When we announced our first-ever Trainer’s Symposium held at the 2025 NRA Annual Meetings & Exhibits in Atlanta, Georgia, we were excited to see and hear from you. We couldn’t have anticipated just what a success the Symposium would be, and we’re so grateful to both our sponsors and our attendees.
With over 300 trainers in the audience, asking questions and offering feedback, we covered a number of topics, from the fine points of pedagogy, to ways to enhance your business, to new technologies. Topics included:
- Sandra Woodruff, A Girl & A Gun: The Power of Women - A Growth Strategy for Your NRA Instructor Business
- Geoff Davis, GunSafety4U: Building and Growing Your NRA Training Practice. This discussion involved finding pockets of undiscovered students, improving profitability, and maximizing positive publicity.
- Lisa Paris, InstructorsDash.com: Boosting NRA instructor businesses with a simple platform featuring personalized landing pages, seamless booking, AI, upselling, full automation and ticketing.
- Grant Lessard, Mantis Tech: Enhancing NRA instructor businesses with training tools for both live-fire and classroom instruction, as well as engagement activities.
- Jim Sheckels with Scouting America: Enhancing NRA Instructor business by training volunteers within Scouting to deliver fun and safe quality shooting sports instruction programs for the Youth of America.
- Bruce Corey, Managing Partner at ShootingClasses.com: Marketing Assistance and Administrative Management for Firearms Instructors. Spend more time doing what you enjoy most—training students—and less time handling the details.
- Brian Felsen, COHC with Your Ears Rock: Enhancing NRA instructor businesses via education, motivation, and training on noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL) and tinnitus prevention, proper selection and use of hearing protection, OSHA compliance, and more ear-opening information to instill best practices to protect, preserve, and treat hearing health.
Naturally, none of this would have been possible without the support of our valued sponsors. Presented in alphabetical order, they are: A Girl & A Gun; InstructorsDash.com; Mantis Tech; NextLevel Training; Scalarworks; ShootingClasses.com; and Your Ears Rock.
Stated Education & Training Department Director John Howard, “I am proud of our staff, especially to Ed Zhou for putting this event together with such short notice. There was a lot of enthusiasm in the air. We plan on this growing for next year!”
NRA Staff sent out a survey to all attendees and will be taking all feedback into consideration to improve on the Symposium. We hope to see you in April 2026 at the 155th NRA Annual Meetings and Exhibits in Houston, Texas!
