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Garrett Fankhauser

@glfankhauser

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FFL Dealer Marketing Systems | SEO | Website Builds
Helping Gun Shops & Gunsmiths Grow Sales Online
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This is Cooter. Cooter owns a gun shop. Cooter doesn’t believe in marketing because all his customers already know where he’s at. And when they need another gun, they’ll just come back. At least that’s what Cooter tells himself. Meanwhile, his store is empty, his sales are down, and he’s convinced the economy is the reason nobody’s buying. It couldn’t possibly be that he’s doing absolutely nothing to bring customers back through the door. Don’t be like Cooter. Market your business. Stay in front of your customers. Give them a reason to come back. And stop blaming the economy for problems you could actually be solving. by @glfankhauser
Your gun shop shouldn’t fall off a cliff every time you stop posting. ⠀ If getting busy behind the counter means your marketing goes quiet and sales slow down, you’ve built a business that needs you to keep pushing. ⠀ Post a gun. Answer some messages. Make a sale. ⠀ Then wake up tomorrow and do it all again. ⠀ Posting absolutely has a place. But every post shouldn’t have to carry the weight of generating your next sale. ⠀ What happens to the person who visits your website but isn’t ready to buy? ⠀ The customer who asks about something you don’t have in stock? ⠀ The first-time buyer who purchases from you, leaves happy, and never hears from your store again? ⠀ Those are opportunities you’ve already worked to create. Without a process for following up, you’re leaving them to chance. ⠀ This is why we focus on Acquisition, Conversion, and Retention. ⠀ Get people to discover your store. Give them a clear reason and an easy way to buy. Keep the relationship going so they come back. ⠀ Your content feeds that system. Your website helps convert the interest. Your email, text, and team follow-up keep opportunities from going cold. ⠀ Building this takes work. But that work should keep producing value after you hit “publish.” ⠀ Otherwise, you’re stuck needing another post, another promotion, and another discount just to get things moving again. ⠀ If you stopped posting for a week, what would still be working to bring customers through your door? by @glfankhauser
Most gun dealers I talk to know what they want. More foot traffic. More online sales. More repeat customers. More revenue. The problem usually isn’t knowing the goal. It’s turning that goal into a clear list of things that actually need to happen... and then consistently executing them. “Grow sales” can sit on your priority list for 6 months. “Send an email to every customer who bought from us in the last 12 months” can get done today. Big difference. The more specific the next step gets, the easier it becomes to actually move the needle. by @glfankhauser
Rest in paradise uncle Charlie. 🍻 You and aunt Irene get to be united again 🙏🏼 by @glfankhauser
Hard to “support your local gun shop” when they don’t know it exists. by @glfankhauser
One thing I constantly struggle with is figuring out the highest-ROI use of my time. There are always a hundred things I could be working on. But being busy and making progress are not the same thing. The question I’m trying to ask more often is: What problem am I actually trying to solve? Then I work backward from the goal. If solving that problem won’t meaningfully move me closer to the goal, it probably isn’t where my time should go right now. That sounds simple, but it’s easy to spend an entire day solving problems that don’t actually matter. Tweaking things. Organizing things. Improving systems that aren’t currently the constraint. Doing work that feels productive because it’s comfortable and measurable. The hard part isn’t finding more things to do. It’s identifying the one problem that is creating the biggest bottleneck, making your best decision with the information you have, and attacking it. You won’t always choose correctly. I definitely don’t. But taking action gives you feedback. Feedback helps you correct course. And each correction makes the next decision more accurate. The goal isn’t to perfectly predict the highest-ROI move every time. It’s to stop confusing motion with progress, take your best swing, and adjust quickly. by @glfankhauser
Indecisiveness drives me crazy. In myself. In other people. And especially in business. I’ve watched people lose weeks, months, and sometimes years because they refuse to make a decision. They think waiting will somehow give them more clarity. Usually, it doesn’t. I think one reason I became decisive was growing up in the desert and learning to drive off-road vehicles really fast. When you’re flying through the desert and something comes up in front of you, you don’t have three weeks to decide whether you should go left or right. You make the decision. Because indecision IS a decision. And when you’re driving fast enough, indecision can mean you end up upside down. Business works the same way, just with less immediate consequences. You can spend six months deciding whether to start running ads, hire someone, launch a website, start creating content, change your offer, fire someone, or try a new strategy. Meanwhile, nothing changes. I think about guidance systems on missiles the same way. They have a target, they launch, and they’re constantly making corrections along the way. The objective isn’t to have a perfect trajectory from the beginning. The objective is to get moving toward the target and correct as you go. Fitness works the same way. You don’t need the perfect workout program before you go to the gym. Go to the gym. Then figure out what works. Figure out what doesn’t. Identify your weak points. Adjust your training. Keep moving. Business is no different. You’re going to make some wrong decisions. You’re going to waste some money. You’re going to have to change direction. That’s part of it. You can correct a bad trajectory once you’re moving. You can’t correct something that never launched. So I’ve tried to make this a rule for myself: If it’s a no, make it a no. If it’s not a no, take some type of action. Stop sitting in the middle waiting for time to make the decision for you. Left or right. Yes or no. Start or don’t. Make the fucking decision. Get moving and correct from there. by @glfankhauser
