The Mountain West Firearms Podcast

What about The Range

• Ken Carroll

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In this episode, Robert Wareham of Mountain West Firearms shares an in-depth update on the company’s ambitious plan to bring a state-of-the-art indoor shooting range to Western North Carolina. Robert explains how the original vision for Mountain West was never limited to retail— the goal was always to create a complete experience where shooters could train, practice, and learn in a modern, comfortable, and safe environment.

Listeners get an inside look at the business realities behind the project, from finding the perfect location near I-40 and U.S. 74A, to performing geotechnical studies, developing concept designs, and structuring an $8 million investment plan through private equity offerings. Robert details the painstaking due diligence process, legal requirements for SEC-compliant private offerings, and the efforts to include both large and community-based investors.

However, just as plans were coming together, Mountain West Firearms received notice of a competing offer on the property that forced an impossible decision. The seller shared contract terms with the new bidder, effectively undercutting Mountain West’s option. Unable to commit $125,000 in non-refundable earnest money on short notice, Robert and his team had to walk away from the site—losing months of work and investment in the process.

Despite the setback, Robert emphasizes that this is far from the end of the project. Mountain West Firearms remains fully committed to building a world-class range that serves everyone—from beginners to seasoned shooters, from men and women to families and law enforcement. He discusses what’s next, including exploring new sites along U.S. 74A, Hendersonville Road, or possibly outside Buncombe County to better serve the region.

The episode closes on an optimistic note: Mountain West Firearms isn’t going anywhere. The retail store continues to thrive, partnerships with major firearm brands are growing, and the dream of a high-quality, accessible indoor range for Western North Carolina is still very much alive.

Key Themes:

  • Business and investment challenges in launching a firearms facility
  • The importance of safe, inclusive range environments
  • Commitment to community and education
  • Overcoming setbacks in pursuit of a long-term vision
Introduction:

You're tuned in to the Mountain West Firearms Podcast, where honest talk and expert insight meet the world of shooting, training, and responsible firearm ownership. Let's dive in.

Robert Wareham:

