How the Savannah Bananas built a brand people love

Jesse Cole 0:00 In a few hours, we get to see thousands of people that had this game on their bucket list, and they're waiting outside, they're wearing their gear. And as soon as they see us, they start jumping up and down and getting excited to high-five us. And that's not just players and cast, that's our staff. They get excited, "Oh, you work for the team?" That. And if you can find that and continue to build that and talk about what matters most, and it's not about the money, it's not about the sales, not about the revenue, it's not even about the growth. It's about the amazing moments that you get to create every day and feel that, it's the most contagious thing in the world.

Jeff Berman 0:30 This is Masters of Scale. I'm Jeff Berman, your host. This week on the show, Jesse Cole. The name you may not know off the bat, but Jesse is the founder of the Savannah Bananas and Fans First Entertainment. And if you've turned on ESPN in the last year, you've seen the man in the yellow suit. That's Jesse. He's part P.T. Barnum, part Walt Disney, and he's scaling a whole new kind of sport with his fast-paced circus-style version of professional baseball. Jesse's relentless dedication to his fans offers important insights for anyone in the business of delighting customers, which really should be all of us. We are on location today. We are, uh, recording live at Angel Stadium, where the Savannah Bananas and the Indianapolis Clowns are playing tonight, and we are with perhaps the greatest showman on Earth.

Jesse Cole 1:27 [laughs]

Jeff Berman 1:27 Jesse Cole, welcome to Masters of Scale.

Jesse Cole 1:29 Excited to be with you guys. Been a big fan of the show from when it first launched. So we've shared the episodes with so much of our teams, so many people on our team. It's been great.

Jeff Berman 1:36 Well, we're, we're huge fans of what you do.

Jesse Cole 1:38 [laughs]

Jeff Berman 1:38 And, and I, we were just talking before we, we turned the mics and cameras on about how you all have been capturing content kind of Hoops dream style for a long time now. And I feel like if we were, uh, if we were producing a movie of, of the Bananas and Fans First-

Jesse Cole 1:53 Yeah

Jeff Berman 1:53 ... we might open on you leading the crowd and singing Coldplay's Yellow.

Jesse Cole 1:58 Yeah.

Jeff Berman 1:58 Can you set the stage for us so we can open the show there? [laughs]

Jesse Cole 2:02 Well, as someone who grew up, uh, south of Boston, a huge Red Sox fan, my dad and I, you know, we went to so many games back when tickets were five dollars. We'd sit out in the bleachers and, uh, you know, I was a shy, introverted kid growing up, and my dad, uh, you know, had the opportunity to win this challenge for me to become an honorary bat boy. And so when I was five years old, I saw my first ever Red Sox game, but I was in the dugout before the game. But I was sitting by myself and one player came over and sat down next to me, and it was Hall of Famer Lisa, and he spent 20 minutes with me, this shy, introverted five-year-old kid. He didn't have to, and that moment changed everything for me-

Jeff Berman 2:36 Mm

Jesse Cole 2:36 ... because I saw him as this larger than life pitcher. I saw the Red Sox now as this larger than life team, and I vowed to one day play at Fenway Park. And so I put everything I can into my baseball career. Was fortunate to have professional scouts watching me on Division One scholarship, and then tore everything in my shoulder, and that ended my career. Just like that, I was done. And so that dream of playing at Fenway was over, at least I thought, until we started in, uh, the front office and how to make baseball fun. And what people don't realize is I spent 10 years with this team in Gastonia, North Carolina that no one knew about, just trying to craft what we were doing to get people excited about coming to a baseball game before we started the Savannah Bananas. And then we started the Bananas, failed miserably, lost everything, and then after many years, made it successful. Took the show on the road and was able to, uh, sell out Fenway Park with thirty-seven thousand fans and, uh, everyone singing Yellow and lighting up the sky and it was a moment I'll never forget. Then what happened was I, I got an opportunity to go to coaching. Everyone thought I was into coaching, and I got some coaching jobs, but I also got this opportunity to be an intern for a college summer baseball team. And why would you want that? And I was like, "Well, it's right down the road. Let's just try it at the front office." And I realized immediately that in the front office you could actually create a lot of the experience that happens for fans. And I started to get ideas of, wow, we could change this about the game. We could change this about the entertainment. This is boring. What if we add this? What about music here? And so immediately as an intern, I started to get the idea of what it was like to work in the front office, and then I got offered a job as a general manager at twenty-three years old.

