Jesse Cole is the founder of Fans First Entertainment, which owns and operates the baseball team the Savannah Bananas. The Bananas have welcomed millions of fans to their ballpark and have been featured on MSNBC, CBS Sunday Morning, HBO and ESPN. They have sold out hundreds of games in a row, have a ticket waiting list of millions, and have done a barnstorming tour where they’ve played at some of America’s most famous stadiums, including my hometown stadium, Fenway Park. Beyond the bananas Jesse is an in-demand speaker and bestselling author of two books, Find Your Yellow Tux and Fans First.
In his second appearance on the Elevate Podcast, Jesse talked about the Savannah Bananas’ meteoric rise to fame and how he and his team have revolutionized the world of sports and business.
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Savannah Bananas Owner Jesse Cole On Changing The World Of Sports
Our quote is from Robert Frost. “Freedom lies in being bold.” My returning guest, Jesse Cole, is the Founder of Fans First Entertainment, which owns and operates the baseball team, The Savannah Bananas. The Bananas have welcomed millions of fans to their ballpark and have been featured on MSNBC, CBS, Sunday Morning, HBO, ESPN, basically, anytime you open the news. They sold out hundreds of games in a row, have a ticket list in the millions, and have done barnstorming tour where they’ve played at some of America’s most famous stadiums, including my hometown stadium, Fenway Park. Beyond the Bananas, Jesse is an in-demand speaker and bestselling author of two books, Find Your Yellow Tux and Fans First. Jesse, welcome back to the show.
I’m excited to be with you, my friend. It’s been a while.
Savannah Bananas: A Fans First Experience
It’s been a while. In fact, we talked a little bit about your background on your first appearance. That’s Episode 209, which I would encourage everyone to check out. There’s some timeless wisdom in there. For those you who are just getting acquainted, particularly some of our global audience, tell us about what makes the Savannah Bananas so important and tell us a little bit about this signature game, Banana Ball.
I think it all started with us just putting ourselves in our fans’ shoes, and I was the guy who played baseball. I loved the game playing. I realized watching the game, it was a little too long, too slow, too boring. By watching the game, I realized that there are a lot of boring parts of the game, that it could be better. We started with a traditional baseball team, and we played regular baseball.
Yes, we had a breakdancing coach and we had a senior citizen dance team, The Banana Nanas and a male cheerleading team, the Mananas. We just tried to make it about entertainment and made our ballpark all-inclusive with all the food included. We tried to create a fans-first experience because that’s the name of our company. After a while, we started watching that our fans were leaving games early, even with all the entertainment. We went all in on entertainment.
This was just a regular Minor League baseball team that you had taken over, and no one normally goes to games at it.
No, it was actually lower than that, Bob. It was a college summer baseball team. We were very low-level. It was low-level baseball, but we started selling out games. In the beginning, we were only selling a handful of tickets and my wife and I had to sell our house and struggle. We finally started selling out games, but fans were still leaving. After we saw fans leaving every game early, we realized that we got to change the game. We can’t just add entertainment.
We looked at every boring part of a baseball game from walks to bunts to mound visits. We said we’re going to eliminate that and we’re going to involve the fans. If a fan catches a foul ball, it’s an out. We said, “We’re just going to do an experiment.” We did a one-city world tour in 2021 and ended up selling out 7,000 tickets, then went to 7 cities, then 33, then Major League stadiums. It was one experiment after the other, trying to get better for our fans. Now we have four teams. We’re starting a Banana Ball league. It’s been a wild journey, to say the least.
Mixing Fun With Business
If someone didn’t know you, they might look at a clip on YouTube or otherwise and see your outfit and think like, “This is a silly, gregarious guy out of his mind doing all this crazy stuff,” but I think that they would miss is that you are dead serious. You have studied PT Barnum and Walt Disney. You take this very serious, and this is a business model. I think anyone who listen to episode one will come away with more business awareness that than an HBR case study. Talk about some of the rigorousness. I don’t want anyone to excuse, “He’s just an eccentric and I couldn’t do that in my business.” You are dead serious about this stuff.
We take fun seriously and we take our customer experience very seriously. Yes, there’s probably 1,000 books that I’ve read. I’ve read every single book about customer experience. I’ve studied the greats from The Grateful Dead to Saturday Night Live, and I’ve taught anybody who creates a really unique experience, Cirque du Soleil. We don’t study other sports teams. We study people who create remarkable experiences, and we’re obsessed with that. What does that look like? It looks like looking at every single touch point in the fan experience, every single friction point, and every frustration point. It’s a continual iteration. To give an example, we built our own ticket platform. Why? It’s because fans don’t like ticket fees. They don’t like convenient fees.
No one’s ever loved a ticket fee or a convenience fee.
We built it and it cost us lots of money. Now, you come to any of our games all around the country, you get it with no ticket fees, no service fees, no convenient fees. Here’s the crazy part, we pay your taxes, too. We pay all taxes for all fans, for every ticket, for every merchandise item. It’s an obsession with what would we like as a fan. Bob, the greatest creators create things they would love. George Lucas talked about this. He wanted to create the Star Wars films because he wanted to create something with sci-fi that he would love. Pixar, the same thing. They wanted to create movies they would love.
I sat in the fan shoes and so does our team every single day we say, “Do we like this or is this just to make more money?” We leave millions of dollars on the table to create these fans. Now, to have a wait list of over 3 million people for a team that’s started this little small town in Savannah that’s selling out Major League stadiums and now going to three NFL stadiums and selling out NFL stadiums.
I missed that note. That’s awesome.
We did 3 NFL stadiums and 34 Major League stadium games in 2024. It’s crazy, but it’s that obsession with the detail and then trying things and experiment. We just did a cruise, Bob. We sold out a cruise ship with our fans. We had no idea how to do that.
