MONTEGO BAY, St James —  FOUR years ago when businessman Nicholas Thompson sought assistance from several of the island’s financial institutions to establish an indoor shooting range, he was flatly rejected.

“No financial institution wanted to give me a loan for the venture. They believe that it would not work. It was new to them and so they have never seen me running it before, so none of them would give me a loan,” explained Thompson, a trained teacher, who has been operating a well-established printery in Montego Bay for many years.

But the financial institutions were not the only stumbling block.

Even one of his close friends, a successful businessman in Montego Bay, tried to dissuade Thompson from pursuing his dream of establishing a state-of-the-art indoor shooting range.

“When I was setting up I went downtown Montego Bay and told a well-known businessman that I was setting up an indoor range. The man, who is my friend, looked at me and said, ‘You cannot set up an indoor range because first of all you are not brown, you are not from Kingston and that is beyond your thoughts, so it won’t work’,” Thompson recalled.

That piece of advice, Thompson said, he will never forget, noting, however, that it later became a motivating factor. But despite the negativity, convinced that the venture could become a viable entity, Thompson said he dug deep into his meagre savings and with funds from his thriving printery business, began to buy “bits and pieces of material and equipment” for the range.

“So I started to buy things such as extraction system, ventilation system, intake system, sound-proofing system, target carriers… because I could not buy it all at once. I just did not have the money,” he told the Jamaica Observer West.

Today, after expending more than $15 million, and getting “a lot of help from my friends”, Thompson has established the island’s first and only indoor shooting range. Located at 7 Queens Drive in the resort city of Montego Bay, Friendly Irons Indoor Shooting Range, as the facility is called, boasts a number of features catering for licensed firearms holders and persons within the security services industry.

“We offer training to persons authorised by the Firearms Licensing Authority [FLA] to be trained and also training to holders who want to harness their skills in tactical and defensive training, safety and ethics laws regarding firearm,” Thompson told the Observer West during a recent tour of the facility.

Friendly Iron’s properly fenced facility — outfitted with security cameras, motion detectors, vibration sensors, a spacious conference room — now has a membership of over 200, since its six months of existence.

Thompson stressed that members — many of whom are from Kingston — benefit from a wide variety of services.

The well-ventilated and sound-proof range consists of five shooting bays and adequate lighting systems.

“For those persons who want to test their night sight we can cut all the lights or adjust them to suit their needs,” he said.

He said that his intention was to establish a business that could not be easily copied.

“It took a lot of thinking and a lot of transfer of learning,” he emphasised. “I was a good science teacher so I transferred a lot of my science concepts to the building of the range in terms of light behaviour, sound behaviour…” FLA Chairman Robert Gregory, who, along with his vice-chairman Gilbert Scott, CEO Dr Kenroy Wedderburn and other board members, toured the facility recently, had high praises for Friendly Irons.

“This facility is a well-organised facility. I like the discreetness of it because often licensed firearm holders are a little reluctant to go to a visible open range, so that is a very big plus, so I am very impressed,” said Gregory, stressing that the rules at Friendly Irons are vigorously enforced.

In the meantime, Thompson is urging persons who want to pursue various business ventures not to be daunted by the reluctance of financial institutions to provide funding for their projects.

“You don’t have to have the millions of dollars to start. Millions of dollars can be had dollar by dollar. Your business can start one bolt by one bolt and you must have a set goal and a clean mind, and last but not least, you must have faith in God,” said Thompson.