Jeff Berman 4:04 Outside of a legendary, uh, baseball front office man, um, whether it was a hero of yours, Bill Veeck-

Jesse Cole 4:10 Yeah

Jeff Berman 4:11 ... who did lots

Jeff Berman 4:12 of-

Jesse Cole 4:12 The best

Jeff Berman 4:12 ... wonderfully inventive things-

Jesse Cole 4:14 The best

Jeff Berman 4:14 ... back in the '50s.

Jesse Cole 4:14 Yeah.

Jeff Berman 4:15 But Minor League and, and College Summer League is where we've seen at least some experimentation-

Jesse Cole 4:19 Yeah

Jeff Berman 4:19 ... in baseball.

Jesse Cole 4:20 100%.

Jeff Berman 4:20 What did you try? What worked? What didn't work?

Jesse Cole 4:23 [laughs] I was 23 years old and was two months into my job as a general manager. I wasn't able to pay myself. There was no money. There was two hundred and sixty-eight dollars in the bank account when we started, and there was no money. The team had lost over $100,000 the previous year.

Jeff Berman 4:34 Wow.

Jesse Cole 4:35 So I had saved money, uh, you know, in college, I had a scholarship, so I was living off that.

Jeff Berman 4:39 Mm.

Jesse Cole 4:40 And it was two months in and went to the VEC conference. And-

Jeff Berman 4:44 What is a VEC conference?

Jesse Cole 4:45 So the VEC conference is Mike Veeck, and he brings together Minor League operators, and they talk about ideas. It's all about ideas. And the first speaker, Alan Fahden, came out, and he's running around the crowd throwing two dollar bills, hundreds of two dollar bills. I'm like, "Man, this is a lot of money." And everyone's going, "What makes this different? What's this about?" He starts talking about the power of a two dollar bill and how he keeps it with him. And then Mike Veeck brings out a box and he shows a box and goes, "My dad always said," Bill Veeck, he said, "That if the house is on fire, the number one thing you need to get is the idea first, because ideas are the most valuable thing that we have."

Jeff Berman 5:15 Mm.

Jesse Cole 5:16 And so I'm sitting there at this conference and I'm watching this crazy guy throw giant two dollar bills, and he's saying, "Whatever's normal, do the exact opposite. You gotta think different." And he's talking about how he sold this book, and instead of having it at, at a bookstore with thousands of books, he created his own bookstore in Minneapolis for just one book, his own. And it's just a fascinating idea. So my mind started just seeing like, we gotta think a different way. And so right then, you know, I immediately created my own idea box, started putting down crazy ideas. I started reading about P.T. Barnum, Walt Disney, and I said, "You know, let's do the things that are just a little bit different." So all right, give you an example. You know, you have beauty pageants. Well, what if we had a grandma beauty pageant? And so we actually got grandmas from a senior citizen home and had a grandma beauty pageant, which did not go exactly as we planned, but it was, it was-

Jeff Berman 5:56 [laughs] What, what happened?

Jesse Cole 5:57 Well, I mean, Gertrude stole the show. She was 87 years old. Well, first of all, they showed up late-

Jeff Berman 6:01 Okay

Jesse Cole 6:01 ... because I, you know-

Jeff Berman 6:02 Grand-

Jesse Cole 6:02 ... I should have expected that. They get out of the senior, uh, uh, the van, and they're slowly... These, I asked for seniors, but they brought like super seniors, like great-grandmothers.

Jeff Berman 6:11 Yeah.

