MightyMerchant Services & Features > Clients > Client Profiles > He's Lovin' It!

Guts & Glory Tennis: John Youngblood

He's Lovin' It!

John Youngblood left a stable career working at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia to start an online business. After months of researching how to best prepare himself for the pitfalls of starting a web-based business, he found MightyMerchant, which was then called Datahost.

“I did career counseling and then I did student services and admissions at Emory University here, and I worked there for about 25 years,” Youngblood said. “Finally I decided that it was time to make a career change of my own and I decided to start my own tennis business.” Guts and Glory Tennis specializes in racquet restringing and racquet repair, and also sells tennis-related products and gifts.

Youngbloood said he’s not naturally a risk taker, and leaving his job to start an online business was a gamble. “ I wasn’t ready to put the house mortgage on the line in order to open a brick-and-mortar store, so I wanted to be web-based and work out of the home at first,” he said. One of the first things he had to do was locate a web service provider to help him build a web store. Even though he had built some pretty substantial websites during his time at Emory, he didn’t feel qualified to tackle that job by himself. “I spent several months just talking to different web service providers and hosts and doing research and checking references,” Youngblood explained. His final decision came down to the friendly, helpful service he found in our staff. “MightyMerchant … stuck out as having the most responsive and friendly customer service people that I was dealing with. A lot of the other larger companies that I spoke with, they just didn’t have the same personal touch that Datahost had at the time.” He found a lot of people making promises that they weren’t able to deliver on, even in terms of something as simple as calling back when they said they would, or providing price quotes.
Lead Designer Kathy Smith worked with Youngblood to get his site ready for business, and he found her help invaluable. “I needed this website to do two things because my business had two parts,” he said. “I needed it to promote my local stringing business, so I needed it to get out the information about those services because that’s really the bread and butter services, and then I needed an online store so that I could get products out there for people to purchase.”

Guts and Glory has continued to grow since those early days. “We started out with nothing when we put the website up,” he remembers. It did take a while to get into the search engines, which is typical, but since he was “found,” he’s noticed good results and steadily climbing sales. “Without the help of MightyMerchant, that wouldn’t be happening, because I would have never known to do search engine optimization,” he said, hitting on an element of web design that is essential these days. Another feature Youngblood appreciates is the flexible software. “It lets me alter and change or do whatever I need to do,” he said. “And when I can’t figure out what I need to do I can send an e-mail or a phone call to the support people or to Kathy and it gets taken care of very quickly. It’s something that you just won’t find with other companies. As a customer, you feel like they’re in it with you and you know that they’re working hard.”

Go to Gut & Glory Tennis

Part of Youngblood’s vision for his site was to draw traffic to the site without the intention of selling anything, to build a community of users. “We created a section of the site that we call “Court Jester,” where we just post fun satire and humorous stories, and I get a lot of comments about those pages.” He’s the first to admit that as business has grown he’s had less time to post new material, but “Court Jester” is one piece of the website that’s unique and he plans to keep it going.

Another important aspect of his site that customers tell him they enjoy are the humorous touches sprinkled throughout. Many Guts and Glory customers comment on how fun and light the site is. Some even browse through just to read the item descriptions. "We have intentionally tried to make many of our descriptions fun and informative. Humor is a tool we attempt to use to make our site stand out from the other more 'corporate' sites," he said. "Down home, professional and fun is what we are trying to accomplish. I think we are getting close."

Youngblood said choosing MightyMerchant has been a great business decision, “and one I would never change!”
Thanks John!

John Youngblood’s experience with MightyMerchant is what we strive for with all of our customers. We truly hope all of you feel as positively about us as John does.

If you've had a great experience using MightyMerchant, or if your relationship with us has had a positive affect on your business, we want to hear about it! If you would you like your website highlighted in an upcoming issue of the newsletter, please let us know.