ITS OFFICIAL
As of yesterday, my home-based Type 7 FFL was approved. Timelines (because that's what we do here) are as follows:
- Application mailed May 18th
- IOI contacted June 11th and set the interview for the 18th of that same month
- FFL officially approved July 2nd, just waiting on my paper license for display
The whole process was very interesting and I definitely learned a lot, one of which being zoning. In my personal experience I'm no stranger to zoning laws, but what was particularly interesting is that when I did research on home-based occupations, the regulations were extremely contradictory. Basically, the law stated that you CAN have a home-based occupation... but you can't have any customers come to your residence, you can't sell any products, you can't perform any services for customers, etc. So essentially you could run a home-based business but quite literally couldn't do anything. I called up my contacts at the zoning office and they were just as confused and said they'd look into it. About a day later they got back to me and said they'd JUST changed the rules, omitting all those contradictory regulations... how convenient. Nonetheless, I got the green light from my zoning office.
Next was the IOI interview. I'll admit I was overly nervous for absolutely no reason. Prior to the interview I had made some modifications to my property to align with what the ATF recommends but doesn't require — namely, I put up some cameras. I personally use Ubiquiti for my camera and internet setup, so I ran cables through my walls and installed cameras in my place of business, which is my front dining room. I also installed a locking doorknob on my stairway closet to serve as my secure storage, and this was perfectly acceptable to my IOI.
The interview took about three hours and my interviewer was very thorough. He went over all my business information as well as the application itself and made a few minor corrections. After that we went over processes and procedures — the acquisition and disposition process — and he even gave me some guidance on how to handle a disposition if I wanted to transfer to myself, which was unexpected but very nice to know. About an hour in, all the nerves were gone and the rest of the interview was basically just a conversation. By that point my IOI had started making statements like "when you get your license, do this" rather than "if." By the end of it, he said we were approved and left.
I received my official approval on July 2nd (True Independence Day), somewhat unexpectedly, via a call from Boundbook asking about my plans for a bound book solution. I told them I wasn't interested, but was glad to hear I officially had my license.
As for future plans, I'll be applying for a Class 2 SOT once I'm more familiar with the process, but for now I'll mainly be focusing on transfers. I'm also in the process of building a digital bound book that can be self-hosted on-prem or in the cloud. Once it's finished, I'll be publishing it free and open source for anyone to use, modify, or build on top of.
Overall, a very fun experience so far, and I'm glad to finally join the club.