What’s amazing to me is people do all these other things obsessively. Let me jump back one sec to the baseball problem you were trying to solve. I have always said having kids go through Little League that if I could figure out what inning it is and then the first year, they have kid pitch should be like open bar at the games. That’s my innovation to Little Leagues. We’re a business. We’re trying to make money. They do all these things and making money. Clearly, you are selling out everything that you are doing and assume you’re doing well. This chicken and egg of either trying to make money or doing the best product that you could possibly do for which money will come. I feel like everyone jumps on the first one and doesn’t realize that there’s more value or virtue in the second.
You’ve got to do the unscalable to do the scalable when you first start. To give you an example, it didn’t make sense financially or time-wise for us to call every single fan who bought a ticket our first seven years and thank them. It didn’t make sense to do the same thing with merchandise. It doesn’t make sense to send out personalized videos after our games to our fans. Our first 5 or 6 years, we did this to almost every fan. We were obsessed and trying to create that fandom. I think that’s how we start anything.
We did our first cruise ship and we sold that out with 2,500 fans. We went crazy with special gifts and special experiences. Our players were everywhere, places you would never expect that they were going to experience. We created a Broadway theater musical. We don’t know how to do that. We have no idea to do that.
Do the unscalable until it scales. I like that.
That’s part of the model that we look at. Again, it works when you are the only in your industry. Most people try to be a little better. We try to be the only.
I know Tim Ferriss referred to it a lot, and I’ve heard different people say it. I can’t remember if it’s 1,000 raving fans or 10,000 raving fans. There’s a paper someone wrote around, like, “Stop trying to have a million followers. The value of having a smaller group that cares deeply is much more valuable.” It seems like you’re getting the best of both worlds, though. It seems like that was your focus.
We’ve done golden tickets where fly people around the country to come to our places and come to our games and give the VIB, Very Important Banana, treatment. It’s that type of obsession. I think it is, if you can balance them both and I think understanding your flywheel. For us, we realize what makes us different. It’s our live events. We’re doing things on a baseball field people have never seen before. If we capture that and then share it, it drives our content, which drives traffic and demand, and demand forces us to do more live events.
When you understand your flywheel, which us, it’s like when we do live events, we have to do things we’ve never done before. It’s not the Globetrotters where it’s the same show every night. Every single night, we’re doing 10 to 15 things we’ve never done before in a game. Our players are doing trick plays they’ve never done before in a game. Fans are going to see something brand new that we can capture and share and you know you’re going to get something new that creates that excitement and demand to see something that you’ve never seen before.
Creative Destruction And Banana Ball
This notion of creative destruction and willing being to move on, Netflix is one of the best case studies in business. They have twice made a major pivot that a normally a competitor would take them out. They had a thriving DVD business and they said streaming. They said, “Streaming all this same stuff that everyone else has will come a commodity. We need to be a studio and produce stuff.” Normally, the company gets crushed by something else. When you joined the last time, you had just totally revolutionized this Minor League, not even Minor League as you say, college ball, and made it something that people wanted to go to and people were dying to go and you had a waiting list.
I had the shirt. I’ve been to the game at that stadium. You had just started to try this thing called Banana Ball. Banana Ball took off. I could see how you’d be like, “This got us here in this Minor League ball,” but you basically gave that up and destroyed the old business for the new one. That’s not that easy to do. What made you believe in that? I don’t want to overload you the questions here, but I followed some Facebook thing where you were criticized and then someone defended you because they were like, “You’re abandoning us,” and these are the people who probably told you it was stupid that you were doing this in the first place. There’s a lot of outside voices going on. I think people should realize you literally killed the business that made you successful for this new experimental thing. I think a lot of businesses struggle with that.
Jeff Bezos said it best. You need to be willing to be misunderstood. To go back to Netflix, how much were they misunderstood? They just went to streaming too quick. They did a few different things, splitting the company. I understand that, but they saw where their future fans were going, their future customers were going. They saw it. They just did it early.
You have to be willing to be misunderstood.
It’s so tempting to milk that cash cow.
They have all the cash and you’re still seeing it with linear cable. Linear cable is still trying to milk every opportunity they can and I get it. What we realized is that we are obsessed with where our fans are going. We can see trends because everything we’re doing is testing. We experiment. We have our own ticket system. We do our own merchandise. We do everything in-house. When we put things out, we test different markets. We test our different teams where they’re playing and we’re seeing how our fans respond. What we know is that also, what are the friction points that our fans don’t like. To answer your question, our conventional, traditional fans were really bothered that we weren’t in a league anymore.
Bob, I knew we were going to create a league. It just wasn’t going to be right away. I knew we had to create Fans First with the Bananas, then the Party Animals, then the Firefighters, then the Tailgaters. Once we have fans of each brand, now you create the league and now everyone cares about it. I’m willing to look at the long-term. I also know right now we’re that most leagues, most teams are taking millions of dollars from TV rights. We are not, because we’re leaving every single game free on YouTube we’re playing a different game because we realize where YouTube’s going and we’re the only live sport and Banana Ball’s going. Now we have more followers on the Bananas YouTube than every major sports team in the country. It’s just you have to be willing to be able to sacrifice in the short-term to see the results.
You can understand trends much better by doing constant testing.
They get to see how fun the live experience is so you’d want to be part of it.
You want to give your fans the opportunity to experience it as far as take the short-term dollar. We failed every step of the way, Bob. Our first game on ESPN primetime. We got them to agree to do non-exclusive, which doesn’t happen. If you were going to go on ESPN, you would only be going on ESPN.
Particularly if you’re not the NFL or someone who has better leverage.
