The (Improbable) Story of Savannah Bananas' Rise to a $1B Empire

You gotta create attention first. If people don't know who you are, good luck trying to create something.

You guys have a multi-million person waitlist for tickets. On TikTok, you have 10 times more followers than the New York Yankees.

You're one of our Mount Rushmore type of guys because you're playing the game on extreme hard mode, and I respect you for it.

It's way harder than I thought.

So we completely ran out of money. We had nothing left. And then Emily turned to me and said, we have to sell our house. So we sold our house.

Did you have conversations of wanting to quit?

I mean, it was brutal. I feel like I can rule the world.

I know I could be what I want to.

I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel. What's up, guys?

Oh my God, it's Jesse Cole. What's up?

How you guys doing?

We almost wore the same thing today.

You should have. You should have. There's a lot more going around these days. I think I'm keeping them in business.

When did you start the yellow suit, yellow hat? What was the day?

What was before the bananas? That's the crazy thing. People didn't even realize that it was before the bananas. That's the wild thing. Oh, yeah, man. We had a team and you talk about first million. We had a team in Gastonia. So I was wearing this before because of P.T. Barnum. Inspired by him not just to be the same, same, you know, regular host like everyone else.

So Do you know what you're getting into at all with this?

I know I've listened to your show and I'm ready. I'm ready to rock. I love the one with the— to the owner of the Jazz. That was an interesting— that was more of a sit down.

When I was hanging out with him, I was telling him a bunch of Savannah Banana anecdotes. I was like, you got to, you got to do this. You got to do this. You got to get the grandmas on the court.

He loves hearing all the other things he should do.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's probably what he liked, Chunk. He probably liked that.

Yeah. No, it was very well done and very well produced as well. You guys did a great job with that. Well, thanks, man.

Well, we're excited to have you here because you are, you're one of our, like, entrepreneurial Mount Rushmore type of guys because you took some, you know, it's the, it's about the gap. It's about the gap of going from nothing to something. And the way, how far you went with nothing to something incredible is, is pretty remarkable. Just to give people a sense, I mean, I don't know a soul in my life who wanted to go watch exhibition or minor league baseball. That was not even a thing. And yet you guys have a multi-million person waitlist for tickets. You guys have— I just looked this morning on TikTok, you have 10 times more followers than the New York Yankees. And so just accomplishing that kind of blows my mind. And I want you to come on here and I want you to tell your story. I want you to teach us kind of how you think, because I think what you— the way you think and how that's been applied to baseball could be applied to many other types of businesses. I think that's the real gift you're going to kind of give the entrepreneurial world.

Yeah, well, fire it up. Let's, let's jam.

All right, so Sam, where should we start?

Start at the start? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's spend— but we'll keep it a little bit abbreviated because you've done a lot of amazing podcasts. We've talked about it. But yeah, do set some— set the context a little bit. Like, 10, 15 years ago, where were you?

Why even be there? Like, why weren't you an intern at JP Morgan? Or, you know, why is your first job a GM of a summer league baseball team? What was the plan?

Never could have got a job at JP Morgan or any of those, for the record. So no, I, I, I played ball. So my whole life was baseball. My dad owned a baseball facility. I was very fortunate to get a huge scholarship to Wofford College, Division I school down South Carolina. So My goal was to play professional baseball. So I was getting, you know, letters from the Mets and the Padres and the Pirates and the Braves. And I was like, this is going to happen. And then I tore my shoulder just like that. So everyone's like, oh, you're going to go into coaching, Jesse. Your dad was a coach. You're just— that's your mindset. And I coached for one summer in the Cape Cod League, and I wanted to pull my hair out every day. It was the best players, like the highest level. Like, these guys were all going to be first-round picks, and I was in the dugout at the best seat. And I was just bored out of my mind.

I used to go to the Cape Cod League games and it was, the hot dogs were great.

It was just baseball. It was just baseball. But it was, it was high. It was, it was all these guys. If you look at the major league rosters, all-stars, a lot of them played in the Cape Cod League. But I was bored. There's a difference between playing and watching. And so it was the first time I really, you know, as Walt Disney thinks, you know, put yourself in the customer's shoes. I put myself in the spectator's shoes and I was like, I'm bored. And so it was then I realized that I don't want to coach anymore. And I said, well, what if I, you know, got in the front office and tried to make the show and the entertainment and the experience better for fans? And that's really where it started. And that's when I went to take this job as a 23-year-old general manager of one of the worst teams in the country.

Isn't there a story of Disney going to— I don't know if it was a park or an amusement park with his daughter, and he's sitting on a bench and he's kind of just like looking at this. He's like, why don't— like, I wish this was fun for me and her and not just her, for example. Isn't there some famous story like that? And that's where the origins of Disneyland came about.

100%. And I've studied Walt religiously. So, yes, it was at Griffith Park. It was his two daughters. Saturdays was his day with his daughters, and he always took them. He had, you know, Daddy Day with the daughters. And so he took them to Griffith Park, and they're on the carousel, and he's sitting there and he goes, I wish there was a place that adults and kids could have fun together. And that's where the literal mindset said, well, what if we created a place like that? And so I, in a weird way, was sitting in the dugout the best seat in the house with some of the best players, thinking, I'm bored out of my mind. Why can't this be fun for more people? And so that's where it kind of started the journey as a 23-year-old general manager with no money in the bank account, not getting paid on how do you make this more fun? And that's really where I fell in love with Walt Disney and P.T. Barnum and started studying WWE and Cirque du Soleil, Saturday Night Live. I became obsessed with learning about entertainment, not necessarily learning about the baseball business. I want to learn about the entertainment business.

Can you tell us the transition from employee to owner? And then, well, yeah, first of all, that is like, what was that era?

I was a general manager for 2 or 3 years. Then I became the managing partner, which the owner gave me like, I think like a 5%, just like equity stake for being a part of it. And then it was 2014. So that was, geez, 6, 7, 8 years later that I bought it from him. So the team was worth very little, made it worth a lot more. So went into owner financing debt with him and bought it for him in 2014. And he gave me every opportunity. I was so fortunate that the owner, Ken Silver, just let this kid kind of run with the team and try things and experiment. But we ended up having success after that first year. And so made the team a lot more valuable, which is a good win for all of us.