Jesse Cole 6:11 And they're slowly getting out, and I'm like, "This game's gonna be delayed." Um, but yeah, they, the, the first question we did, uh, "Gertrude, if you could be on the cover of one magazine, what would it be and why?" And she goes, "Of course, Playboy." And I was like, "This is in front of a live crowd. She's 87 years old. No one should be thinking about that." And that's how it opened. So, um, but that's like anything, we do something different and crazy things happen. But we did that. I mean, we had flatulence fun nights with whoopee cushion giveaways. We had sleuth underwear nights. You know, we had, uh, garbage can nachos, which we still do in Savannah, like which five orders of nachos, three hamburgers, three hot dogs. It's heart-stoppingly delicious. Still can't get a cardiologist to sponsor it. But all these things, we started thinking about how do we do things differently? And that's where the experimentation lab started in Gastonia.

Jeff Berman 6:53 It's one thing to say, "I'm gonna, I'm gonna take the blinders off."

Jesse Cole 6:55 Yeah.

Jeff Berman 6:55 "And I have the idea box, I'm gonna fill it up."

Jesse Cole 6:57 Yeah.

Jeff Berman 6:57 It's another thing to actually generate the ideas for the grandma beauty contest or, or whatever else it may be. What, what's the process for coming up with

Jeff Berman 7:04 the ideas?

Jesse Cole 7:04 We had nothing to lose. See, when people realize they always put so much weight on failure, they put so much weight on an idea. When we first started, you do something, who cares? It might not go, go right. It might not go wrong. You know, it's just gonna happen. So we just kept doing all these different ideas. And so now we, we've developed kind of a system on how we generate our best ideas. You know, we follow a Saturday Night Live model and we generate ideas on a Tuesday all day idea sessions. Then we have a table read, and we start doing rehearsals, and we go through all that to have a brand-new show every week. Back in the day, you know, Walt Disney was asked, you know, before he passed, he said, "Walt, what's, what's the process for all this?" The process? There's no process. He goes, "We just try things. We experiment. Some w- work, some don't." And I think when you, you take out the weight of that and just say, "We're gonna try things," you find out a lot more gold. And you find the gold because you're, you're doing more. You learn more by, the more you do. And so Henry Ford says, "You learn by doing." And so we're just constantly doing things. Well, so back in the day, the first 10 years of Gastonia, there was no one covering us. There was no social media. We were just testing things. And you watch how the fans react, and then you try it again.

Jeff Berman 8:07 There's so many people right now who are working at companies that could be massive-

Jesse Cole 8:10 Yeah

Jeff Berman 8:10 ... you know, Fortune 50 companies or at, at relatively early-stage startups who've had a plan.

Jesse Cole 8:16 Yeah.

Jeff Berman 8:16 And whether it's because of AI-

Jesse Cole 8:18 Yeah

Jeff Berman 8:18 ... or, or other exogenous forces, external forces are coming in and forcing them to have to think different. W- When, when you talk to these folks and they come to you, what are you saying to them about how to inject that like, you know, let's [beep] go of it, you know-

Jesse Cole 8:33 [laughs]

Jeff Berman 8:33 ... i- into a process

Jeff Berman 8:35 so that y- you take away that fear of failure-

Jesse Cole 8:37 Yeah

Jeff Berman 8:37 ... and actually give yourself freedom to experiment?

Jesse Cole 8:38 Yeah, we had a plan. We were a college summer baseball team, and then the plan changed because we watched what our fans were doing. We watched as fans were leaving games early. No matter how much entertainment we had, no matter how much dancing, celebrations, crazy moments, surprises, they were still leaving early. Our plan was to be a baseball team. Why were they leaving early? Because the game was too long. It's too slow. It's too boring for people. It's a late night. You're taking your kids home. No one wants a three or four-hour show. And so we saw that. We literally videotaped, and we're taking pictures and watching every 30 minutes. But no one told us that, "Hey, we want a faster show." But they act. And so we had a plan, and then you pivot to see. Everyone's so focused often on their current customers. We love our fans more than anything. They're, uh, they... I would put us up against any company in the world how much we love our fans, but we're also thinking about our future fans. What are our fans gonna want in three to five years? And you can see little things that they react to. What time do they show up? When do they leave? How do they react to the thing that we do, our original music? When we put things on social media, we put millions of things on social media. You can respond right away. It's not, "Oh, the algorithm likes it." No. Do your fans like it? And if your fans like it, they will tell you that. And so I think the reality is it's not about what are our plans, it's you need to put more things out there and share with the world and find out what they like and what they don't like. Companies are afraid of doing that because they're afraid of the perception of what people will think. I don't care in the world what people think. We're gonna fail every day. We do silly and crazy promotions. Every day baseball traditionalists criticize us. We're not for them. Who are you for? If you're trying to grow a business, you're trying to create customers, you're trying to create fans, put more out there and see if they like it. Don't do surveys. Just actually go do it, and that's what Walt Disney believed in, and that's what we try to do as well.