The NFL, every single game they have, to an extent, is in its special exclusive. Thanksgiving Games, the Christmas games, the Thursday games, they’re just with 100 of different places. You don’t know where to watch the game. We’re keeping every game free on YouTube. Our first game on ESPN, the transmission went out. Our first Major League stadium, our ticket system shut down. We fail every step of the way when we do something new, but we’re willing to get back up.
You’re still using your ticket system for those stadiums. Are they not under agreement with Ticketmaster or something like that?
Of course, they are but we’re using ours. We are adamant.
I didn’t know whether, contractually, anyone is forced.
Contractually, they were.
Good for you. You’re going to get called in front of Congress to testify for the antitrust lawsuit.
We have had groups reach out to us because we are upset. We said, “Fans deserve no ticket fees, no convening fees, no service fees. We’ve built this. This is not going to competition with anyone else. This is internally for us.”
“We’re not a competitive ticket agency.”
We’re doing our own. Luckily, we had teams like the Yankees and the Red Sox, and they were just like, “We believe in you guys. We’re going to fight this. We want to do it.” Once you get 1, now we have all 17 Major Leagues, stadiums, the NFLs, and we’re doing with us because we believe in it.
A League Of Archetypes
I have a question. You create this league now. It was originally the Banana team and then the Party Animals, but now you have the new teams, and you’re really building a league. The old Globetrotter, New Jersey Generals, it couldn’t have been that fun to be on the New Jersey Generals. Is there going to be some difference between everyone want to be on the Bananas team and not the other team or does it come about the league and there’s no Bananas team eventually?
I guess the biggest comparison to this is Cirque du Soleil. You can watch a different Cirque du Soleil show all over the world, and they’re different shows, but you have an idea. You’re going to get some acrobats, you get some storytelling, you’re going to get some music, but you love the brand, and you know you’re going to see something different. The Party Animals are the greatest party in sports. We have an official bartender, and we have a party band that’s unbelievable, playing before and during the game. The bartender’s in the dugout like a waterboy. He’s doing the flare bartending. We have the Firefighters. They have the Fireline drumline. They’re the hottest team in sports.
We have the Tailgaters, which is the greatest pre-game in sports. They have a country rock band. They’re going to do line dance. We’re going to create this unbelievable experience in front of the stadium. You create a different point of view and experience. What we’re realizing, the Party Animals have more followers than every Major League baseball team on TikTok, and they’re our second team, because they have built a following on people that love to party. You build fans first. They’re going to want the whole thing.
You need an archetype when you create these teams.
We spend an outrageous amount of time. We look at the point of view, the theme, the characters, the music, the signature moments, the signature elements before the game, after the game, during the game. We spend our whole time working on this and creating this. Do we love it? Do we get excited about it? We say, “All right, now we’re going to build that brand.” We’re going to be adding two more n to start the league officially with six. I’m having the time in my life creating these brands. It’s a lot fun.
These were exhibition games before, but so does this become like a real league? I’m sure there’s a Banana Cup or something that’s coming.
You better believe it. It’ll be the most crazy trophy you’ve ever imagined. We’re disrupting ourselves again.
Did you buy the $6 million Banana duct tape art? Was that you?
No, but I immediately put out 62 t-shirts that we had with our banana with duct tape on, and sold them for $62.40. They sold out in six minutes. You’ve got to jump on that. I like that because we’re a bigger company now with hundreds of employees, but we saw it and we quickly reacted. We just put it out and you got to be like a speedboat. To answer your question, we’re disrupting ourselves again. We learned that this exhibition thing is working, but now we listen to our fans say, “What if they cared even more?” They don’t just go to see the different shows, but what if they actually care about the outcomes? You bring even more excitement to our Banana Bowl and our highlight big games. That’s the next level. There’ll be another disruption in five years that I’ve already started thinking about to continue to keep fans interested.
Next summer’s games at baseball stadiums and football stadiums, will they count?
We keep standings. The Party Animals won the tour in 2023 and the Bananas won the tour in 2023. We keep standings, but not the real official standings and everything will happen when the league launches in 2026.
When the league launches, the capacity of what you need for these games is crazy. They’re going to still to use these other people’s stadiums.
It’s an Uber model. It’s an Airbnb model. We come into these stadiums, even Fenway. The amount of revenue they’re able to make on food and bev and on a game on day, day one and half, it becomes a win that we can go to these stadiums because we’re selling out the ballpark. The Bananas will be at the Major League stadiums and the football stadiums, the Party Animals are pretty close to doing Major League stadiums and sell, but every other brand builds up. They might start at 5,000 stadiums, then 7,500. The more fans they keep building up and there are so many.
You’re going to develop a home-and-away concept or not?
We just announced it. We announced the Texas Tailgaters. What we see is that demand is part of our flywheel. To give an example, most teams play at a stadium for 80 games, 70 games, and good luck in the beginning of the season when it’s cold or good luck if they’re not in the playoffs. They’re not selling all the tickets. We know that when we come into a market, there’s a lot of excitement to see something they haven’t seen before. Our Texas team is playing in Frisco, San Antonio, Round Rock and Houston, and there’s more market. We eventually do El Paso.
The other teams come and visit them.
They will come visit them, and then Texas will be the home team in Texas. The other two teams that announced they’ll have their home state. You build a state identity in different locations. There’s always excitement. It’s more than just a city team. It becomes the whole state’s team. That’s the mindset.
I want to go back. Now I’m jumping around, but I’m so curious from a business standpoint, when you’re in the stadium, they do have a concession. Is that the one thing you had to acquiesce to. How do you like not being able to control all the variables? I know you could back when you were in Savannah.
It’s extremely tough because especially in a few stadiums that the parking was more expensive than our tickets. That’s really tough for me. We have to go above and beyond on the show, and we have to make it a bucket list trip. What we can control, as soon as they come to the stadium, we do a plaza out in front. Fenway, it’s the first time ever they shut down all the streets.
