Trends in CHL class enrollment, revisited

Over the last couple of years, the enrollments in my CHL classes have varied quite a bit, but what I now consider a ‘small’ class is what I would have considered a really large class 6 years ago. Back then, I was happy to get more than 3 students in a class. Business got a lot better when I located a facility that could accommodate up to about 30 students, with a range and fingerprinting service on the premises. The convenience of having a one-stop class that took care of everything made a lot of difference, and I started averaging 10-15 students in each class.

About 2 years ago, my courses started consistently selling out. Back then, I capped my courses at 16 students (two sets in an 8-lane range), but the demand was much greater than that, so I worked out ways to handle larger classes. It’s a lot more work, but I can now handle classes with up to 32 students — with the help of another instructor. My brother Tom now co-teaches with me whenever I know in advance that I will have more than 16 students. I also have standing arrangements with some other instructors to help with range testing if I need it.

I have noticed that recently, the demand for CHL classes has eased up a bit. For instance, tomorrow’s class only has eleven students, which is a comfortable size that is fairly easy to handle, even if a few of them have little or no handgun experience. With less than 15 minutes of one-on-one coaching, I can get almost anybody shooting well enough to pass the ridiculously easy Texas CHL range qualification. Of course, I make more money with more students, but I have not yet found the magic marketing trick that will predictably fill my classes.

Something happened today that might change that. Actually, a couple of things. One, I have been studying search-engine-optimization (SEO), and I have discovered a number of things that I have been doing wrong. And I will be correcting those problems over the next few weeks. But the Big Thing that happened today is that I got a very nice mention in Martin Avis’ email newsletter, ‘Kickstart’. I don’t recall how big his list is, but I think it is in the hundreds of thousands. When I saw that, I went and bumped up the bandwidth limit on my site by a factor of four — and I hope that is enough to handle the traffic surge.

If you are interested in Martin’s newsletter, you can sign up for it here. (Opens in a new window)

So, if you are here as a result of Martin’s email, welcome, and I hope you find something here interesting enough to come back. I also hope that the increased traffic leads to more students.

Understand Combat Stress

Stress is a marksmanship-killer. It is estimated that the typical police officer loses up to 80% of his marksmanship skills during his first deadly-force encounter. Chances are excellent that you will lose that much, if not more, especially if you don’t practice enough. Even a small amount of stress can seriously reduce your marksmanship skills, as I have personally experienced. If someone is trying to kill you, you will experience very high stress.

One thing that the larger police departments have done that reduces that serious dropoff is simunitions training. Simunitions training involves the use of special reduced-load rounds in handguns that are manufactured or retrofitted for the reduced recoil. The participants wear full body armor, since there is still enough force to cause injury. Simunitions training gives the participant much of the real ‘feel’ of a gunfight, and takes out much of the !O!M!G!I’m!being!shot!at! response that has an impact on your marksmanship in a real gunfight.

Simunitions training, while very desirable, is something that few of us ever get. The next best thing is practice. LOTS of practice. You should practice your drawing from concealment even more than you practice actually shooting, and you should practice shooting a lot. One general guideline is that if you have practiced something 1000 times, then that’s the way you will do it under extreme stress. Somewhere around 1000 repetitions, you no longer have to think about what you have practiced.

Just be sure you practice the correct things.

Changes coming to CHL-TX.COM

Even though I have more than 30 years experience as a programmer, I am fairly new to web programming (after all, from my perspective, the Web is fairly new). That, and a severe lack of available time has led me to finally get some programming help on this website. Sometime next week, I will have the first cut at a real, automated registration process, which I expect will allow me to reclaim a substantial amount of the time that I have been using to process registrations by hand (with the occasional embarrassing error).

Since I am a programmer, I will be maintaining and expanding the site myself (mostly). Another thing that I plan to do fairly soon is replace the funky blue default WordPress template with something a bit more appealing — and readable. The only holdup at this point is finding one I like well enough to pay money for.

I also plan to give this blog a bit more focus than I have in the past. So far, I have been writing about whatever happened to be on my mind at the time, and the result has not been very consistent. I will be planning my posts around the following subjects:

1) Recent changes in Texas law, and implications on concealed carry
2) Book reviews on gun-related subjects (I read a lot, but I will be starting another separate blog for general book reviews on non-gun topics)
3) Tips and techniques related to concealed carry
4) Occasional snippets from my CHL and NRA courses
5) Answers to any questions that I have gotten from my CHL students that I had to research. If I had to go to DPS legal to get an answer, chances are that others can benefit from what I learned.

One thing I do NOT plan to cover, even though I am heavily opinionated on the subject, is politics. The blogosphere already has more than enough political pundits. I will, however, add some of my favorites to my blog roll.

I haven’t decided how often I want to post, but I think I will try for at least once per week, probably on Wednesdays, which is currently my least-cluttered day (I brought my laptop with me so I could post at lunch today, but the real reason is that I expected my Saturday CHL class to completely sell out today, which it did, and I wanted to be able to update my website when that happened).

Another item on my plate is working out a co-teach arrangement. So far, I have two prospects for co-teaching. One is my brother Thomas, who has recently retired from the Austin Fire Department, and the other is Mike Teaff, who has assisted me in the past with range testing. Co-teaching would have several benefits, including enabling me to handle more classes, give students more than one perspective, and make it much easier to organize and manage each class. If you are a qualified CHL (and/or NRA) instructor, and you would be interested in a co-teach arrangement, please drop me a line.