And it was still like a real, like a, like a, like a normal baseball team, like for the first 2 years, right?

You're not even the Savannah Bananas yet.

You're still the Gastonia Grizzlies.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The ones nobody heard about. I think that's really important. The sort of like the toiling in obscurity, trying things, iterating. Now let me ask you, those ideas that you just said, every one of those ideas, I'm like, oh my God, what a genius idea. That's fantastic. And I could totally— it makes me laugh. I could totally see them. I could see the press release. I could see the news clip. I could see the TikTok clip. Now, to have 10 great ideas, you probably had, what, 1,000, 10,000 bad ideas, something like that. Tell me about your practice of generating ideas and what was your kind of system of creativity?

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Let's recap. That's pretty remarkable. This is remarkable. So it took you 8 years to get to $1 million in revenue?

No, we didn't even get to $1 million in revenue.

Okay.

So after— we never got to $1 million. It wasn't until Savannah that we actually reached $1 million in one year.

And how old were you on the 8th year? You were like, what, like 32?

So I was 23.

Yeah.

So yeah, you know, it was— so when we finally got— so we had Gastonia and then Savannah in 2015. So we had both teams at once. So I went to Savannah in 2015. 2016 was the first year we reached $1 million in revenue.

How many times did like kind of smart, well-intentioned friends and family sit you down and be like, Jesse, what are you doing?

What are you doing?

What's going on? I was having the time of my life.

Do you need some help? Do you need a job at the car wash? Like, what are you doing out there?

Oh, everyone I've come across, especially family, knows I need help in many different ways. But they were— No, they saw I was having fun. Guys, think about this. We took over a team that had most nights 50 to 100 fans. And my first year we had nights where we're getting over 1,000 fans or 1,500 fans or 2,000 fans. By our second year, we were selling out games. Like, again, it was only 2,000, 3,000 seat stadium, but it was unbelievable. I was having the time of my life.

Were you making a profit?

Yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I mean, we got, you know, by probably $800,000, $850,000 in revenue, probably costing $600,000. So like expenses. So it was, you know, oh, it was a healthy profit. You know, it was for college summer baseball. We were killing it. Are you kidding me? It was like, heck yeah, look at what we're doing. And you know, in the late 20s in Gastonia, a little tiny, I was, I was happy. But every day I got to create new things. That's what people don't realize. I got to create things and I got to have fun and I got to see every day. I got to test those ideas in real time. Will people show up or will they not? Will they like this promotion or will they not? Will it sell tickets or not? Will they buy this merch or not? I got to test every day. And Henry Ford at Greenfield Village, I'll never forget, I visited him. He said Henry believed in learning by doing. And I'm obsessed. I want to be the fastest learning sports organization in the world. And so the more we do, the more we learn. And so that started, you know, many years in Gastonia before we went to Savannah. All right.

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You mentioned P.T. Barnum and Disney and how you obsessively studied them. What were some of the early stories that inspired you? Or things that they did that maybe me, who hasn't read about P.T. Barnum, wouldn't know about, but that blew your mind?

Well, with P.T. Barnum, it was so much about how do you create attention? Showmanship. He says, without promotion, something terrible happens. Nothing. And so when you look at his books, I mean, he hired terrible performing musicians. Violinists and musicians that were so bad that he put them outside of his museum. And so he'd say, the only way you can get away from it is you have to come inside the museum. He would just come up with ideas and he would bring people together. He was a master promoter. He was also a tremendous writer, and he was always writing. He was always speaking. So I kind of took his spot as like, he was always a front person. You got to have someone that truly believes in what you do. And P.T. Barnum believed in his museum. He said, hey, some of it's true, some of it's not, but you're going to come in and you're going to be entertained. And he believed in that. And he went on top of every mountain top to yell that. So I kind of took that from him. It's like, all right, I was dressed like everyone else. I'm like, no, I'm going to get a full tuxedo. By the way, the first one was black and it had tails and it was 95 degrees in North Carolina summer night. I almost melted. So I said, we're not doing that. So I found a yellow one that was brighter and fit the color of the grizzlies, which was also kind of yellow. That's how that started. Um, but it was about showmanship. Pete Brown was a showman. How do you create attention with all your acts? And then Bill Vecch, man, he was the most fans-first owner ever. He would sit with the fans in the stands. He was an owner. He would literally set up and he would, he would talk to all the fans every single night. He would go Vecching, as I made up the term, but after every game he would go to the bars with the fans just to connect with them. You know, when he took over the St. Louis Browns, they say, what time the game starts? He goes, what time do you want it to start? Like, that was his mindset, was always what would be best for fans. And he did it. He did constant giveaways. He was first one to put names on the back of jerseys. He had the exploding scoreboard with fireworks. I mean, he was just so far ahead of his time, and every other owner hated him because he was doing so much more for fans than they all were. And so you combine that with then Walt Disney's vision, and it's kind of fun to do the impossible and put yourself in the guest's shoes. Those three kind of just set me on a tone of like, let's try to combine these worlds and create something pretty special in baseball.

So all of that is like you dressing the way you dress and doing the thing you do now. It's inspiring because the company is, I don't know if it's real, but the headlines is that it's worth $1 billion and you're incredibly successful and you're well-loved. But for the first handful of years, did you, did you feel like, I mean, did you feel embarrassed? Were you like, I don't know if this is going to pay off. I don't know if it's worth it. I'm risking my reputation. I look silly right now. Did that fear come into play? Because when I hear what you're doing, I'm like, that makes sense, I should do that. And also, I'd be embarrassed.

1000%. We've been criticized every step of the way. I've been embarrassed many steps of the way. You know, our first 8 years and 9 years in Gastonia, we did everything. It was myself, was my wife. We had 1 or 2 other team members. We put out show tonight signs out around town just to try to convince people, hey, they have a game, please go. We did the trash before the game. We did the hiring. We did the concessions. We did operations, putting signs up. We did everything. And it was exhausting. And people criticize. It's like you're a college summer team, you know, on a Wednesday night there might be 500 people there. And then when we went to Savannah, that's when the criticism and the skepticism reached an all-time high.

Why then?