They never shut down Van Ness because it’s where the players park, they shut that down for us. We had 20,000 people in the streets for 2:00, 3:00, 4:00. We put on a show. We want to control that experience. We can make that experience great, we can do on the field, we can do all that. Concessions, we can’t control. Parking, we can’t control. We do the best we can and hopefully, people will see something they have never seen before.
We were joking before the show that you should take some options up on stadiums in October because they’ll still be open, but there’ll be some non-playoff teams. Are you coming to Foxborough or not?
No, we’re doing two games at Fenway. Our NFL stadiums are Tampa, Nashville, Tennessee Titans, and the Panthers. We’re doing Clemson College football, 81,000 people at Clemson Stadium.
You’ve sold out all the football stadiums?
The lottery list just opened. We have 3 million-plus on the lottery list, but let’s put it this way. We have well over capacity on the list, and that’s just one person on the list. They usually buy 2 to 4 tickets.
Lottery System And Fighting Scalpers
Talk to me about the lottery. My son was registering for classes in college and they do this. 11:00, it opens, you go, it crashes. You lose all your classes. We’re paying a lot of money as customers for that. The concerts are still doing that. It’s just like you just create so much room for problems. I’m like, “Why can’t they give them a slot or submit your thing?” It seems like you’ve addressed this frustration.
It’s because we failed. People think, “You guys are handling that well.” It’s because we failed so many times beforehand. Our ticket platform shut down the first 3, 4, 5 times we did it.
When you encourage everyone to pile in, it’s almost impossible to keep up with it.
We not only increased our servers to a ridiculous level, but also what we do is we have slots. We build everything. Our K Club is our biggest fans and that’s growing. That’s going to be a very high number, growing 25,000 a year. We shut it down at that. We stopped at that number. They’re guaranteed tickets first. They get tickets before everyone else. They get to choose. We have our 2023 class go the first week, our 2024 class go the next week, our 2025 class. We get to test the system, get the system, seeing the demand even more, not just from the list, but what they’re actually buying. It opens to a lottery list and we know, based on the tickets available, how many people buy. We do the lottery for this many number.
You’re going to have people disappointed, but they’re not frustrated in that sense of, “I stayed up all night, I went on the thing, it crashed.” It just seems like a horrible user.
We’re very clear. It’s a lottery now. People are upset. “I’ve been on the lottery for three years, I haven’t done it.” “Join the K Club. Get on the K Club.” There’s always going to be that challenge. The alternative is you try to have everyone buy and it doesn’t work. It shuts down and you got lots of people upset. What we do is the fairest way for fans. Also, so scalpers and bots don’t get the tickets. We have worked hard to verify. Literally, scalpers are putting fake tickets out there. We announced the season, the tour, and there were hundreds of tickets. Some tickets even had $1,000.
Tickets before you released them.
There were zero tickets out in the market, and people were selling hundreds of tickets, speculative tickets, and people were buying them, but they weren’t even existing. That is wrong. That’s going to be our next fight that we fight to keep them when that doesn’t happen. That’s a tough undertaking, to say the least.
You have a 3 million list.
That’s just the lottery list, so that’s only one month. That shuts down in one month. Basically, from October 3rd to November 1st. The interest list, which basically tells you you’re not going to get tickets, but if you’re interested in a city, if something crazy happened, there may be a chance, but then, next time, you have a chance to get it.
You’re releasing inventory. Have you gone global yet?
Intentionally, no. We’ve had the opportunity. I’ve studied this a lot and we’ve had some really good opportunities. From a business standpoint, it makes sense. You can’t lose.
I’m thinking Wembley, like the NFL’s been doing.
There’s been interest in Japan, Australia and UK, of course. The way I look at it is I study great companies that have grown privately and done a really good job at creating enduring brands. Chick-fil-A is one I study, and they focused really relentlessly on the Southeast, obviously focused on malls first, and Southwest relentlessly on Texas for the first 3 to 5 years. There were 70 million people that went to Major League baseball games in 2023. There was 80 million 10 years ago.
We’re going to 2 million in 2024. There’s a very big market all over the country that still hasn’t even seen us. Let’s continue to get really good here. Really good, much better than we are right now, especially during football stadiums, which we’ve never done before. We’ve got to get really good and then go to that when the market demands it. When in Japan or Australia, they’re knocking down our door saying, “We have thousands of people that want tickets,” and we’re not there yet. We’re not going to go.
It occurred to me that you’re basically running an owned and operated model in a market that in every other sport is basically a franchise model. As you build more and more teams and being responsible for all those identities and otherwise, do you imagine selling teams or managing the league? How do you think about that?
I think about control. I think about the experience. Me and Emily’s interests are much different than shareholders or investors. We’ve been fortunate. No one called us a few years ago, Bob. We never got any calls. Now that we’re getting called from investors.
People want teams, I assume.
I’ve looked up to these people. I’m like, “You’re reaching out to us. What is happening right now?” As great as those people are, and I have so much respect and admiration, there’s a different interest level. Their interest level is, obviously, at some point, to get a return on investment. I’m not interested in return on investment. I don’t want to create a billion-dollar company. I want to create a billion fans.
Even if we get someone that wants to buy, say, the Tailgaters or the Party Animals, and it’s at a ridiculous number because of the value of all the fans and everything else, they’re going to want to get a return and they’re going to make decisions to drive revenue to make up for that investment that they made. That goes against everything that we believe in our core values. Everything we do is about fans first. I’m looking not at the next quarter, like many people who invest. I’m looking at the next quarter century.
You think you can operate all these team. I was saying it less of the financial and more like it’s a lot of work to run each team. If you’re scaling and each team has a persona and a location in towns to deal with, and not that a capacity constraint is bad, but you’d be the first person to, in any of these things, to own. You’re the first person in a lot of things, including on my show, wearing all yellow. It’s interesting to own and operate all of the teams directly that have different elements or vibes to them.