Hi, everybody. Robert Wareham again with Mountain West Firearms with another podcast episode. Today I want to kind of bring everybody in our uh audience up to date on the progress of our indoor shooting range. Many of you have come by the store over the last several months, and we shared with you our plans long-term to put it in indoor shooting range. In fact, uh it was never our intention to just open a standalone retail store. But in April, when um our building at uh 1484 Charlotte Highway became available in the wake of Helene, we looked at it as an opportunity to at least introduce ourselves to the community and to uh get our systems in place and tested. And it's been very valuable from that standpoint. I mean, we uh we have established uh dealerships with many of the largest distributors in the firearms um uh wholesale marketplace. We've also become dealers with some of the top uh firearms manufacturers, Sons of Liberty, uh Henry Rifles, uh, and others have made us dealers. We're also dealers for Gulco um holsters as well as Urban Carry. Uh and uh and every day it seems like we almost sign up uh some new manufacturer to provide their product to the community. One of the challenges we've had exp we have experienced, and we've shared this with folks, we're limited in the number of firearms we can actually keep in inventory uh at the store because um the the building was not designed to be a firearm store, and of course it's got windows, it has um a large roll-up door uh which could be vulnerable to uh a vehicle ramming. Not that I want to give anybody any ideas. We have done what we can to reinforce the building. We've put bars on the windows that are at ground level, uh, we put straps across the uh panes in the roll-up drawer. Uh but and every night uh we remove every firearm from the display cases and all the firearms from the wall, and we put them inside um a hardened room inside the building that we call the vault. Uh and we have two uh rolling shelf units, and and so we take and we remove everything from the wall, we put it on these shelves, and we roll them in there, uh, and that door has been reinforced and and deadbolt locks put on it. So at the very least, any attempted intrusion and burglary would be met with a substantial delay. And of course, we have ample closed circuit cameras and alarm systems that would notify law enforcement. We don't want any of our firearms landing in the hands of criminals. And so for that reason, we voluntarily limit the number of firearms that we have in stock to those which we can take down and store every night. So that's sort of the story there. But back to the status of the range. About oh, it's almost uh a year and a half ago now, uh, when we first started thinking of opening a firearm store, um, we also looked at the concept of it being a range. In fact, my wife Jennifer, when she originally suggested we we open up a firearm store, and I just started looking for a retail space, she says, no, I think we need to do, you know, we need to do the successful ones, all have indoor ranges with them. And so we went down to um uh West Palm Beach, Florida, where the National Shooting Sports Foundation was having their retailer and range expo that they have every summer in West Palm Beach, and that is a an expo just for firearms retailers and range owners. Well, uh suffice it to say, it was an eye-opening experience. The opportunity that exists in the uh indoor range, uh private range marketplace uh is phenomenal, and we immediately made the decision that this is something we needed to bring to North Carolina. Uh there have been uh indoor ranges in in uh western North Carolina, and uh suffice it to say they've they've filled a need, but uh things have reached a point where uh many people say they're crowded or some have gone out of business. Uh we're looking at making one uh really a truly modern contemporary range with uh first-class uh digital range equipment, uh uh air conditioning equipment that makes it so that when you fire your weapon, not even the gases from your own weapon come back into your nostrils. And then that that uh that air is taken and pulled out of the building, run through a HEPA filters so that it's not put out into the environment. The cost of putting in a range, the between the range equipment and the HVAC air handling equipment, uh uh it it's about the same. I mean, uh you spend as much on ventilation as you do on the modern range equipment uh that you use to move targets back and forth, and many of the modern um target systems uh can give you shoot-no-shoot scenarios, they can flip a target, they can do things. Uh and so it's just very exciting time. The other thing that we uh noticed is that there's large segments of the market that are underserved. Uh, and the feedback that you get and what you hear when you do market surveys is that uh women especially need to feel comfortable uh and not threatened coming into a range environment. And in fact, your average consumer uh does not want to be treated in a condescending fashion by people who consider themselves experts uh in firearms and and question why, you know, uh a new shooter is is coming to the range. That's the whole point of the range, is to make people better uh handlers of their firearm and safer handlers of their firearm. So anyway, we made the decision to move forward. We started looking for a site, and we found what we believe to be an absolutely ideal location in about November of last year. And that location was down uh near the intersection of Interstate 40 and uh U.S. 74A, what we know is Charlotte Highway, the very highway that our store is located on now. And so right there at that prime location at that intersection, uh there was 1.6 acres that had been on s on sale for over ten years. Um and so we went in. We initially started just by making an offer on it, but it readily became clear that we needed more time to perform our due diligence to make sure that the uh the site could accommodate a building, uh, that uh it was a permissible use for the building. So we converted the purchase contract into an option to purchase at agreed upon price. And to be fair with the seller, we said, look, we may not sol sell, uh we may not close on this for you know four, five, six, eight months even. But to compensate you fairly for um the delay in closing, we would agree to increase the purchase price by about $5,200 for every month that passed by. And that