Break One Clay Target Sports runs its shooting range deep in Queenstown Hill Station, up a gravel road with no reliable cell signal, overlooking Coronet Peak and the Shotover River. Guests check in from inside the van on the way up, before they’ve even seen the range. For a business handling firearms, gun range waiver software isn’t a nice-to-have. It has to work before anyone touches a shotgun, signal or no signal.
What Break One Was Missing
Owner Blake Holden ran the business on a paper journal and paper waivers. Staff coordinated new bookings and cancellations over phone calls and texts, all tracked in a single diary. Calls got missed. The diary wasn’t always in the right place. For a small team running a safety-critical activity, those weren’t small mistakes.
Check-in set the wrong tone before guests had even fired a shot. Blake described the old process as “cumbersome,” handing out papers and hunting for a pen that worked.
What Happened When Break One Switched to Wherewolf
The fact that Wherewolf worked offline mattered more here than almost anywhere else. Up on Queenstown Hill Station, connectivity isn’t guaranteed. Staff needed a system that captured and stored waivers whether or not the van had signal, then synced everything once it did.
That portability changed how the whole operation ran. Guides could pull up the day’s bookings and guest details straight from the dashboard, in the van, on the way to the range, instead of relying on a diary that might be sitting on someone else’s desk.
“Wherewolf has been as big a step forward as the Internet for us.”
Gun Range Waiver Software That Onboards New Guides in Minutes
Break One runs on a lot of casual staff, like most adventure tourism operators. But unlike a lot of adventure activities, this one involves live firearms, so however fast onboarding needs to be, it can’t come at the cost of consistency.
“Wherewolf is very intuitive to use. Our new staff can onboard with our guest check-in process in a matter of minutes.”
— Blake Holden, Break One Clay Target Sports
Paperless check-in also meant one less thing for staff to manage on a shift, freeing guides to focus on safety briefings and the guest experience instead of chasing paperwork.
Using Guest Data to Fix a Scheduling Problem
Break One used its guest data to spot something a diary never would have shown them: their 3pm trip was underperforming.
“From the data in Wherewolf, we were able to establish that some of our trip timings weren’t working.”
Guests wanted time to fit in other Queenstown activities after their shoot, and a 3pm start didn’t leave room for that. Break One moved the trip an hour earlier and saw 15% more bookings from the change.
The same follow-up emails that helped fix scheduling also built repeat business. Break One’s repeat booking rate now sits at 25%.
“Our repeat business list this year is 25 percent. It’s fantastic.”
Before a Single Shell Is Loaded, Break One Already Knows Who’s in the Van.
For a shooting range built around a scenic, off-grid drive to a private range, check-in was never going to look like a typical front-desk waiver. Break One needed gun range waiver software that worked without signal, onboarded new guides fast, and still gave Blake the data to fix what wasn’t working.
“We have many clients who come in the van, and they use Wherewolf and go ‘that’s amazing.’ We hear that a lot.”
— Blake Holden, Break One Clay Target Sports