It’s extremely hard and we’re still getting into that right now. The Party Animals are launching that brand, and the Firefighters are going to be challenges, and they’re not going to grow fans at certain levels and certain areas that we maybe would hope for. If you’re playing the long game, you’re open to it. It comes down to this. It comes down to people. We’re lucky that we’re having some people that are truly learning how to do things differently and what our brand’s about. We have a very young team that ages up with us. We started with four of us.
How many now are full-time?
We travel with over 200-plus people. In Fenway, we travel with 208 people that literally flew into Boston.
Do you have a big yellow bus? How do you do that?
No. We fly. It’s completely unscalable. The Globetrotters travel with 30 people, we’re traveling 200. We want to make sure that’s high touch moments. We do our home broadcast. We do everything.
When should we expect Banana Airlines?
We’re not going to do that. Do what you do best and we’re hoping to create the show. We got to learn that. We got to learn all those parts of the business. There’s going to be challenges. In 2024, on football stadiums or on a cruise or on something, it’s really not going to matter in 5 years, 10 years. We’re going to either not do it or going to get better at it.
You have maybe not achieved everything you’ve set out to achieve, but I’m assuming that line has moved for you, but you had all of these life-changing achievements and levels. This will be a multi-part question. I know for you, from talking to you last time in person, this notion of you’re from Boston, your dad and you went to baseball games. This Fenway thing was like a big deal to you. This was like a full circle like, “Dad, I made it,” moment. I’ll split these questions. Was that as meaningful as you expected or were you like, “Okay?” I don’t know. It hits people differently sometimes.
There were moments that I’ll never forget from that night, but there were also moments that I’d love to forget from that night. With anybody that is, to a form, a perfectionist that is obsessed with the experience, you’re going to see a lot of the things that don’t go well. Walt Disney, when he was building Disneyland, he said, “Whenever I go on a ride, I’m always asking, ‘What’s wrong with this thing? How can it be improved?’” that was his mindset on everything. I’ve learned so much from Walt.
I was five years old. I got to be an honorary batboy for the Red Sox. I sat in the dugout and Lee Smith, Hall of Famer, came up to me and spent twenty minutes with me. He gave me my first fans first moment. I got to pitch at Fenway when I was twenty years old in college. My dream was to get drafted by the Red Sox. To sell out Fenway, you have the largest crowd of the year, 37,000 fans there.
That wasn’t hard. I just had to throw that in.
It was unbelievable. There was moment, and I’ll never forget when we do Yellow, where we turn up all the lights at the stadium and we sing Coldplay’s Yellow, “Look at the stars. Look how they shine for you. It was all yellow,” and the whole stadium lighting up. I’m looking around 37,000 people, I’m on home plate looking out at this in the middle of the game. I got emotional. Those are those moments. As bad as we played, as many of the misses that we had from an experiential, those are the moments that I try to remember and how to build those as we’re going on.
To answer your question, that was a huge moment. I had this dream of playing at Fenway and selling off Fenway, but then I’m onto the next dream, and I love Walt Disney said it’s fun to do the impossible. I’ve created an impossible list of all the things that are potentially impossible that we could do. That’s what I look at.
It is kind of fun to do the impossible.
Are you and Elon working on a game on Mars? I feel like you’ve got that in your back pocket.
Our players say that. They say, “We’re probably going to go to the moon. We’re probably going to play moon.” I’m like, “Yeah.” I don’t put much time into that.
These days, you just hire a ship. It’s not that hard. There’ll probably be Uber for spaceships in the next ten years.
The founder of Ikea said, “Happiness isn’t the end result. Happiness is being on the way.” What truly excites me is the journey of what we’re building because when you try to do something that’s impossible or you haven’t done it, and then you actually figure out a way to do it, there’s no greater feeling. It’s like, you want to do that again, but you want to go through the journey to get there.
I think you answered the question I was going to ask inadvertently without meaning to, which is great. I’ll restate it, which was, I see a lot of people get to a financial goal, a goal, a dream or something, and they find that it’s just not as satisfying as they thought because they get to the top and they look down, and then inherently they’re achievement-oriented and they’re moving the line and they’re working on the next. They’re surprised at how unfulfilling hitting this goal could be. It seems like your anecdote for that, and is definitely part of your DNA in the company, is to make sure that the journey is fun on the way to the next summit.
In more ways than one, it’s to keep playing the game. Keep playing the game. That play is an intentional word. I see what we do as play and we get to bring joy. Every day, I keep playing the game. If all of a sudden, the game is over, that’s the saddest and most depressing place. I never want the game to be over. To keep playing the game, you got to keep reinventing. You got to keep innovating. You kept doing things people have never done before and going through the challenges when you fail, because now it’s like, the failure makes it interesting.
Now you’re down. The greatest games that people watch is when they’re down at the end and then they come back and win. I love being down because I’m going to find a way to try to get back up and then, all right, let’s do it again. I think it’s that journey that excites me and our team. We’re teaching that it’s hard. It’s hard what we do. We don’t understand how to do merchandise all over the country and buy warehouses and figure out the logistics. We’ve never done that before but that’s part of the journey. Eventually, we will. Any great company, I think they went through the same journey.
There are two types of criticism and feedback. One of my business, I say mentors loosely because he was not a mentor to me, but he is a virtual mentor to me. I’m sure he’s in your Rolodex, but it was Herb Kelleher. You probably know the famous story of Herb, but this woman wrote a complaint letter five weeks in a row, “I hate your plastic tickets, I hate waiting in line, I hate this, whatever.” Eventually, he took the letter and you wrote back, “Dear Mrs. Whatever, I think you’d be much better served by flying a different airline.”
