount so they can mark it up. They will use you. They'll finger fuck your inventory and then order on the Internet, often using you for the transfer. Regardless of their actual experience or knowledge base, they know more than you, know how much every thing is worth and have been there, done that. Everything they have is gold. Everything you have is shit. Everybody has an opinion and they all want to express it. Your job is to smile and try to keep the conversation focused on them opening their wallet and buying a gun or whatever accessories you sell. More often than not, you won't have what they want or, if you do, they can buy it cheaper somewhere else. If you have what they want and the price is OK, they'll have to ask their wife first.

The gun BUSINESS is a tough one. It is extremely competitive. Margins are razor thin if you try to be competitive. The regulatory and record-keeping requirements are burdensome. You can compete on price, selection or service . . . maybe even two, but certainly not all of these things . . . chances are the BUSINESS of selling guns will not be what you hoped or expected.

Oh, one more thing: Those days off and vacations that  you enjoy at your current job? Forget those. When you start a business, you create a new 60 hour a week job for yourself and your new boss is a prick.

Otherwise, it's great . . . living the dream and all that.

Be careful what you wish for. You just may get it.

...and sell it on FB as NIB for $100 more b/c there's "no paperwork" involved.  Those customers get fired, I don't need traces hitting my books thank you.

FWIW we're focused mostly on services like repairs and restoration, not on carrying inventory and doing sales; retail sucks in general and gun retail sucks even worse.  We still have overhead for machinery and equipment, so you need cash to start up, space to work, and people with the KSA's to use the tools if you don't have them already.  If you are decent at welding and machining already this is the way to go... but any decent welder or machinist will make a better living as someone else's employee than as a small business owner gunsmith.

Everything else Bladeswitcher said is true, but this needs to be emphasized.  

In the 5 years I had my shop, I worked a minimum of 60 hours a week and six days a week, except for the few holidays that I closed for 2 days off  (Sat & Sun or Sun and Monday).   I had three days off in a row about 4 times in those 5 years.  

I couldn't have said it better.

I have really grown to hate ignorant people.  Before I opened my shop, I would just blow them off and go about my business. Now I flat out tell them what I think of them.  I have no tolerance for stupidity any more.

If I could go back in time 4 years ago, I would have done anything but opened up a gun shop.  I'm not trying to be funny, I am dead serious.  I'm just trying to save you the stress that some of us have gone through.

The internet has made your local gunships obsolete.  

And I quit doing transfers 3 years ago because of all the stress it brought on.  It didn't happen to me, but a biddy of mine received in a loaded gun for a transfer.  He wasn't happy.

I find that my tolerance for idiots is directly proportional to the amount of money they spend . . .

I have one customer who is so annoying that my blood pressure rises when I see him cross the parking lot. He seems to understand his effect on me and always manages to find something to buy just at the moment when I've had my fill and am about to finally act on my desire to kick him out.




It seems counter-productive to refuse transfers. The 4473/NICS requirement is the one thing that keeps a local gun shop at all relevant.  If it weren't for transfers and/or the need to buy guns from a licensee and do the 4473, many gun enthusiasts would never step into their local gun shop. Transfers bring people into the store and some of them, in theory anyway, may buy something while they're there.

Only once?

I have done really well since I quit doing it.

I am considering getting in to do NFA only transfers this summer.

What the quickest way to make a million bucks opening up a gun shop ? Start with two million.

In all seriousness for the OP, go to the ATF's web page and pull up the FOIA listing of every FFL in your state.  Find out how many are in your area, from WalMart and the big box stores like Cabela's or Dick's, down to the little guy slinging transfers from Bud's and CTD for $10 from his home evenings and weekends as extra beer money.  Then look at the local population and see if the numbers support another FFL.

Does anyone else find it odd the OP has not responded to any post?

Nope. Not odd at all.

The nice thing about having your own business is you get to work half days.... any 12 hour period every day.  

Sounds to me like you're slacking.

Don't do it. Seriously.

Thanks for the input guys, I  have been popping in here and there to read responses.

