From the Firehouse to the Firing Line

From Fire Chief to Long-Range Outfitter

Paul Bourgeois didn’t come up through a machine shop or the competition shooting circuit. He spent 25 years in the fire service, eventually serving as fire chief of a department in the East Valley of the Phoenix metropolitan area.

That’s not the résumé you might expect behind a precision hunting rifle operation, but it explains a lot about how Precision Hunting Supply operates: an emphasis on procedure, verification, quality control, customer service, and eliminating as much uncertainty as possible.

In 2017, Bourgeois retired from the fire service and began guiding big-game hunters full-time. That experience ultimately planted the seeds for Precision Hunting Supply.

He was already using long-range hunting equipment in the field, helping clients prepare for and execute successful shots under real hunting conditions. Guiding also gave him a firsthand look at what worked, what didn’t, and where hunters and their equipment were most likely to fail when the pressure was on.

Learning From the Pioneers

In 2019, Bourgeois became affiliated with Best of the West in Cody, Wyoming, one of the pioneering companies in modern long-range hunting.

Although he had already been shooting and learning on his own, Bourgeois credits hunting legends John Porter, Jim Sessions, Dan Adler, and Jack Peterson with helping take his education to another level.

That relationship gave him professional-level training and experience that helped lay the foundation for what would eventually become Precision Hunting Supply.

Bourgeois operated as Best of the West Arizona beginning in 2019.

In 2023, he brought on Brett Broman, a fellow fire-service professional and longtime hunting partner. Bourgeois and Broman had worked together in the fire service and hunted together for years, making the transition from colleagues and hunting partners to business partners a natural one.

Later that year, the company transitioned away from the Best of the West Arizona name, rebranded as Precision Hunting Supply, and opened its brick-and-mortar location in Mesa, Arizona.

The Best of the West influence remains part of PHS’s foundation: combine an accurate rifle, proven hunting ammunition, dependable optics, and a ballistic solution that has been verified at distance.

PHS adopted that philosophy and built its own process around applying it to production rifles as well as custom and semi-custom platforms.

The Accurizer Service

Precision Hunting Supply’s flagship offering isn’t a particular rifle. It’s a process called the Accurizer Service.

The idea is simple. Hunters invest substantial time and money into tags, travel, equipment, scouting, and preparation. PHS wants the rifle system to be one thing they don’t have to question when the hunt begins.

The process starts with evaluating the rifle and confirming that it is an appropriate platform for the customer’s intended use. If the rifle is new, PHS seasons the barrel before ammunition testing begins.

From there, PHS tests a variety of ammunition, including factory and custom loads, to determine what that individual rifle performs best with.

Then the company’s long-range technicians take over the data-collection process.

These experienced professional shooters collect and verify ballistic data at short, medium, and long ranges. That information is combined with the environmental conditions from the testing session to develop the rifle’s ballistic solution and, when appropriate, a custom yardage turret matched to that rifle and ammunition combination.

Depending on the rifle and the customer’s needs, PHS can also add or coordinate upgrades such as optics, aftermarket triggers, muzzle brakes, bedding, bubble levels, and other components.

Precision Hunting Supply is not a traditional gunsmithing shop. Its specialty is evaluating, testing, configuring, and verifying the complete hunting rifle system.

The end result is a system whose performance has been demonstrated and confirmed on the range.

Ready to Hunt

That same philosophy carries into PHS’s Ready-to-Hunt, or RTK, systems.

PHS works with proven production rifles along with select custom and semi-custom platforms and builds a complete hunting system around them.

A typical RTK package includes the rifle, optic, custom yardage turret and ballistic solution, hard case, 40 rounds of matched ammunition, wind meter, Switchview lever, scope coat, and verified range data.

The objective isn’t simply to sell someone a rifle.

It’s to deliver a complete system in which the major variables have already been addressed, tested, and verified.

Equipment Is Only Half the Equation

Training remains an important part of the business.

Since inception, Precision Hunting Supply has trained more than 300 students in long-range shooting and hunting. The company hosts shooting schools each year both in the Phoenix metropolitan area and at locations around the country.

Private instruction, however, makes up the majority of the company’s training work.

In many cases, that means taking a customer who has just purchased a rifle system into the field and teaching them how to use it properly — from building stable shooting positions and managing recoil to reading wind, using ballistic data, and understanding their own effective range.

That training is a natural extension of the PHS philosophy. A well-built and verified rifle system is only part of the equation. The shooter still has to understand how to use it.

The Mesa storefront reflects that same specialized approach. PHS focuses on precision and Western hunting equipment rather than trying to operate like a traditional gun shop carrying thousands of unrelated products.

The business is built around understanding how the rifle, optic, ammunition, ballistic solution, equipment, and shooter work together as a complete system.

Built From the Field Backward

Precision Hunting Supply has an unusual origin story for the firearms industry.

It began with a career fire-service professional who became a hunting guide, sought professional long-range training, spent years working with hunters in the field, and eventually built a business around solving the problems he repeatedly saw there.

Bourgeois’s fire-service background brought an emphasis on procedure, quality control, training, and verification. His guiding experience brought an understanding of what actually happens when hunters and equipment are put under pressure in the field.

Broman brought a similar fire-service background, years of hunting experience, and an established working relationship with Bourgeois.

Together, they have built Precision Hunting Supply around a simple principle:

When the opportunity finally comes, the hunter shouldn’t be wondering whether the rifle system will perform. That question should already have been answered on the range.

Precision Hunting Supply — Confidence at Distance.