represented, frankly, uh about a uh uh 5% return uh on um the purchase price of $1.25 million. So we put up $20,000 in earnest money. Uh we followed that with geotech studies and site planning. We got some initial concept drawings, which many of you who have visited the store have seen. And uh we were very excited about this. Now, of course, to take on a project of this size, uh the budget is about eight million dollars, to tell you the truth, between purchasing the property and building a building and doing all of the other things you have to do, um you know, i it was gonna take about $8 million. And so when you go out to raise private equity capital in the United States, you're allowed to make if if you're not gonna make it a public offering, you can do a private offering, but you have to register it with the Securities and Exchange Commission under both uh North Carolina law and federal law, and basically it's referred to it as an exempt offering. And you have to have these documents prepared by attorneys, and we have a very fine attorney downtown that has been working on these over the year, and uh we had them all ready to go, and and frankly, we had some uh uh interest by certain investors, and you know, not all of them work out. Some you decide that probably aren't going to be the right partner for you in this venture for a variety of reasons, but we were really on the verge. We had uh uh the private placement memorandum, which uh is required to have an exempt private offering. We had one of them prepared. We were uh in the process of getting the second one done, which was going to allow for community investors, uh uh, which would be smaller dollar denomination investors to come in and own a part of the range itself, uh sort of as a founding member, if you will, with some member pre membership privileges going along with that. Well, suffice it to say, just on the verge of having all of this ready to go, so that we could start an equity campaign in the fourth quarter of 2025, I received a notice from the selling broker through my attorney that they had received a competitive offer. And under the terms of our option, if a bona fide competing offer came in, um then we had 10 days in which to exercise our option. And to exercise that option, we had to post an additional $125,000 in non-refundable earnest money. And um and then we had to close within 30 days after exercising the option. So essentially we were given the notice two days before Jen and I were supposed to leave on a little vacation to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary. We received a notice that they had received what they considered to be a bona fide offer that they were going to accept. And they attached a copy of the offer to the notice, and it didn't take very long to realize that the selling broker had uh provided a copy of our option to the competing buyer and all of its financial terms, and that the competing buyer had calculated not just our base purchase price, but also the added uh $5,250 per month, and had proposed to go under contract immediately to purchase this land and to close on it by mid-November. And in fact, they had calculated what our purchase price would have been in November of 2025, and that was their offered price for the property. So clearly um they were trying to put us in a position where the owner would say, Well, I'll I'll take this because I get all my money now. In fact, if you think about it, the owner, the seller, uh got the full benefit of the bargain that I offered him, including the escalated purchase price, got the benefit of the geotech study that I paid to have done, uh, all of that benefit, and um deprived this community and Mountain West Firearms of the opportunity to build on that site. Because I simply could not put up $125,000 that was non-refundable in hopes that we would be able to raise the remaining million dollars or so uh in just a short 30-day period. So many of you have seen the photos, many of you have seen the plot map. When you came into the office, it showed that we were going to be on this parcel at 303 Gash's Creek Road. I'm very sorry to inform you that that is no longer the case. Um we did not exercise the option, we lost our option on that property. So, does that mean we're giving up? Absolutely not. We still believe that Western North Carolina desperately needs a modern, well-lit, comfortable facility where men and women and youths and competitive shooters and casual shooters can come and become more proficient with the use of firearms, can get good training, can have a good retail store, and so we are currently looking for another location. Certainly, if any of you listening to this know of a location that you think would work, um, we would be happy to hear about that. Uh it would be a location preferably somewhere along uh, you know, U.S. 74A, or it would be a location uh potentially in the Fletcher area, um, somewhere along Hendersonville Road or around the airport. We've had some people suggest uh that it probably would be wise to put um this facility outside of Buncombe County and certainly outside of the city of Asheville, and so that's something that we're looking at uh quite carefully as well. So I just wanted to communicate to you through uh this podcast that nothing has changed. Uh Mountain West Firearms is here to stay. Uh we will continue to operate uh out of our retail location, and um hopefully we can get that uh location to be profitable sooner, uh, and then we will at the same time pursue uh simultaneously identification of a new location for our uh range, which um we hope to open sometime in the next 18 to 24 months. So that's the status of the range project at the moment. I know I've taken down the names of many of you who've said you were interested. We'll be communicating with you separately by email uh to see what your interests are and to keep you informed as to what's going on with regard to the progress. So we want to share that with you. We consider you folks to be part of our family, part of our community. This is a project to benefit Western North Carolina that we take very seriously, and we intend to proceed with it. I'm Robert Wareham, and that's it for today from Mountain West Firearms. We'll see you next time.

Introduction:

Thanks for listening to the Mountain West Firearms Podcast, where skill meets responsibility. Subscribe for straight talk and expert insight, and we'll see you on the next one.