Ditto on everything said don't through my 2 cents in often but have been a storefront for 19 years, I think one of most important things is inventory cost. We own a medium sized shop and have around 600 thousand in just INVENTORY cost. Profit will finally come when you truly own that inventory free and clear (NO BANK LOAN) never took a dime out of my shop for the first 5 years. I opened after I got off of my other job and stayed open till 8 in evening and all day on saturday. Yep those hours sucked but still working at my other job motivated me to do good at my gun shop. After 8 years my wife quit her fulltime job and opened the shop at noon and we still stayed open till 8. My son was raised on the floor of my shop from birth on and now works there. After 12 years I finally left my comfort of the regular paycheck and fulltime work week to a now leisurely 70 hour workweek of a fulltime gun shop slave I mean owner/operator. Will it work Yep follow my simple business plan spend almost 20 years developing a customer base and devote your life to it and you to can live the dream.

Oh yea by the way we don't do transfers either and if all dealers stopped or raised the price to 75 dollars so it would actually benefit the shop gun sales would go back to the old days when we actually sold lots of guns onsite to real customers for actual profit. GO ahead and shoot me down all you dealers that do transfers for 10 bucks its just my opinion anyway.

The problem is that there will always be guys willing to do transfers. Hell, some FFL's ONLY do transfers.

Yea I know it was just my rant for the day

Google price fixing. Just saying.

Most of the shops in my area have two prices for transfers. One price for old, collectable or rare and hard to get guns that they don't have and can't get (pre WWII Luger, HK P7, S&W registered magnum, original pre-70 series colt 1911, etc)  and a significantly higher price for regular guns like glocks, S&W, springfield, kimbers etc... For a rare collectable, my closest shop will charge $40, for a new glock they will chage $75. Another shop nearby will charge 10% of the purchase price of a new gun and a straight $40 for used.... At those prices, they dont do many transfers as guys will travel to use cheaper FFL's.

There are a few guys within a half hour drive doing cheap transfers ($20-30) and they are making serious money doing as many as they can handle. Word of mouth travels fast and bussiness is booming (pun). One dealer I know gave up on stocking guns and just does transfers and repairs. Something to consider with the amount of money it takes to keep a decent amount of stock in a gun store.

I don't own a shop, but I've been working at one as one of the first employees. If you really want to do this, make sure you have these three areas covered:



1. You need a ton of money. The shop I work at lost $1000 on a good week for the first year and only stayed open due to the owner having a gas station whose profits went straight into keeping the lights on at the gunshop. You need to open with a decent inventory and prepare for some of it to not sell for months or even over a year. You need enough money to keep the shop going for at least a year without any profit. Expect to never make much money.



2. If you want to do gunsmithing, get a real gunsmith. I've seen the work of "gunsmiths" come through our shop that really pains the heart. Just this week I saw a pristine M1 Garand that went in for cleaning at another shop and got destroyed. I hope our smith can bring it back. Our gunsmith went to most of the big gunsmithing schools and all the company schools on the Gov dime (armorer for the Secret Service). Try to get a former armorer for a federal LEO agency with a well-respected armed division, and maybe even a large PD or SD. There are certainly good non-LEO gunsmiths but they are a dying breed it seems, and many who call themselves gunsmiths are good for little more than basic cleaning. If you can't find a good smith, don't offer any more than cleaning. Don't risk a customer's gun.



3. Be prepared to spend all your time working the shop. It will consume all your waking hours for over a year. It will suck. When you aren't doing paperwork and steressing over legal stuff, you will be working with customers who can often test your will to live on this planet. And then most of your time will be just sitting there waiting for someone to come in, and then suddenly you'll be overwhelmed with customers for a few minutes before going back to hours of empty store.



I strongly suggest you work at a local shop for a while and learn the trade, even if your working for free. There are a ton of little things that you won't even think about until you need to know them. POS software and how to set it up and program it, the local/state/federal legalities of selling and transferring, how to deal with the paperwork for different kinds of transfers and consignments, how to deal with local/state/federal agencies and their paperwork.

I noticed it says CT under your name.  Another obstacle.