Jeff Berman 10:18 You, you, you could easily have become the most successful front office person in summer college baseball-

Jesse Cole 10:25 [laughs]

Jeff Berman 10:25 ... or minor league baseball or maybe in Major League Baseball.

Jesse Cole 10:27 Well.

Jeff Berman 10:28 You could have been. I mean, that, that's a, that's a path that was available to you.

Jesse Cole 10:31 Yeah.

Jeff Berman 10:31 Why isn't that the path you ended up taking?

Jesse Cole 10:33 The greatest creators create things that they love. Often someone that's a creator, they're in a system and they're in a cog and they're creating someone else's dreams, someone else's vision, someone, a board member's goal. I realized as someone who played the game and loved playing, watching, it just was never truly exciting for me.

Jeff Berman 10:51 Mm.

Jesse Cole 10:51 And I realized that if I stayed under this box that they put you, "These are the rules of the game. This is how you have to play. These are the rules of the league. You better not break the rules or you're gonna get fined," which we've been fined plenty of times back in the day when we were in a league. If you can get out of that box and just create things that get you excited and you believe if you get excited about them, you love it, that other fans and other customers will get excited about it, that's the world I wanted to live in. And so, yeah, I could have gone the four hours, but then you got people telling you what to do. Walt Disney learned this. He's like, everyone said, "Hey, you can't do a full-length animation film." He said, "I'm gonna do it because I believe it's going to be great." And I think a lot of people, they may believe, but they're told what to believe and what not to believe. And I just believed that something was out there that not your traditional baseball fans would love, that a family would love, that young people would love, that people just wanna go have fun and not take themselves too seriously. There's the conventional world of sports, which we play a little bit in that world, but we can't control whether your team wins or loses.

Jeff Berman 11:49 Right.

Jesse Cole 11:49 But what we can control is the show. And if we build the rules, we make the rules of the game, we make the rules of the show, people can leave and have a great time every single night. That's what we're trying to do.

Jeff Berman 11:58 So a lot of, of entrepreneurs would have built their deck. They would have

Jeff Berman 12:03 gone around and pitched this idea for a, a, a new concept and raised a bunch of money or tried to and go from there. That's not what you did.

Jesse Cole 12:11 Start doing.

Jeff Berman 12:11 Yeah. Well-

Jesse Cole 12:13 See more. One city world tour. Start small, dream big. We had this idea, we had this belief. We played banana ball, and we did it behind closed doors. We played nine innings in ninety-nine minutes, and the players said it was the most fun they've ever played, and I watched it. You couldn't take your eyes out. How do you make that happen? I called my two college coaches, said, "I got a crazy idea. Can we do this behind closed doors?" They said, "Sure, Jesse, we'll give it a shot." And we got fired up, and we said, "All right, well, let's test it."

Jeff Berman 12:37 And it didn't work right away.

Jesse Cole 12:39 No.

Jeff Berman 12:39 What happened?

Jesse Cole 12:40 It's... [laughs] It never works right away. It always starts as chaos when you first begin. But then we said, "All right, well, is there something here? Is there some magic? How do you make it where people, you can't take your eyes off, you can't leave your seat, or you may miss something you've never seen before in baseball?"

Jeff Berman 12:53 You didn't raise outside capital.

Jesse Cole 12:54 No.

Jeff Berman 12:54 You're, you're, you're, you're not, like, an independently wealthy guy spending a trust fund down or something.

Jesse Cole 12:59 No.

Jeff Berman 12:59 You saved a few bucks with, with a college scholarship. How have you been sustaining this while you're trying to get enough traction or product market fit?