Well, you had professional baseball for 90 years. So you had professional baseball for 90 years, and then all of a sudden there's a college summer baseball team coming in. So they just had the New York Mets affiliate the year before us. And now they wanted a brand new stadium. The city said no, they weren't going to invest because no one was coming to the games. So all the professional Savannah teams were the lowest in the league in attendance. I mean, literally some nights having 300 people in the ballpark for professional baseball. So we came in and we had, we're going to make baseball fun. We're going to do this. We're going to do this. We're going to do this. They're like, sure you are. We've heard that before, kid. And yeah, we sold 2 tickets in our first 3 months and I mean, we were hung up on every day. I mean, my wife, she would walk in. So we had a free launch event where we were literally having free food, free drinks, everything. She'd walk into little shops, stores, restaurants, and be told, get out. Like, literally told. We weren't selling. We were offering free. Hey, we just want you to come. We're the new team. We're here in town. We want to meet the community. I mean, it was brutal.

What did you have conversations of wanting to quit?

You couldn't because we were now 7 figures in debt. You know, we had to, we had to buy, we had to buy the team, which was, uh, we bought it through the Coastal Plain League because it was an expansion team. And then we also had to put money in the team. We had to do the startup. We hired people. We had nothing. So we were in debt and we had all these, these young people right outta college, a 24-year-old team president as well that we were responsible for. And so there were no options of quitting.. It was just how do we convince these people to believe in us? And what I realized is the only way to do that is we had to show them. As Steve Jobs says, no one knows what they want until you show it to them. We were talking, talking, talking. That's not good marketing. Marketing is creating experience and showing people. So we had to get to that point.

You seem like an incredibly optimistic guy, and I love that. I love your energy. And obviously at this point, there's a lot to be optimistic about. But the era that we're talking about, things were not going well. You sell 2 tickets in 3 months. 7 figures in debt. And I'm curious, like, nobody's optimistic 100% of the times. There are moments of either doubt or pain or struggle. And like, so when I say rock bottom and then they're making the movie about you, what's the movie scene where the director's like, okay, this is the rock bottom scene. It's maybe it's you and your wife or it's, you know, you at the ATM machine looking at the balance. You know what? What's rock bottom? When I say that?

We didn't speak English. Wait, Emily's the one.

She kept me. I don't know how, because I can get into, you know, I think all entrepreneurs, you know, we're high performers and we think differently, but also you can spiral a little bit. And I started, I'm optimistic, but I was like, Em, what are we going to do? This is bad. Everybody's saying no to us. But she's like, Jesse, we did this. We got to get to that first game. Get to the first game. Get to the first game. So she lifted me up and we knew we just had to get to that next at bat. But the first thing was really name the team. Because at that point we didn't have a name of the team, so we had to get people to understand who we were. And so that was the big thing, too. And that's when things changed positively and negatively, because when we did a name the team contest, everyone said, be the Spirits, be the Ports, be the Anchors, be the Braves. I was like, there's a team in Georgia called the Braves. We're not going to be the Braves, guys. But there was one person that suggested Bananas. And I remember we looked at each other and said, yeah. Go bananas. And we thought of the Banana Nanas senior citizen dance team and the Mananas male cheerleading team and a banana baby that we lift up before the game and a banana band and Can't Stop the Peeling. We just thought of all those guys. We were like, we have to go.

It is perfect.

And then we announced it and we got crucified, man. We were ripped apart locally. I mean, it was, it was so bad, guys. I'll never forget the St. Patrick's Day parade 2 weeks after we announced, and we're wearing green banana shirts., and we're getting booed walking through town. Literally, people are booing.

Were they like baseball purists, or did they think that you were insulting the town, or what?

I've watched like maybe 10 or 20 interviews of you now, and we've talked about you a bunch of the podcasts, and I've noticed that you do a few things consistently. And one of them you've done here already a bunch of times. You've already named Henry Ford, Bill Vett, Walt Disney. You talk about Steve Jobs all the time. You name P.T. Barnum, you name drop all the time. And am I taking— I guess I'm reading into that where Do you go out and try to find inspiration and then do you find like a couple lines in books and you're like, that's it, that's what we have to do? Or because I've learned you, you, you, I don't think you've ever explicitly talked about your creative process other than I think you said that you make a list of 10 new ideas every single day. And then I've also noticed that you have these like frameworks where you say like Walt Disney said this, and it's as if you like read this biography, you saw that one line, you're like, I live my life according to that. Now, can you talk a little bit about that? Because that's kind of Fascinating.

Well, Walt Disney said curiosity keeps leading us down new paths, and we'll keep trying things and experimenting. And it's my curiosity. So, yeah, I'll go very deep on subjects. I don't think there's a track. Yes, I do 10 ideas a day. Yes, I journal every day. But it's the reading I get fascinated by. So when I start learning about Walt Disney, I read one book, then it guides me to another book, then it guides me to another book, then it guides me to— like, I'm looking across right now. I have an entire bookshelf of all— every book on Walt Disney and Disney World. I don't know, 100 books maybe. And then I have a whole section on P.T.

Barnum.

Then I have an entire shelf on Amazon. Then I have an entire shelf on Steve Jobs. Then I have shelves on, like, ESPN. I have every book on Taylor Swift. She's fascinating, what she's doing. Marvel, you know, Grateful Dead, you know, all these different worlds. Because there's a blueprint on how to create something truly special, a world of entertainment that's different than anyone else. But in sports, you know, I would say, you know, obviously WWE, UFC, F1, they're thinking differently.. But in most traditional sports, it's the same thing. You're, you're competing to win. And we're, our game is compete to create fans and how do we entertain. And so I, I want to learn from the greatest entertainers in the world. So my framework is I'll just go very, very, very deep. And then what I do is I earmark every single page and, uh, I know exactly where, when I earmark a page, what I'm looking for. I've done book reports, uh, I've done numerous book reports like Built to Last.

Tell me about a book report. Like what? What's a book report?

