TexasCHLforum.com

https://xynegy.com/2013chlsurvey/

No comprehensive survey of the business of Texas CHL instruction has ever been conducted. Yet there are over 3,000 of you out there.

Some of you teach as a pastime, and some of you rely on it for income.

As of year-end 2012, there were 584,850 active CHL holders and 3,017 certified CHL instructors.

The landscape is changing. While you may have forecasted revenue from renewal classes, that revenue is gone. And the previously overlooked requirement that you have NRA, TCLOSE, or other recognized national certification comes to into play.

It’s time to re-evaluate your business model.

https://xynegy.com/2013chlsurvey/

This survey is intended for Texas Concealed Handgun License instructors. Its non-commercial purpose is to gather data about the current state of the business in order to better equip instructors with operational and marketing knowledge.

The information collected is entirely anonymous, and no identifying information will connect any supplied data to you or your business. Survey data is submitted using SSL encryption--the same as commonly used for Internet credit card and banking transactions--to ensure your privacy. The survey does not capture your Internet (IP) address, and it places no "cookies" on your computer.

Select data charts from the survey will be presented at the 2013 Texas Firearm Instructors Conference http://www.instructorconference.com/ to be held near Houston’s Hobby Airport August 9, 2013.

If you choose to supply your email address, you will receive a complete, detailed report of the survey's findings.

https://xynegy.com/2013chlsurvey/

You may receive an email within the next few days inviting you participate in the survey. If you have already submitted your answers, please ignore that email.

Thank you for promoting our Second Amendment, and thank your for giving your time to teach others.

Thanks for doing this Skiprr! I think it will be very beneficial to discuss these issues and the prevailing though among CHL instructors.

Chas.

An update: 152 instructors have completed the survey as of today. Good response so far, but we could sure use more for a broader sampling.

The survey will close in two weeks, on July 28, in order to allow us adequate time to evaluate the data that seem most significant to present August 9 at the 2013 Texas Firearm Instructors Conference. The full analysis and report will be available on or near September 1.

A couple of items based on some email responses and a preliminary glance at the survey responses.

First, if you hold a CHL instructors license but do not regularly teach, or teach only as an assistant or associate of someone else’s company, please do consider filling out the survey. It will take you seconds to complete; literally. And if you choose to add a comment at the end about your status, it will be extremely helpful. It’s looking as if about half of the licensed CHL instructors are not actively teaching; if we could get more of these individuals to respond to the survey we would be more likely to confirm the reason(s).

Second, I received several questions about personal privacy issues concerning this survey.

The survey is heavily focused on business operations and marketing. That’s its purpose. While there are a few questions related to the changing laws and supplier relations (e.g., DPS, MorphoTrust), even those are mostly presented with a view to the impact on business revenue.

The concept is this: If you design a better mousetrap and decide to start a company to manufacture and sell it, the first thing you need to do is understand as much as you can about how other mousetrap manufacturers operate. What’s their business model? Who do they sell to and through what distribution channels? How do they market and advertise? What differences are there between larger, more successful mousetrap manufacturers and smaller, lower market-share manufacturers?

But you get the idea. What we hope to accomplish is to arrive at a set of benchmarks that describe, in general, quantitative terms, what CHL businesses are doing. If all goes well, we can do this every two years (in conjunction with legislative sessions) and start seeing valuable data trends.

A common, and important, business strategy is to regularly perform a “SWOT” analysis on your business and product/service lines. “SWOT” stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. In order to do this with reasonable success, you need to know a fair amount of accurate data regarding your market segment.

Because the survey is so focused on business/marketing, we’ve had a few questions about privacy concerns and the “real” intent of the survey. One friendly email from a noted instructor said that he went so far as to answer 90% of the questions, then decided the true purpose of the survey was to put him on a distribution list and try to sell him new services.

I know you have only my word on it, but there is absolutely no commercial purpose to this effort.

Opting-in with an email address actually stores the address in a separate database, and it can’t be matched up to the survey responses. The provided email addresses will be deleted once the final report is sent to those who asked for it. And we are obtaining no street addresses or telephone numbers for any CHL instructors. The email addresses we used to invite instructors to participate were gleaned from the public information on the DPS website, the same source we’ll use in 2015 if we do this again.

Nobody starts teaching CHL classes because they think it will make them insanely wealthy. That also means it isn’t a rich target market for third-party service providers.

Many of you view teaching CHL classes as a community service...though you probably don’t want to lose money in the process.

Likewise, this survey is intended to be a community service to you, the ones who work to increase the number of CHL holders.

Other than the anonymous data, nothing about you or your business will be stored. There will be one email reminder sent next week, but other than that and receipt of the final report, you will not be contacted again until 2015...that is, if you are in the DPS instructor listing at that time.

Nobody’s gonna try to sell you nuthin’ as a result of filling out the survey.