The SharpShooters USA Core Values

This website refresh represents the main digital portion of our visual rebranding. I’m working on another blog post that will walk you through how we arrived at our new logo mark and colors. Our rebranding started not with the old logo or the new logo, but with our core values:

• Clean
• Family Friendly
• Knowledgeable

My predecessor, Andy Shipp, implemented these 3 core values. I considered changing them, and in fact planned to change them, but once I spent some time here, I embraced these three core values and decided to keep them in place, and leverage their value to rebrand SharpShooters.

Clean

We don’t want to be a typical gun store. A typical gun store is often dirty, dingy, dark, and can be a bit seedy. We want to be the polar opposite of the old school typical gun store. That starts with the first impression of our facility, and we want that to be simple: clean. We clean our shooting ranges every day. Our air filtration systems are absolutely top of the line, recycling all of the air in each of our three bays every 90 seconds. We clean up all the brass, wipe down every surface, and vacuum up every trace of lead. In the retail store, we’re constantly cleaning the glass countertops and we sweep and mop the floor every night right after closing. 

But it’s not enough to be clean if you can’t see the clean, so we make sure our facility is very well lit, so you can see and be comfortable knowing that everything you can see is clean.

Family Friendly

One of the most common things we hear is that people are intimidated to come into a shooting range, especially when they’ve never shot a gun before. They’re right: It is, but it doesn’t have to be. We understand that there’s an entire population of people who know little to nothing about guns, ammo, and accessories. Every one of our team was once a complete newbie to firearms.

Today, as our world turns upside down, more and more people are coming to the realization that they are indeed their own first responder, and they must do something to protect themselves from bad actors. It is our mission to teach, educate, inform, and help you learn what you need to learn to be confident, empowered, and not at all intimidated when you enter any gun store, not just ours.

We invite you to bring your kids into SharpShooters. We’ll help you teach them proper firearm safety and good habits for operating, maintaining, and cleaning a firearm safely.

Knowledgeable

In order to educate, inform, and help you, our staff must be the most knowledgeable firearms instructors, armorers, and hobbyists anywhere near our location. I’ve told so many people that our staff’s knowledge of firearms and the history of firearms is “encyclopedic”, and that is not an exaggeration.

All our employees are trained as Range Safety Officers. Our employees can attend any of our own classes for free, and clock in and get paid to attend those classes. Why? So they can know our product better, so they can better inform you, our customers.

Why Core Values?

Shortly after I arrived at SharpShooters in January, we had a situation in which one of our employees, a Supervisor, had to make a decision on what to tell our customers. I shared that situation on my LinkedIn profile, but here’s the summary. 

The FBI NICS e-Check Background Check system was down temporarily. It happens from time to time. We had a store full of people wanting to buy guns and they could not (because every firearms purchase requires a background check). What do you do when you have to disappoint your customers face to face?

The correct answer is that we fall to our core values: clean, family friendly, knowledgeable. “Knowledgeable” was the operative term here. We explain, based on our experience, that the NICS system fails every now and then, but is usually back up within an hour. “While you wait, here’s a free gun rental and a free lane for your inconvenience.”

Our core values drive how we behave, when things are good and when things are bad. How we behave creates our brand, because how we behave is how people will describe us to other people. And our brand is what our customers, members, visitors, and other internet audiences will remember.