Yeah. So we did this as a team. So for many years in the beginning, we actually paid our people to read. So we'd pay them to do book reports. So we're obsessed with learning as part of our organization. So we did that for many years. Now we do kind of team books that we read as a group. But yeah, a book report, I'll go through and just kind of the biggest takeaways, the biggest things that lead to fans first, ideas, parallels. David Novak, the former CEO of Yum Brands, he had a very good compliment to me. I didn't know what it meant. At all when he said it at first, but he's like, you're one of the greatest parallel thinkers I've ever seen. I go, thank you, David. What does that mean? And he goes, well, he goes, literally, what you can see something and then you can make it your own in a parallel path. And so, like, when I see something from Grateful Dead about what they did as far as, you know, they brought the sound in-house, they tried to bring the tickets in-house, they tried to— they let all their fans record all of that. Then Dave Matthews followed suit. I can see that and then follow it our way. So that's you know, again, no real method. It's just I want to look at examples of the best in the world. So like Jimmy Donaldson, you know, he was with us, MrBeast. And so like, I've read everything on him, but we spent a lot of time talking together because he's the best in the world at YouTube. So I try to ask all those questions. I think that's just— you follow your curiosity.

What'd you steal from Jimmy?

Well, the big— the biggest thing I was fascinated with him was the YouTube growth on how he looks outside of the country. 70% of his views come from outside the US. And so you better believe that we immediately were hiring, you know, Spanish-speaking broadcasters. We're going to hire Japanese-speaking broadcasters. We're going to start having our games and social go all over the world as we continue to grow there. So that was the one thing I was like, all right, what in YouTube can we do right now to grow an audience and create fans? And he shared what he's doing with his audience and dubbing. And that was fascinating.

We did an episode with Jimmy and we, he talked about the same sort of 10 ideas a day thing. So he was like, you know, I started this when I was 11 or 12 years old, and he said kind of your same story. There's a great quote. He goes, at 12 years old, nobody watched. 13 years old, nobody watched. 14 years old, nobody watched. 15 years old, nobody watched. 16 years old, is anybody ever gonna watch? Nope. 17 years old, nobody's still watching. And he's like, finally, when I was 19, I started to get some viewers, and even then it was small, right? Um, so he had this kind of 6 years of toiling in obscurity, 7 years where it just wasn't working, but he was getting better. And he talked about how he used to do the kind of 10, 20 ideas. Like, the most important thing in a YouTube video is the idea, the premise of the video. So I came up with 10 to 20 ideas a day. He's like, I would flip open a dictionary at the source. So we had him do it live on the podcast. We put a random word generator and he came up with ideas live on the thing. And you could tell he had built that muscle. So I'm curious, like, you say this thing about the 10 ideas a day. Is that like you used to do that early on? Are you still doing that? Is there a sticky note on your desk right now with like 10 ideas you wrote this morning?

I did 2 groups of ideas. No, I have—

Please get it.

So here is, here's the idea book. So I have one every single year. So, uh, what's that say on the COVID Well, it just says 2025 ideas, Banana Ball. So I just have, I have these books all the time. And so yeah, today I was obsessed. So I'm working on our, our two, two of our newer teams. So I'm working on, uh, the Indianapolis Clowns, which we brought back, um, one of the most famous Negro League teams. And so yeah, it's all the Clowns characters. Dynamic contortionist, batboy, the juggling hawkers, juggling ball boy, an umpire that's a mime, trampoline coaches, strongmen, balloon artist, ringmaster/barker, human cannibal, a character artist. So, like, just— and it starts listing. So I start thinking about ideas on how I want to build.

So I want to zoom in. You do this first thing, or you take meetings first, or what's your kind of process? Are you like— do you have a routine you use?

Dude, you're an animal. You're an animal.

Yeah, I love it though. It doesn't feel like— it's never felt like work. There's certain things that if you really love, like ideas, if I've come up with good ideas or ideas that are exciting to me, like I'm fired up the rest of the day, I have great energy. And so it's like you got to create before you consume. Often we consume and we read all these things and I'm getting criticized. We get all these different things, but it's like if I can create first and that's, I mean, we just today literally as we record this, we just launched our first ever fans first ticket marketplace. So secondary market right now, we're getting killed. People are spending $400,000, $500,000, $600,000, $700,000 for tickets and often they're getting scammed. We built our own one, face value, no markups, no fees. We just announced that. 30 minutes ago. Like, that fires me up because I'm going to learn. We're going to get it out there. We're going to start experimenting. Like, you get to do new things. That's what Walt Disney— you got to try new things constantly. And I love that.

I feel like the— now the sort of— you've hit escape velocity and people now recognize, oh wait, this is something special. And you have a lot of momentum going. And I'm sure whether it's speaking fees or like speaking gigs or just meeting interesting people throughout doing what you're doing, you've now gotten into some pretty interesting rooms. Like you've, you know, you've mentioned reading about Jeff Bezos. You'll meet Jeff Bezos if you haven't already. These things will happen because I think everybody can take inspiration from a brand builder and a fan-first, customer-first mindset that's like not just words but actually put into action in all these really interesting ways. Who have you met in this that, that kind of was like a wow moment for you? Or, and I'm curious, what do they want to learn from you? What do they pull from you? Because I think, you know, it doesn't matter how sort of successful you are in one industry, I think there's a lot they can learn from you.

Well, I appreciate that. But, you know, whenever I get a call with one of these people, I'm picking their brain like crazy and asking questions.

But yeah, it's a question tug of war.

It usually is. You know, it's, it's funny, the FaceTimes and the videos and the calls that I get now. And but, you know, one that stood out for me was Bob Iger a couple of months ago. And, you know, I have so much respect for what he did and to continue to make creative the heartbeat of Disney. You know, I think it loses its— sometimes it ebbs and flows with the creative. And after Walt was gone for 20, 30 years, they were figuring out— then Michael Eisner and Frank Wells came in and went crazy. And then Iger kept it going to a whole nother level. And now again, trying to bring back that. That was a 30-minute conversation. I walked out fired up. So, you know, I mean, there's— it's a wide array, you know, from, you know, the heads of WWE and some WWE wrestlers to actors to actresses to a lot of musicians. Now I'm hearing from a lot of musicians, you know, big-time football players, and, you know, athletes. But, you know, I think my biggest thing is I always just want to host them. Come out to our show. You know, you learn by seeing. Watch how we literally start entertaining 7 hours before the game. Watch how we stay 2 hours after the game and continue entertaining. Like, that's what Taylor Swift— she's like, I'm going to do a 3-hour and 45-minute set, which is crazy because I want to overdeliver. And so we look to overdeliver with everything. And so, you know, I enjoy hosting people more at our shows and getting to meet them and share with them the behind the scenes. That's where I get a lot of joy.