I’m sure you get a lot of criticism, a lot of feedback. I know a lot of it you take seriously. How do you delineate between the feedback of things that you messed it up and got wrong and that this is not the right customer for us and just fundamentally doesn’t understand our value proposition and needs to go buy a different product or service?
It depends on how they treat our people. We have two of our great people on our K Club that when you become a bigger fan, you become very invested in the brand. You care more and you’re passionate. Our two people are leading the K Club right now have a lot of these interactions. If someone ever treats with disrespect towards the person, that’s when we go. If it’s about something that our product did, we’ll jump in and we’ll take that. Jared and myself, we’ll jump in. If it’s disrespectful and mean to a person and spirited at them, that’s when we start questioning it. There’s criticism.
They say, “Jesse, WTF. I’m A VIB and I want to bring all my CEOs to your game and F this lottery. Here’s $100,000.” Let’s say they say this super nicely. It’s $100,000. “What do you mean lottery? $100,000. I want to bring everyone in the game.”
Obviously, everything’s a unique case and now you’re getting very into your case, which I love. For instance, the number one criticism we hear is, “Your tickets are so expensive.” The challenge is they’re not seeing our tickets. Our tickets are $35, $40, $50. They’re seeing the $300, $400, $500, $600 on the scalper websites or the ticket broker websites. Most of the criticism we receive, they’re uneducated. I have to try to educate, but if it’s real tough criticism individually that we have to look at, we will look at it and we’ll test things. If one fan, “Alright, we’re going to try something different and see what the result is that,” but this is much probably anyone. It’s often the people that are very loud and vocal, then they get taken care of better. To my core, that frustrates me. I’m trying to figure out a balance.
I’m sure you and McKinsey have tried to figure out this problem, and I’ve seen the verified buyers and the whole scalper thing, but you’re probably going to solve it before they do. Has no one figured out like a face recognition thing where you can be guaranteed a $40 ticket if you’re the one that buys it, and you have to be there and it’s not transferable. I’m still surprised there’s so much slack in this secondary market. I know Taylor Swift has gone after this. Everyone’s tried to solve it.
The question we ask and with everything, and if you probably heard the story of the 2000 great Olympic rowing team that they asked the question over and over again, will it make the boat go faster? That was the one question. The question we always ask, “Will it create more fans?” You mentioned the transferable. That’s a delicate one because think about this. You have to balance. Are you upsetting more fans by making it?
That’s why I don’t know the answer, but I know smart people are working on it.
“I want to transfer this to my mom. I want to transfer this to my dad.” We weigh things over and over again. Our big test market is our K Club. Our K Club is our biggest fans. When we roll out new things with them and see what’s their feedback? Luckily, in 2023, we struggled, we had some tough feedback and we deserved it.
How many are there in that club?
Right now, there are 30,000, and so it’s a very strategic number as we grow. We learn from them. It’s hard to have, “This is the way we’re going to do things,” because you have to go case by case and learn and adjust.
I think any business leader or company leader on here when thinks about R&D or innovation, I just can’t think of anyone better than one from on this than you. You guys are the masters of iteration. Talk about how you’ve systematized this because the old school thing was like, “We’ve got to put 20% into R&D,” but that was in a manufacturing world, so it was very tangible. “I’m going to take X amount of my budget and I’m going to put it to these guys in a lab and they’re going to work on new products that we don’t have today.”
I think people are struggling in a service world to make sure that whatever the percentage is, they carve it out and leave it unconstrained. What sucks is when a product doesn’t work in the lab, it doesn’t work in a lab. Unfortunately, in services, it has to not work when the customer consumes it. You can ideate a service in the lab, but you don’t actually know it doesn’t work until you do it on the customer. What is the process that creates so much innovation at your company? What are some of the best practices people could learn from?
In the best practice, and I I’ve said it, it’s a broken record, but the starting point of all innovation is to literally put yourself in the customer’s shoes and look at every friction point of the experience. For us, it’s like we found friction in tickets. We found frictions in how you eat. We found friction in how you park. We found friction in the baseball game. We found friction in even a cruise experience. We found friction in going to a Major League stadium. We look at our industry as a whole, the things that we touch, what are those things that are just, overall, you hear it, you see it, you feel it, that there are friction points? We then evolve. For research and development, the crazy thing is we hedge our bets on everything.
The starting point of innovation is to put yourself in the customer’s shoes and look at every friction point of the experience.
To give an example. The one-city world tour. That was crazy. This is how Banana Bowl started. People don’t realize we tested a one-city world tour. We announced we’re going to one city. Do you think that created some demand? We didn’t have a ton of followers back then, but we had some. In one city, their mayor actually read my first book and was a fan and reached out and said, “What’s it going to take?” I’m like, “What do you mean what’s it going to take?” He goes, “What’s it going to take to get you?” I’m like, “I don’t know what you’re asking.” He goes, “Can we give you some money?” I said, “I’m open to it. What have you got?” They literally helped fund and put us in a position where we couldn’t lose too much.
We went on a test that someone believed in us. We found one person who believed in us. The same thing with the Phillies. We had our 2024 tour schedule done. They came out and said, “We really want you to play at Citizens Bank Park.” I said, “we’re already done.” They go, “What’s it going to take? What if we do some merchandise? What if we have special concession items? What if we do this? What if we do that?” They set up a new precedent for us. I think the it goes back to everything that we try to do. You look at the friction points. You create enough fans and you do a very small bet in the beginning where you can hedge your bets.
The Hall Of Shame
This is the key thing. You are great with failure and you fail a lot. I’ll ask you for some, but these are above-the-waterline mistakes, not below-the-waterline potential things that could take the ship down.
