Vance / FTT 240 /
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Michael Vance
Instructor – Robert Richardson
FTT 240 - 47891
5 October 2023
Week 8 Assignment One
To reiterate for these one of two last assignments, my hypothetical business that I
would like to launch in the future is a firearms manufacturing business, my own machine shop.
This assignment talks about employee training, hiring, product knowledge, evaluating
employees, and ongoing/continuing education.
How will I train employees to know the firearms and features your business is selling?
I think the best training is hands-on training. I’m defaulting to my enlisted years in the
army, but I always felt hands-on training was the best combined with “train the trainer”. You
train your employee, giving key points and showing how things done and give out knowledge. At
the end of the training, you have the employee “train you”, to showcase what they’ve learned
and retained and to see how much they’ve retained. This can also show you how well they’ll
react when they need to give this knowledge to customers. This can work for both aspects of my
business, the machinists and workers that create the products in my machine shop, as well as
the customer facing employees.
Hiring and training new employees: How would I plan to hire and train new
employees, to be prepared to work in a firearms business?
Vance / FTT 240 /
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I don’t have the experience yet, but I think that the best approach to hiring new
employees would be their general demeanor, how sociable they are, and how knowledgeable
they are about firearms. I would prefer to hire people that are already interested in firearms,
and own firearms of their own. It would probably be best though to place that as a second
priority over hiring people that can be friendly and work well with customers. Depending on if
they were working on my customer facing side or manufacturing side, training would either
consist of retail POS systems that we use, what paperwork they need to fill out when processing
a transaction for a customer (financial, and ATF forms), and the manufacturing side needs to
know how to operate CNC mills and lathes as well as other machine shop machinery. I’m
intimately familiar with being a machinist and have already trained others to become
machinists. It’s the retail side that I need experience with, as I’ve never worked a retail job other
than a six-month stint in a call center.
Evaluating employees: How will I evaluate the employees, especially with regards to
their performance in the business handling firearms and working with customers?
I would never want to be like some bosses or workplaces that only focus on metrics and
performance on a spreadsheet. I would rather look at every employee objectively. The most
important things would be friendliness and helpfulness to customers, and secondly good
recordkeeping and filling out ATF forms properly to keep legal and out of trouble. I would listen
to my other employees and observe them without interfering occasionally so as to not make
them feel I’m constantly over their shoulder.
Ongoing/Continuing education: How will I develop plans for continuing education of
my employees, along with my own continuing education?
Vance / FTT 240 /
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I think the best way in the firearms industry to give continuing education to employees
would be to have as many resources as possible available at work. Firearms magazine
subscriptions to my company, online firearms resources, and any relevant trade magazines.
Have them all available for my employees to read and keep up with the latest trends in firearms
so that they are knowledgeable when they interact with customers.
Keep employee training simple but with enough good information, show my employees
that I care about their personal growth and knowledge as a firearms company employee,
provide good resources for them, and provide them with good feedback on their performance. I
don’t ever want to have a “fake” corporate atmosphere like I’ve experienced in some big
companies, pretending to be “family” but I do want to get along with my employees, them to
get along with each other, and to have knowledgeable people working for me that provide good
customer service.
Vance / FTT 240 /
Bibliography
Dubois, Lou. “How to Implement a Continuing Education Program.” Inc.com, Inc., 2010,
www.inc.com/guides/2010/08/how-to-implement-a-continuing-education-program.html.
Lipman, Victor. “4 Steps to Painless (and Effective) Performance Evaluations.” Forbes,
www.forbes.com/sites/victorlipman/2012/10/04/4-steps-to-painless-and-effectiveperformance-evaluations/?sh=24fa943c7b29. Accessed 6 Oct. 2023.
“The Do’s and Don’ts of Retail Employee Training.” Lightspeed HQ, www.lightspeedhq.com/blog/thedos-and-donts-of-retail-employee-training/#step-1.
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