When I hear you talk, I think I would never want to compete against this person. And we've, and we've had a bunch of people like that. I think Jimmy was one of them where you're like, oh, this guy is just like, he's going to, he's going to die or win. I mean, there's, there's, you know, you're going against a crazy person. You don't seem motivated by money. You don't seem particularly competitive with the outside world. You must have a chip on your shoulder. And what caused it and what's, and what's kind of forcing you to keep on moving forward?

Yeah. Name that chip.

Certainly have a chip on his shoulder. And I think, but that's not what I'm chasing. I mean, yeah, a chip on my shoulder. You know, I was an only child. You know, I, I always wanted to make my dad proud. That was kind of a big thing for me. I want to make my dad proud. He worked really hard, spent a lot of hours working, and I always wanted to do well for him. But then I didn't get drafted, tore my shoulder. I think often I've been, you know, misunderstood is probably the way Bezos would explain it, like misunderstood. And, you know, we've got criticism every step of the way, you know, in Gastonia, what are we doing here in Savannah? You know, how dare you bring college summer baseball? How dare you name the team the Bananas? How dare you leave traditional baseball to create this silly sport called Bananaball? You know, it happens all the time. The one that really fires me up now that I have a folder saved it's a fad, it'll be gone, their 15 minutes are up. I have every one of those saved, and I will never say anything back to them except some people, when they get really going, I just write, thanks for the inspiration. Because it actually— and I mean that sincerely. You know, those— the and ones and all the groups that have kind of come along and disappeared. I get fired up about because we are completely misunderstood. People think we are the Harlem Globetrotters. We're building a sport. There will be a world where the kids' first ball they pick up is a yellow banana ball. There will be a world where banana ball is played all over the world because of the entertainment level, because it's not just about people who love the sport. They love the fun, they love the show, plus they love the crazy talent that these guys can do with backflip catches and trick plays and the celebrations. They love how if they sit in the upper deck, we're going to come up there and we're going to give them flowers and we're going to throw giveaways and we're going to put on a show no matter where they're sitting, even if they're the furthest seat away.. And so I get excited for that money. Again, 10 years ago, we had nothing. And so now, yes, we're very fortunate with the businesses, but nah, I chase moments. Like, there's certain moments. Our first game at Fenway Park. I was a kid who grew up with a goal to play at Fenway Park, grew up south of Boston, and we had the largest crowd of the year there. And we're all singing the moment Yellow, which is a powerful moment. You've probably seen the videos. And everyone's got their flashlight. The whole stadium is singing yellow, and I'm on the field and saying, look at what we get to do together. Or our first football stadium with 81,000 fans, and we're putting on a halftime show with 250 people in the middle of the game, which should never happen. And I'm jumping up and down because I'm feeling it. You know, when we're going to do a 100,000-seat stadium, when we're going to do a cruise, where, you know, all these— we're playing aircraft carriers, all these things, play games at beaches. Those moments fire me up because you get to feel a part of something and you get to feel alive. You know, I think I want to feel alive. And I'm sure you guys get that feeling too with certain things. It's not the money. It's, it's these moments that, you know, really light me up.

You're sort of like this joyful version of Dana White or Vince McMahon. You know, like, I think Dana literally said the same thing in a press conference. He goes, he's like, I'm in the— we're in the business of moments. And he goes, we sell good moments. And then sometimes we sell holy shit moments. And tonight was a holy shit moment. He's talking about a big knockout that happened.

We're a similar mindset. You know, I've got to work a little bit with those guys. I haven't connected directly with him yet, but I mean, yeah, he creates these moments that you never imagine.

I love it. That's amazing. He's just sort of like rage-fueled more so than you're like, I want to create this amazing family fun. You know, but I think that's part of the nature of fighting versus, uh, you know, baseball. Yeah. Today's episode is brought to you by HubSpot. Did you know that most businesses only use 20% of their data? That's like reading a book, but then tearing out 4/5 of the pages. Point is, you miss a lot. And unless you're using HubSpot, the customer platform that gives you access to the data you need to grow your business, the insights that are trapped in emails, call logs, transcripts, all that unstructured data makes all the difference. Because when you know more, you grow more. And so if you want to read the whole book instead of just reading part of it, visit HubSpot.com. When you sit, you step back, you know, how do you sort of figure out the good ideas versus the bad? It's easy to come up with 10 ideas a day. It's easy to sort of think of these things in hindsight, but You know, when you say the ticket price is $25, there's no ticket fees, we sort of round off the change. That's cute when you're selling 200 tickets. Now you're selling— I think I did the math— is like, this is like tens of millions of dollars you're eating in cost by eating the ticket fees or revenue left on the table, depending on how you wanted to look at it.

A bit of it.

And, you know, I'm sure there's a, you know, someone over there with a spreadsheet who's like, Jesse, this is not can we not do that anymore? Like, can we charge for hot dogs?

Because, you know, this is— they know better in our organization at this point.

But yes. Well, like, I guess, what are your principles? So one thing you've talked about is like fan first. And I think if you asked— if I go to 100 businesses around here, I said, are you a customer-first business? They would all say, of course, of course, customer matters. But then you go look at their actions and they're totally out of line with, with customer first. And so like, what are the different principles you have or the things you find yourself repeating over and over again? That sort of, or when a new person comes in, they really have to like almost break their brain and rebuild it to work the way you guys want to work and come up with the ideas you guys want to come up with.

So I'm, I'm psychoanalyzing you a little bit because I've just, I, I admire you so much and I wanna like steal a little pieces of like the way, the way you operate, you're doing something that we talked about, Sean, when we talked about MTV and how they sort of like said, this is the world that we are building. So they basically like what you're, what you're doing is you're saying, I'm creating a world, I'm world building. I'm not necessarily empire building, but you're, you're creating this world with its own rules. And I think where a lot of entrepreneurs, myself included, fall short is you say like your values and you're like, well, I'm just kind of going through the motions of getting it done. And if I asked you what your values were, sometimes you wouldn't even remember what they are, or they would just, you know, do it because they have to. You do this really good job of creating these rules and processes that you actually abide by. And some of them sound incredibly silly. Like, you know, you have— I like— you have all these phrases, like you had the One City World Tour. I think your first world tour, it was just in Georgia or Macon, Georgia.