As Bezos says, “The one-way door and the two-way door.” You’re able to go out and come back out. Everything is a small bet that we hedge. When we do one game on ESPN, we’re not doing our whole tour. We do one. We’re going to figure out now we’re going to make sure we get another one. It sounds simple, but that’s how we do it. It’s worked really well because if you do a ton of those bets, you’re going to find some that eventually become up really big bets later.
You celebrate failure. Give us your hall of shame. I’ve heard you talk about some of these. You celebrate failure, you welcome it. I assume not repeating failure, but you’ll try anything. There was one where people were digging up your field, something about a plane ticket or something like that. Was that in the top five?
We failed to an extent with every single thing we did for the first time. The first shipment of t-shirts, we had had too many Ns in Bananas. We literally misspelled our own name on the first shipment of t-shirts. Our first all you can eat night. We’ve never done that. There’s never been a whole stadium of all you can eat. We didn’t know our fans were going through 10,000 pieces of meat in an hour. There was like a 2 to 3 hour wait. It was brutal. Our first game on TV, as I said, the transmission went down on ESPN. Our first Major League stadium, our ticket system got hacked and shut down our whole ticket system where people were trying to get in. Disaster. It’s happened every step of the way. Even those promotions, the living pinata, we put someone in a costume.
Kids with pool noodles were hitting them as they’re throwing candy in the air. That’s an HR disaster that didn’t look too good. There are promotions every night. Even at Fenway, this was a disaster called the Fenway Frank Promotion. We got two guys named Frank, and we had them have hot dogs, franks, hanging down on a string and they were supposed to run around the bases, then swing them up into their mouth. It was a very weird promotion. The hotdog fell off the string within ten feet, and they were just dragging them all around the dirt. The promotion was done. I didn’t know what to say anymore. I’m like, “There they go.” It’s not going to happen anymore, but then you move on to your next one. I think that’s the mindset. Just get me to the next at bat.” That’s how we look at all of our Failures.
How do you, as a leader, approach failure or these ideas with your team? I think this is where people start. You’re not screaming at them. Do you guys do debrief? What is the culture of failing?
I’ll go directly in the department that I spend most of my time, so much of my time with the entertainment because I believe the biggest differentiator we have is our show. You go to a sporting event, you see the one team wins, one team loses, but the actual entertainment that happens, that’s everything. I spend a lot of my time with the entertainment team. After every game, we do an LCP, Learn Change Plus. It’s an entire report on the pre-game and the post-game and throughout the game on every single promotion that we do. We take notes, all of us in entertainment.
What is the plus?
Plus is everything. That’s Disney. Disney said, “Disneyland is a living, breathing thing. It’ll never be complete. We will continue to plus the show.” He believed in plusing. Plusing is just enhancing better continuous improvement. We use that language. Our last fan’s first principle is we’ll always plus the experience. Plus is we look at a promotion like Fenway Franks. What could have we done different to plus it? Could we have had six people with hotdog? At least two stay on. Could they have done it first in their mouth before they’re running? We know that’ll work. You look at all these opportunities and two plus it. Next time, you’ll have continuous improvement and get better on it.
What if the answer is to kill it in that?
That is a lot of them. I get on the field, I even say, “Fans, that was the first time and last time you will ever see that promotion.” I literally let them know. We say, “Why didn’t it work?” There was no button. There was nothing to get the fans going. The contestants weren’t the right choice. We should have got this. We make those decisions as we discuss that after every single show. It’s creating an environment that is safe and right after to talk about it. Everyone’s involved in it. What we’re doing, we’re not looking at the person for their decision, who came up with the idea, who executed. We’re talking about why it didn’t work. We criticize ideas, not people. I think that’s something everyone could learn.
Create a safe environment where everyone is involved. Do not look at the person for their decision or why something did not work.
You are running this, you are an entrepreneur, like you are the definition of an entrepreneur at heart, growing this big business. I used to draw a graph for our team. It was a ball and a flashlight, and the flashlight could see through a large part of the ball when it was small. As the ball got bigger, the flashlight ray was a lot smaller and there’s only so much you could see about what’s going on. People always liked that and helped them understand why they couldn’t follow everything that was going on, and they weren’t in the loop as the company got bigger. What have you either done well or struggled with or what have you figured out you need to keep and has to be me and has to delegate and let go and not know what’s going on?
Spending a lot of time on this and let’s have this conversation in ten years. I’ll have a lot more insight, but yeah, what I think about is who are the people that I’m spending the most time on, how do they make the biggest impact on the most amount of people? What I realized is I used to be so close with the players directly, but as I’m traveling, there are more players they don’t have that same feel, that have been around me and knowing the vision and knowing we’re doing. I’m literally committing now to start having lunches with players and, say, breakfast. I’m going to start doing that. The things that I let go, we split up our business a little bit.
I’m creative and our president is operations. We look at operation standpoint a lot of how do we make it work? How do we make the merchandise work around the country? How do we make our logistics work? He helps execute that. The creative team I’m spending most of my time with our video, our marketing, our creative, our broadcast, that’s where I’m spending most of my time. We have a clear division there and he runs with it. If it jumps into our side, like our holiday catalog and everything that we’re doing, merchandise, that has to be out in social a little bit. We’ll cross-reference a little bit. I think like anyone, you try to departmentalize what you are best at, what gives you the most energy and where you can make the most impact. I know my focus has to be the show, the creative, the team, and building the game of Banana Ball. That’s where I put most of my time.
Has it been hard for you to let go?
A hundred percent. I guess the things in the past, like when we first started, we did 100 merchandise orders today, and you get really excited about it.
You get every email, every dashboard.
Numbers don’t excite me. If we do 1,000 orders or 5,000 orders a day, that’s fun. I’m proud. I will applaud, but again, it’s not the dollars or money that excites me anymore. It’s the doing things that have never happened before in our game and for our fans. That’s what really excites me. That’s what I focus on.
