To get from her childhood home near Whitwell, Tennessee, to nearby Jasper, where she now owns and operates Battle Creek Powersports, Phynessa Sewell traveled a winding path: from Chattanooga to Europe, to Knoxville, to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Africa and back.
She graduated from Chattanooga’s Baylor School, spending her senior year in Paris. After finishing her undergraduate degree in international studies at the University of Tennessee, she moved to Cambridge and earned a master’s degree in theological studies from Harvard University.
From there, it was off to West Africa, where she spent 18 months with the Peace Corps — and realized she wanted a motorcycle.
She remembers carrying water in her village when she saw an older woman sitting on the ground. There was a child — the old woman’s granddaughter, as it turned out — in her lap.
“(The child) was near death,” Sewell says. “She was green.”
The nearest adequate medical facility was miles away, and Sewell had no ready transportation. What ensued, she says, was an adventure during which she punched a man in the nose and narrowly escaped charges. The child got medical help and survived, she adds.
“With a motorcycle,” she says, “I could have just taken (the little girl) to the clinic myself and avoided all that hassle.”
Sewell says that when she got home, her dad joined her for a bike-shopping trip. They drove from Marion County to Chattanooga, she recalls, only to be disappointed.
“We went to two or three shops, and nobody even talked to us,” she says.
They came back toward home and made one more stop, at a shop in Jasper, then owned by Stan Sewell. She wound up buying a Kawasaki Vulcan 500 — and ended up marrying Sewell two years later. By February 2008, she owned that Jasper shop, renamed Battle Creek Powersports.
Sewell says motorcycles are what lured her to the business initially, but “the reality is we sell more off-road” vehicles.
“And it’s not just all-terrain vehicles (ATVs), but side-by-sides as well,” she says. “(Side-by-side) sales have skyrocketed since we’ve been here — so many people around here have hunting property.”
Sewell says Battle Creek features Kawasaki, Polaris, CanAm, Slingshot and CF Moto brands. Her hope is that in early 2025, her staff will be showing off those vehicles in a new $2 million showroom that would double Battle Creek’s covered square footage.
“We’ve outgrown our space,” she says, adding that her original shop was a single 10,000-square-foot building on a 4.5-acre parcel. In 2015, she added a 10,000-square-foot building that serves as both a warehouse and the dealership’s service department.
Sewell concedes that she was “super naive” when she took on Battle Creek.
“Didn’t know anything about the industry,” she says, but knew she wanted to try to grow her business.
“I studied religion (at Harvard) rather than business,” she says. “Poverty alleviation rather than wealth creation, because the traditional method of running a dealership puts so much risk and stress on employees that it’s hard to keep good people.”
At Battle Creek, she says, everyone starts with a base salary that she admits “isn’t lucrative, but would put beans and rice on the table if no one ever came through the door.”
She adds that performance pay is team-based, with all margins going into a pool from which all employees draw. Because commissions are shared, she says, sales staffers routinely help one another, which ends up being to the customer’s benefit.
Sewell says she opened Battle Creek in 2008 with a staff of three. The shop now has 15 on its payroll today, and annual revenues have more than tripled in the past decade.
“We’ve done something right in 16 and a half years,” she adds. “My team is so very good.”
Battle Creek Powersports is at 375 Commerce Place, Jasper, Tennessee, 30 minutes from downtown Chattanooga, traveling primarily on I-24 West.