There's meaning behind that in the whole thing. There's meaning behind that, which I can get into later.

But the point is, is that there's meaning, there's meaning to it. There's intention and meaning to everything.. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs, they don't have the courage to say, this is the world that I'm building and here's the rules and laws of the world that I'm building and I'm gonna stick to 'em. And I might, some of 'em might sound silly, like wearing a yellow tuxedo all the time, but there's a reason for 'em. But if I live it according to the rules, it's gonna actually become a thing. Did you always have that in you? Or is this like something where like you've learned like, man, if I just say it enough times, I'll start to believe it and it'll start becoming true. Like walk me, walk, walk us through that.

Did you raise money for this or do you, do you control 100% of this business? What's the, what does the business side look like?

Do you on your weekly leadership meetings or whatever you guys have, do you pay attention to the finances at all or do you just say like, revenue is a scorecard for doing things right. That's all I care about. Make sure I have enough money in the bank to go do what I want.

You focus on the metrics that matter most to your customers. That's what I pay most attention to. So you better believe that I pay attention to the speed of every game. I pay attention to how long the merchandise lines are at every game. I pay attention to how many trick plays are, how many ball four sprints.

Do you really? Do you have a metric for like wait times on merch?

What's the wait time right now?

It depends on the stadium. That's the biggest challenge. So right now we're at a really, If we go to Yankee Stadium or Fenway Park or a football stadium, depending on the size and the setup. So we invested this past year with another experiment. Jared Orden, our president, was brilliant in this. He said, we're going to set up an outdoor mall. So we bought a monster tent and that was a test at Yankee Stadium and that changed everything. Our per cap went up. So we had to find the space to do that. And we did the same thing in Seattle. We're playing there. So it depends if you're indoors, if you're in stadium, we have a— we can only have a small tent. It's really bad. My goal is to get everyone within 10 minutes. We're not close to it right now, but the same thing at serving, uh, all-you-can-eat food right now in Savannah, everyone can get fed within 5 minutes. The first few nights it was an hour. So like, we'll get there, but those are the metrics that I focus on. So to answer your question about money, um, I, I, I have one meeting a year, it's coming up and it's about an hour or two, and our finance director and Jared, they'll share us what we're looking at and me and Emily just say, all right, great, where are we reinvesting?

And so this is what Dana White said too. I think Dana White, I heard him say, he's like, I, I meet with the CFO occasionally, but I just, you know, I don't really care.

It's, it is what it is. And again, we're very healthy and all the estimates that people have are dramatically low on where we are. Like it is, we are very, very healthy. And I know that I pay attention to right now we're going, you know, obviously you go into Christmas holidays. So how many fans are we serving merchandise? How quickly are we serving them? How quickly are we getting it out? We have a huge 100,000+ square foot warehouse that we have now, and our team is like, get out, get out, get out. How quickly can we serve them? That's the things. So I'll know exactly how many people we serve when we do a 24-hour shirt. You know, we, we go through 30,000 orders in 24 hours. Like, I know the metric this year versus last year, and how do we continue to grow that? 'Cause that means we're creating a better product and a better experience and have more fans. Uh, social media, I pay attention to all that as well.

Have you ever heard the founder of Airbnb talk about the 12-star experience?

Do you know his friend?

I love Brian Chesky. He's one I would love to meet. Me too. I've taken a lot of inspiration from him.

Yeah.

Like the helicopter, the fire— the fireworks going off, the red carpet. Yeah.

Okay, we'll connect you with him. But one of the things that— one of the things you reminded me of was there's an anecdote about you pointed the cameras at the game, at the stadium, at the fans instead of at the game, because you were like, I want to watch from the security camera when people get bored and when they leave. Is this true? Because you wanted to basically like study the fan experience and try to understand like what— where are the lulls, where are the dips?

Almost like a—

like how Jimmy would look at his YouTube video retention chart and say, oh, at 7 minutes there's a dip. What did we do at 7 minutes? Oh, that's when we did our ad reads. We need to make those more entertaining because we can't— we can't lose people during that time.

So me and Tyler, the CEO of Beehive, came up with a little challenge for you. It's the newsletter challenge. Now, if you know me, you know that I'm a big fan of newsletters. I got my own newsletter. I also had a business that was a newsletter business that was amazing. I wrote this newsletter about crypto. We grew it to quarter million subscribers and we ended up selling it after a year for millions of dollars. And I want you to be able to do the same thing in your business. So we're doing a challenge. $10,000 is on the line. Plus me and Tyler will actually be in your corner as growth advisors. You just need to go to beehive.com/mfm and you either start a new newsletter or you move your current newsletter over there, and 5 finalists will get picked to pitch me and Tyler, sort of like Shark Tank, and the winner gets $10,000. So go to beehive.com/mfm. That's beehive.com/mfm to enter the challenge today.

How many, um, HQ staff do you, do you have now?

I wish I, wish I had the answer for you. Uh, I'll give you an idea of what it looks like on the road. Um, so if we go to a major league stadium or football stadium, we travel with 200+ people. Wow. If we have a minor league stadium, it's 150 people. And so we have 3 tours, we have 6 teams. So we're traveling with 500+ people. Then we hire between 100 to 300 at each stadium as part-time staff to help with merch, tickets, logistics, etc. And then we have our team in Savannah. So, and then we have our cast. I mean, it's, it's hundreds, you know, some are equivalent, some are full-time. But yeah, we're hiring every week. There's new people joining our team.

And I read that you had the business and you were like, we're going to get into social media. And I think it was like, I don't really know what I'm doing, but like, hey, you, you know, my coworker, just start, go and figure this out. Is that true? And were you successful in just getting like young, inexperienced people and inspiring them? And that worked out? And has that worked out better than hiring more of the, the more of the experienced people?