Jesse Cole 13:07 Most businesses, a lot of businesses start, "Hey, we gotta start this. We need to maybe raise capital."

Jeff Berman 13:10 Right.

Jesse Cole 13:11 "Or we gotta have advertisers, sponsors. We gotta get all this." Well, what we were fortunate with College Summer Baseball, we started a model where, you know, if we could sell the tickets and get people excited enough to come, we learned how to be successful by just selling tickets. And selling tickets, everyone's like, "Ah, we don't have-- I don't know if we can do that golf event because we lost our sponsor." Well, then the event's not good enough.

Jeff Berman 13:30 Right.

Jesse Cole 13:31 I mean, y- if people don't wanna pay to come see it, we had to make a product that people wanted to pay and come see. And so we created in, in College Summer Baseball, we were selling out every night, four thousand seats a night.

Jeff Berman 13:41 Yeah.

Jesse Cole 13:41 Now this is after only selling two tickets in our first three months, running out of money. My wife and I had to sell our house, empty out our savings account, sleeping on an air bed with nothing. But we got them to see the show, and we saw dancing players, we saw fun moments, we saw banana babies, banana bands, all that. We put that, the Banana Nanas, senior citizens dancing. People were like, "This is something we've never seen before." So that's, you know, small, you know, a three million dollar business. We're making money, and it's fine.

Jeff Berman 14:04 Out of nothing. Was, was there a moment where you and your wife looked at each other and said, "This isn't gonna work"? Was there a moment where you lost faith, or you just weren't sure you were gonna get there?

Jesse Cole 14:12 We wouldn't let ourselves go there. Most people, like... We couldn't. We were a million dollars plus in debt. We just got married. We have to go on. There's no other option. So we-- If we ever let our mind just go like, "Oh, we're not gonna make it," there was no option.

Jeff Berman 14:28 So what, what, what's the inflection point then when you've sold the house-

Jesse Cole 14:32 Yeah

Jeff Berman 14:32 ... you're sleeping on the air mattress, have to be some moments your wife and you are looking at each other going, "Well."

Jesse Cole 14:37 Yeah.

Jeff Berman 14:37 "Deep breath."

Jesse Cole 14:37 We didn't sleep at all.

Jeff Berman 14:38 Yeah.

Jesse Cole 14:39 We, we didn't sleep at all. We'd walk the streets just thinking. And we just kept saying, "Get to that first show. Get to that first show." It's like my dad, you know, as long as this, "Hey, get to your next at-bat. And forget about what happened in the last at-bat. Get to your next at-bat." In that mindset, and then swing hard in case you hit it. And so we said, "We're gonna get to that opening night, and we're gonna swing hard." Banana Nanas went out and danced in the pouring rain because there was a rain delay. We had the first banana. We had the players doing dances, and people were like, "What am I watching?" But it created attention.

Jeff Berman 15:05 Mm.

Jesse Cole 15:05 They were saying they saw something. So from that point, we started selling out every game.

Jeff Berman 15:08 Wow.

Jesse Cole 15:09 So the business became set at a four thousand seat stadium. So we already had a little bit of a cushion to say, "Hey, we can experiment. Let's go take this on the road and see where it is." We had a Penske truck that we just packed all our stuff in. We didn't know how to set up merchandise. We didn't know logistics. We didn't know how to do sound systems at other stadiums. We didn't know any of it. But we said, "Can we get enough people excited to come see it?" And we sold it out. We failed miserably the first night. Sound went out, but enough good happened. They watched the excitement and said, "All right, how do we get to the next day?" Got to the next day, put on a great show, and I knew right there. We had a surprise fireworks show. We had the fans stayed an hour plus after the game. They didn't wanna leave. Which normally games, you wanna leave.

Jeff Berman 15:46 Sure.

Jesse Cole 15:47 And I said, "This is it." And so the next year, go to seven cities, then thirty-three, then Major League stadiums, then football stadiums. You just keep expanding after you start doing it.

