We recently connected with Glen Stilson and have shared our conversation below.

Glen, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you talk to us about your team building process? How did you recruit and train your team and knowing what you know now would you have done anything differently?

We have never used a ‘Help Wanted’ ad, so to speak, to build our team. Everyone that works with us now came to us organically, and that is what has helped us to build such a strong team. Some of them approached us with a cold call, some were people working in similar industries who wanted a new challenge, some are from personal recommendations from our team, and a few of our people even started as clients. We look less at resumes and bullet points in their past, and more at how they live their lives today – will they fit in with our team? Will they fill the gaps, enhance strengths and improves weaknesses? We always invite new potential team members to come to company events and team events to see if they fit the mold, as it were – and it’s proven to be a very important of the onboarding process for us.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

We are Independence Training, an emergency response training organization that is based on practical application of evidence based concepts and techniques, combined with the vast experiences of our team members. We work with the private sector, corporations, civic organizations and government agencies/military units. Primarily we work with defensive tactics, firearms-based self defense, firearms skill improvement, small unit tactics, emergency field medicine, trauma medical concepts, and outdoor survival fieldcraft.

What primarily sets us apart from others in our field is that our training isn’t based on just one person’s experiences or anecdotal techniques. We base everything we do on proven methods that we have no issue proving again and again under pressure.

We also pride ourselves on being adaptable – we are not dogmatic about our approach to training. We have to always be modernizing our approach to problems, and the majority of our team are still working professionally in their chosen craft in addition to being educators on our team.

How did you build your audience on social media?

It’s difficult to differentiate yourself in the social media world, so we chose the educational and realism route. We find that posting consistently, posting primarily about things that our audience can learn about (call it ‘free training’), and being real about who we are and what we do. We don’t do multiple takes, we don’t use fancy equipment, and we don’t make excuses for mistakes that we may make while demonstrating or teaching about something. In the end, we’re just regular people who make mistakes and are just trying to get home to our families every night. Our audience seems to connect well with that.

Any thoughts, advice, or strategies you can share for fostering brand loyalty?

We always put clients first – we pride ourselves on a high level of customer service and it is something we are well known for. We answer emails promptly, return voice calls promptly, make sure we monitor social media to answer questions that are being asked, and we follow up with clients after the service. We also have monthly Alumni events, where existing clients are invited to do everything from meet and greets at local hangouts to gathering at a local business in our network to learn something new. We keep the cost for these events very affordable – usually at no cost to the client.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.independencetraining.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/independencetraining/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/IndependenceTraining/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/glen-stilson-95872147/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/IndependenceTraining/videos
• Other: Podcast: https://www.thearmsroomshow.com/