Hiring For Talent, Skill, And Culture
The last topic I want to dive into that I think people could learn a ton from you because very unique is hiring. There are people who like to focus on talent, on skill, on culture. I guess maybe it’s different for the players versus the company. Obviously, you need someone who can hit a ball, no matter how much you like them. What is your model of hiring and what can you teach and what can you not teach?
This is, again, learning through failure. We always hired interns. Literally, interns would grow with us. Even our president was 24. I was an intern, my wife, we all started and then grew in. We believed in that. At a point, like 5, 6, or 7 years, when we started hiring from the outside, we hired some people from the outside, and it just didn’t work. We paid them, we took care of them, it just didn’t work. I realized why we weren’t truly clear, as clear as we could on the challenges of working in our environment and on the true vision and on the expectations. What we created when I brought in our most recent director of entertainment started, he’s tremendous.
I wrote, “Here are all the challenges. Here’s why it’s going to be working with me. You’re going to be micro led like crazy.” We went through every single thing that we could. He goes, “Alright, I want this.” We have worked so well together. Now, it’s all of our organization. We have a VCE, Vision, Challenges, Expectations. If we want to hire someone, build a VCE before we do it. What’s the vision of the position? What is it doing? What is it? How is it going to help fans? What are all the challenges on in this position from a fan standpoint? What are your expectations? You better go hard on this because we’re going to coach hard. We’re going to teach hard. We’re going to educate hard. We don’t believe in training. Dogs are trained. We believe in coaching and mentoring. We explain all that in this.
As we start the process, we put that out. We look for a future resume. We want to know what you want to do in the future, not what you’ve done in the past. We want to see how hungry you’re to grow, because that’s a big part of who we’re and what we stand for. We want to see a video cover letter, how can we interact with you and then a fan’s first quick essay on how you fit our core beliefs. We start with that. It’s a process where you have cultural learners going to go through there. We’re still learning because we’re hiring more than I ever would’ve imagined, but that VCE and that future resume and knowing where they’re going and what to expect has been huge for us.
What do you do in both cases where you have a ball player that doesn’t really buy into the culture or a culture player who doesn’t have the skills to play the ball as you need them to do?
From a player standpoint, to be very clear, we have three main things that we look for. Fans first ability. Literally, we check this. If we’re bringing people in, we talk to their coaches. How often do they spend time with fans? How often do they do things like that?
I’m curious where they would’ve been doing that before.
They’ve all played somewhere. You can tell they’ve all played somewhere and to an extent, they’ve played in front of fans. Do they just go right into the locker room? Do they actually say hello? We get an idea of that. We have their Banana Ball ability, trick plays, doing things that no one’s ever seen before in a baseball field. Finally, there’s a social connection. Social media is very important. It’s how often do they spend time actually learning social connections. We look at those three things, fans first, Banana Bowl and social, and put those together and then we test again.
We have it again in 2024. We built a team called the Visitors. They’re in gray uniforms, and it just says visitors on them. We literally have players that were looking and they play for them and they go in front of crowds and we play some extra games. We get to see them in those environments in front of sold-out crowds. What do they do? Most of the visitors end up getting a full-time contract. Again, testing, a lot of clarity, and that’s how they grow with us. Are they winning on fans first? Are they winning on their Banana Ball ability and their social connection?
There’s definitely a method to the madness. Last question. I’d be reticent. It’s 2030, and you’re coming back to the show for your fifth time. What crazy vision thing did you have out that you are going to be telling me that you guys just did?
Building Banana Land
The big one is many years out, so it’s not in the next five years.
All right, 2035, you’re here. At that point, my AI hologram’s interviewing your AI hologram. What is it telling me about?
I’m trying to think if it’s there, but the big vision is building Banana Lands and following in Walt’s footsteps. The first ever that you have these sports identities that have their own lands. The Party Animals, Party Animal Island, the Firefighters have their own world. The Tailgaters have their own land, and it’s the mecca of Banana Bowl where we have youth fields that we have Banana Bowl kids playing there.
We have kids all over the country playing this game and doing trick plays like my six-year-old son. We have a stadium, which I’ve have ideas that no one’s ever seen from the way that seats move around and what’s happening and things going around at the stadium at the same time. We’re creating this entire experience where people from all over the world are just coming to experience Banana Land and the joy and the fun. Yes, you’re going to see some crazy games and the players and the excitement, but it’s going to be a world. That’s something I would love to create.
I have no doubt that will happen. Jesse, for the 3 million people who aren’t on your list, or the 10 million people who don’t follow you, where do people go to learn more about you or the Savannah Bananas?
I’m easy to find. I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn. I started doing posts years ago with no one paying attention, but I just shared the journey. I wish I could go back to Walt or PT Barnum; they shared the journey as they were doing it. I think there’s a lot of value to that. I spent a lot of time on LinkedIn and social media, and obviously, we’re pretty easy to find.
Jesse, thank you for joining us. As I’ve said, I’m just not impressed by what you’ve accomplished, but I can’t think of a business leader who couldn’t benefit from emulating a lot of the practices that you’ve put in place. I look forward to doing it again.
Yeah, you’re the best. Thanks, my friend.
If you enjoyed this episode or the show in general, I’d appreciate if you could leave us a review as that’s what helps new users discover this show and amazing guest like Jesse. In Apple Podcasts, just select the library icon, click on Elevate, scroll down to the bottom, and you can leave a quick rating or review. In your browser or a different app, you can find easy links to review on other services, such as Google Play and Stitcher and more by following the link on the subscribe page at RobertGlazer.com. Thank you again for your support, and until next time, keep elevating.
Important Links
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- Find Your Yellow Tux
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