One of my favorite things about digital marketing has nothing to do with ads, websites, SEO, or social media. It’s leverage. It’s the fact that you can build something once and have it continue creating value when you’re not there. Your website can sell while you sleep. Your marketing can bring in customers on the weekend. Your follow-up can keep working on holidays. Your content can reach thousands of people while you’re sitting on the floor playing with your kids. That’s what I love about this stuff. I’ve always been obsessed with efficiency. How do we get more output from the same amount of time, energy, and resources? Because time is the one thing you can’t make more of. I think the problem is that leverage isn’t always tangible. You can see a new display case. You can touch new inventory. You can walk around a bigger building. It’s harder to “see” the value of an automated follow-up system, a website that converts, a piece of content that keeps generating traffic, or an email list you’ve spent years building. But those things can become some of the most valuable assets in your business. They separate the value your business creates from the hours you personally spend creating it. And ultimately, that’s what money is anyway. It’s an exchange of value. If your business can create value for someone at 2 AM while you’re asleep, on Sunday while you’re with your family, or while you’re 1,000 miles away from your computer, you’ve built leverage. That’s why digital marketing is one of my favorite things to help business owners build. Not because marketing itself is exciting. Because a business that can work without requiring you to be present for every transaction is a fundamentally different kind of business. That’s the game I’m interested in. by @glfankhauser
I think one of the reasons I enjoy living in an RV so much is that I have an almost obsessive desire to make things more efficient. And an RV is basically one giant exercise in efficiency. You have limited space, limited power, limited water and limited storage, so everything has to earn its place. But at the same time, the amount of capability packed into that small footprint is pretty incredible. Diesel-powered unlimited hot water. Heated floors. Multiple AC units cooling a fraction of the square footage of a normal house. Solar generating power on the roof. Batteries storing it. A generator as backup. Your kitchen, office, bathroom, bedroom and everything else you need within a few steps. And if you want to go somewhere else, you can move your entire house. It changes the way you think about stuff too. Instead of asking, "Do I have room for this?" I find myself asking, "Is this worth the space it consumes?" How much utility can I get out of every cabinet, every appliance and every square foot? There are obviously tradeoffs to RV living, and it definitely isn't for everyone. But I've realized that I really enjoy the constraint. A normal house gives you an abundance of space. An RV forces you to think about utilization. And apparently, optimizing the shit out of a tiny rolling house scratches a very specific itch in my brain. by @glfankhauser
Gun shop owners will spend 10 to 12 hours a day working inside their gun store. Then spend only 30 minutes on their online business and wonder why it isn’t growing. That’s the disconnect. Your website isn’t a replacement for effort. Neither is your email system, your CRM, your SEO, your social media, or any other tool we build for you. They’re leverage. But leverage only works when you actually apply force to it. If you want online sales to become a meaningful part of your business, you have to treat it like a meaningful part of your business. That means putting products in front of people. Sending emails. Creating content. Following up with customers. Running promotions. Looking at what’s selling and doing more of it. You wouldn’t open your gun store, unlock the front door, sit in the back office, and expect customers to magically show up and buy. Yet that’s basically how a lot of dealers approach e-commerce. They launch a website and wait. The dealers who win online aren’t necessarily the ones with the best website or the biggest inventory. They’re the ones who consistently work the system. You already understand this with your physical store. The mindset shift is realizing your online business deserves the same attention. by @glfankhauser
How much money is your gun store leaving on the table every time you lock the doors? by @glfankhauser
“People around here only buy on price.” I hear this from gun dealers all the time. But if price is the only reason someone has to buy from you, you haven’t given them another reason to. That’s the real problem. Most gun stores sell the same guns. They buy from the same distributors. They have access to the same inventory. And they’re competing for the same customers. So when there’s nothing meaningful separating one store from another, what does the customer compare? Price. That’s why you need to build an actual offer around what you’re selling. Maybe it’s free range time and a basic training class with every first handgun purchase. Maybe it’s a trade-in guarantee that gives customers confidence to buy today knowing they can upgrade later. Or maybe it’s a membership that bundles preferred pricing, free transfers, and priority access to new inventory. The point isn’t that you need to use any of those specific offers. The point is to give someone a reason to buy from YOU that isn’t just having the cheapest gun. Because once price becomes the only lever you can pull, the dealer gets stuck. Margins get thinner. Advertising gets harder. Growth gets more expensive. And every time the market slows down, they have to pull back and wait for things to get better. That’s not a great position to build a business from. The best time to expand isn’t necessarily when the gun market is booming and every other dealer is expanding with you. It’s when everyone else is pulling back. That’s when advertising gets cheaper, competitors disappear, customers are up for grabs, and you have an opportunity to take market share. But you can’t do that if your entire strategy depends on having the lowest price and waiting for the market to carry you. by @glfankhauser

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