We have very few from the outside. I would say 80, 80% have been started as interns, you know, and I was an intern for a little bit. My wife was an intern. We believe in that. You learn, you learn from seeing how people do in this kind of culture. And so So yeah, social media, again, first insight, Can't Stop the Peeling. 2016, we created a music video to it and Justin Timberlake. We made Can't Stop the Peeling. It was a very rudimentary video, but I watched— I remember watching it put on Facebook and I was like, 10,000 views, 20,000 views, 30,000 views. It got like 100,000 views. I was like, whoa, people like this. And I was like, let's do more of this. And again, so once TikTok came around in 20— 2020, when we started paying attention, yeah, one of our interns, I said, just post every single day. She goes, what do I post? I go, I don't know, but make baseball fun. If it's, if it's make baseball fun, if it fits that overall brand, do it.

And we learn.

And then nothing happened the first few weeks. Then we had one that hit. It was like, all right, it's our players. What are our players doing? Okay, now let's do this with our players. How about a music video with our players? How about this? And just kept iterating. We posted every single day from 2020.. And so that's literally how we learned. And you think about our second team, the Party Animals, they have more followers than every Major League Baseball team on TikTok because we started with them, you know, in 2022 or so. And so, yeah, everything is just— you can't be afraid of failing. I mean, every night we do 10 to 15 promotions we've never done in front of a live crowd. Games, skits, ideas. Every single night we have our scripts and, you know, it's different colors to show the new things we haven't done before. You know, that, that's where you learn. And so like, we're not afraid of failing because we're just going to keep trying new things and our fans will give us the benefit of the doubt because they know, hey, we're just going to try something new next and they're going to keep trying.

Somebody told me you guys treat this almost like, uh, Saturday Night Live. Like you have the, the pitch meeting the way Saturday Night Live has this kind of weekly schedule where they pitch and then they, they, uh, script and then they rehearse, then they sort of edit from there. Like, is that what you guys do?

Even just naming it over the top.

Yeah, 100%. So yeah, over the top. And so, uh, form you got to fill out by midnight. So we have all the ideas, whether it's a walk up, whether it's a celebration, whether it's, uh, you know, something in the crowd, whatever that is. And then if there's a video or a full description.. And then our meeting starts at 10:00. We review all those. Then we have a smaller group meeting at 11:00. Then the players share some of their ideas, broadcast, share some of their ideas. And by 4:00 on Tuesday, we have a table read where we go over what's going to be in the script. Then we start getting the props, the creative. Then we do rehearsals when we— in the city, in Savannah. Then we do rehearsals in the city. Then we do rehearsals in front of our VIP, our very important bananas, which is our special VIP group. And so we get to watch them. How do they react? Are they taking video? Are they into it or not? And then we put it into the show and that's repeated with every one of our teams.

This business sounds so hard to run. You have— I mean, so you have that, you have just the production of the SNL, you know, just so you have your personnel issues. You're going to have some personality clashes. You're going to have like pay, paying them and keeping everyone in line and then getting funny stuff out the door. Then you have merch. I think merch makes up half or 40% or something of your revenue, which is hundreds of millions of dollars. You have supply chain issues, then you're traveling with hundreds of people. Then you're doing social media. I mean, this is an incredibly complicated business.

You're playing the game on extreme hard mode, and I respect you for it.

It's way harder than I thought. When you name it all, I'm like, oh my gosh, there's so much to— and then you just have like normal company operations.

And the principle is don't do the same show ever again.

Every show has to be brand new. And yes, the logistics are impossible. We hired someone from the military that helped us, and, and like, because we've got trucks all over the country, multiple trucks. When we're going into a football stadium with 100,000 people, we need 12 to 14 trucks. But then we also have two other games in another part of the country that we need separate merchandise, and the teams are playing each other different times. So we're bringing all the merchandise and all the show and all the props to go there, and then we're flying everyone around the country, getting them in. It's crazy.

And then check this out. Look, if you move your head, so move your head like this, it looks like you have two books behind you. I think you wrote two books, right? Does Jesse Cole?

Yeah.

Oh my God. Okay, so Jesse Cole has three books. And then I also read online, and then you have the Hulu documentary, and I think you have another one somewhere else. Yeah. And then I think I read somewhere online that I think you said you don't take a salary or you're one of the lowest paid people and that you live off of your speaking fees. Okay, so Jesse has a book, 3 books, documentaries, speaking fee, and then this monster of a business that is incredibly complicated. What price are you paying to do all this?

It's a good question. I think it's the right question. I, I believe in doing what gives you energy. I'm very, very fortunate. That what I do gives me energy. When I first started in Gastonia and I was doing everything, operations, hiring, you name it, I was worn out. Now, like, speaking or being with you guys right now, this fires me up. I love creating, I love sharing, I love growing. So when I can go speak, that's an energy giver. And so I think our family, we homeschool now. We have 3 kids, we homeschool, we travel. I do daddy-daughter dates and Burger Boys with my son, and I focus on that. But I can always be better in that area. I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed with it. I love it. It brings me so much joy. And I stay really focused, even though it sounds like there's lots of things. I'm focused on trying to create the greatest fan experience in sports and the greatest show in sports every day. And if I'm speaking, I'm sharing about it. If I'm on a podcast, I'm sharing about it. Or in the morning, I'm working with my team on creating it. So it's really— it sounds widespread, But it's all focused on doing something very, very narrow.

What's your talent strategy? So are you like, oh, we use recruiters and then they come in for interviews? Or is it like you look in the TikTok comments and you find people? Like, what is Jesse doing to source some of these, like, diamonds that end up being there?

I think that if I had to make a prediction, I think— and I'd be curious to hear, like, if you ever— we probably don't have enough time, but like, we brainstorm ideas here on this podcast a lot. But I would be curious I think that, so Ari Emanuel, who runs Endeavor and they own WWE, UFC, PBR, whatever, a ton of stuff. He did this great podcast with Patrick O'Shaughnessy and he was like, basically I'm betting, I'm making an anti-AI bet. So he was saying like hotel bookings for Thursdays are now up through the roof. Busy drive times are at 11 AM. And he's like, basically people are working less and they want to go out and have experiences. And so my prediction for you guys is that there's going to be a second wind. I mean, you're already like at like you're— I don't want to say you're at a peak, but you're like, you're like killing it right now. I think there's going to be another like macro trend that pushes you even further up this mountain of glory. Are you feeling that? And also, have you seen any other— like a lot of people don't realize this, that Cirque du Soleil is a multibillion-dollar company. Have you seen like any cool events businesses that like are shockingly large or well-run or that inspire you?

You know, I mean, I think I may— I named the main— there's probably other ones out internationally that I'm not aware of at this point. But yeah, no, I'm fascinated by the cruise industry too, as well, because they're combining the entertainment, the shows, everything. They're creating their own worlds. So I've got a lot closer. Obviously we're doing our own to learn, can we put on a show for 5 days for all of our, for our fans with no playing of banana ball? So that's a good test that we're looking at. But yeah, no, I don't, I don't think I look at that, but I, I'm fascinated about the youth game of banana ball and developing that. We did a one-city world tour test with a youth tournament that sold out in Cleveland, had kids from 48 states come in. So we're going to build the sport that way. And then obviously continue to look at, I mean, we're going to do a tour movie. I'm really inspired by what Taylor Swift has done and how she built that ecosystem, created a great tour, then all these little, you know, things from the flywheel that jumped off it. We're going to do some of that. We're creating original music. So I haven't announced, but we have an unbelievable music partnership with very well-known group that's going to help create original music for us. So all those steps, I think, are going to take the show to another level. If we keep making our show better, I believe everything will take care of itself. We just— we can never settle for, hey, that last year's show was great, let's do the same thing. That's, that's what scares me.

If we saw you when you were a kid, like a teenager, 12 years old maybe, what would we have seen? Were you like selling CDs and hustling entrepreneurially? Were you like Mr. Popular at school? Were you on the fringes? Who were you when you were young? And would there have been any clues that this is who comes out of that?

Yeah, no, I was a shy kid to start. And then I was by myself a lot. And so, I mean, I remember literally during the summer, my dad would go to work and I was like 12 or whatever. He's like, Jesse, what'd you do today? I was like, I rode to Alex's house. I rode my bike to John's house. I didn't do that. Have a lot of friends and I had my friends through baseball. And so anytime I was around my baseball team, I would try to create attention. I would try to do anything because it was my time around people my age. And so, you know, I think that, that love and being around people, I think I didn't have that as much. And now being around 50,000, 100,000 people and staying till the last fan leaves to sign their autographs, like that is something that I think because of what I had and what I, what I wanted, now I can have at a higher level that I keep pushing for that. But yeah, I was, I mean, creating attention. We, instead of public speaking, which ironic, I now speak, we created movies. So we used iMovie and we were the first ones to create movies. So I learned how to create movies and social media and like, like not social media back then, but how to make videos that people were interested in that guided us with what we do on social media. So yeah, I was creative, but I was alone. I just played baseball and I just, I think it was more the world I surrounded myself with after, after school, the Walt Disney, the P.T. Barnum, the Bill Vex. It was that world that really—

you were interested in those guys when you were younger?

No, none of them. No, it was after. So, like, yes. Did I go to Walt Disney and I was the big kahuna at Typhoon Lagoon, which they let me in early and I got to have this whole experience. It was magical. Did I have some really cool experiences at AAU national tournaments or going to Disney?

Yes.

I didn't know anything about them other than what most people knew. It was that world I surrounded myself afterwards. Like you guys, I mean, think about this 10, 15, 20 years ago. It's what you've learned now in the last 10, 15 years. That world has impacted you. You know, I maybe there were some influences obviously back in school, but it's more now you find this new world of entrepreneurs and creative thinking and creators and that inventors and that, that fires me up.

Sean, have you ever seen the talks? So Jesse does these things on his Instagram where, uh, he gives the players a talk before the game. I don't know if it's like new players or something like that, or if it's before every game, but you had the guys in the stands.

No, I haven't seen these.

Okay, so he gets everyone. I'm going to tell the story for you, Jesse, as an outsider, and you can correct me if I'm, if I'm getting it wrong. But you have the— I think it's the team, but maybe there's some of the staff. You have them, I think, in the outfield stands or somewhere like not in the front row. And you're like, you're sitting here because you need to be where like some of the worst seats are. So you understand that we have to make this great for everyone. And then you tell this amazing story and it sounds— I imagine you repeat some of the stories, but every time I've watched it, it's been a unique story. And it inspires them so, so much where I'm like, this fucking guy has made like playing like silly baseball, like, seem like I'm like saving the world. And I'm so invested into it where I'm like, you guys are doing God's work, right? Like, you're— the guy on stilts is doing God's work. Like, I'm so bought in.

Yes, yes, yes.

I agree with you. I agree with you. You've judo'd me where like, I'm totally bought into this. Did you have to learn how to storytell like this? Because you're doing such a good job of getting me invested. And I see the players, the players. Typically baseball players, by the way, when I grew up, I grew up or hung out with the college baseball players. They weren't like the coolest guys. They were always kind of like too cool for school. Like they didn't want to like do silly stuff. And these guys are like so wholesome and awesome. Did you learn how to like tell stories like this? Because it's incredibly effective.

Thank you. 100%. And yeah, still to this day.

Did I tell that right? Those talks?

Yeah, gave us the speech. I'm ready.

Well, that wasn't the speech. I don't think I've shared that one with you guys. I don't think I've shared that one because it was back in Gastonia days. So you brought me back to that one.

I'm in, man. I'm in.

There's a, there's a quote that you remind me of. We can leave it on this, which is, uh, this is John Wesley quote. He says, light yourself on fire with passion and people will come from miles to watch you burn. And I feel like that's what you've done. Like, you, you have lit yourself on fire with passion, and you've done that with this thing that none of us even realized we wanted. And now millions of people want to come watch you guys burn. And I think that's, that's amazing.

I got— well, yeah, hopefully not the other burn way, because some people probably do. The baseball traditionalist and purist, but I want you guys to see a show. I'm so impressed on how much you've known and how much you're able to, to talk about this, but for you to see it and see it from the beginning to the end and watch what goes into it. So just got to get mentally prepared, you know, get some good rest before that.

Well, God bless you. Thank you so much. We appreciate you coming on. This is— this has been an all-timer.

A lot of fun. Thank you guys. Seriously, really appreciate y'all.

All right, that's it. That's a pod.

I feel like I could rule the world.

I know I could be All right, everyone.

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