Jeff Berman 15:54 Hey, folks, we are briefly pausing today's episode to tell you Masters of Scale Summit is returning to San Francisco October twentieth to twenty-second. If you've been before, you know. This is unlike any other business or tech conference you've ever attended. Superstars, incredible programming. The audience is incredible. One phenomenal person after another. But it's the feeling, it's the vibe, it's the energy. It's about shaping the future that we want to see. After three packed days full of rich insights, you're going to leave so energized, so fired up, so ready to go change the world. You're not going to believe it. Join us. Visit mastersofscale.com/summit.

Jeff Berman 16:39 It strikes me that twenty years ago, this would've been a heck of a lot harder to do, in part because you just didn't have the, um, the range of social media-

Jesse Cole 16:48 Correct

Jeff Berman 16:48 ... to pound it out. So how did you market when you're... It's, it's so hard often-

Jesse Cole 16:52 Yeah

Jeff Berman 16:52 ... to take that in real life experience that's so special-

Jesse Cole 16:55 Yeah

Jeff Berman 16:55 ... and translate it on, on social-

Jesse Cole 16:57 Yeah

Jeff Berman 16:57 ... on digital. What, what, what was that?

Jesse Cole 17:00 Well, we spend zero dollars on marketing. We invest on the experience. So most people, I think, when they think about marketing, it's like you gotta go promote something to get people to want to buy something or take on a service.

Jeff Berman 17:11 Mm-hmm.

Jesse Cole 17:11 What we think about is how do you make your experience so remarkable that you capture that and just share that? P.T. Barnum, one of the greatest promoters of all time, he said, "Something terrible happens without promotion: nothing." And so I think without social media, it would've been a great challenge. But yes, now with social media, we can amplify, but you still have to create something truly remarkable, and that's what we try to do every night.

Jeff Berman 17:30 You've referenced P.T. Barnum. You've referenced Walt Disney. There are elements of Vince McMahon and WWE here.

Jesse Cole 17:38 Yep.

Jeff Berman 17:38 Um, uh, there are elements of Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead.

Jesse Cole 17:41 [laughs] Yeah. So.

Jeff Berman 17:42 When, when, when you're looking at these folks who've innovated and created these extraordinary, um, uh, fan-friendly experiences-

Jesse Cole 17:51 Yeah

Jeff Berman 17:51 ... w- how are you determining what, what's gonna work for you, what to draw from them? Um, when, when, when you're researching and you're reading-

Jesse Cole 17:57 Yeah

Jeff Berman 17:57 ... about these folks, seeing about these folks, what, what are you looking to latch onto?

Jesse Cole 18:00 Well, you, you, you start with the best in their industry. So you know, yes, uh, the Grateful Dead, they were the most fan-friendly band of their s- You know, they let the, they let the fans record every single night. You know, they created a newsletter for them. They were speaking directly with them. They brought in their own sound because they wanted it to be better. Like, they were obsessed with communicating directly with the fans. They started selling their own tickets to fans, the fan clubs, all of that. So we said, "All right, how do we do that?" We have 40,000 K Club members that get access to all of our tickets first. We have special meet and greets. You know, that's, that could be well over 100,000, but we're still learning with it every year and slowly growing it.

Jeff Berman 18:32 I spent a couple of years at the NFL.

Jesse Cole 18:34 Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jeff Berman 18:34 Uh, ran, ran the digital media group.

Jesse Cole 18:35 Yes.

Jeff Berman 18:36 There is perhaps no organization more zealous about controlling its rights-

Jesse Cole 18:40 100%

Jeff Berman 18:41 ... than the National Football League.

Jesse Cole 18:42 Yeah.

Jeff Berman 18:42 And they have built a pretty darn good business doing it.

Jesse Cole 18:44 Yeah.

Jeff Berman 18:45 You guys with the Fan First approach-

Jesse Cole 18:47 Yeah

Jeff Berman 18:47 ... you'll do an ESPN deal, you'll do a CW deal. You'll, you'll keep the rights-

Jesse Cole 18:51 Yeah

Jeff Berman 18:51 ... to stream games on YouTube for free globally. Wh- when you're balancing that driving revenue and creating that fan experience, because you're still a business, right?

Jesse Cole 19:01 Yeah.

Jeff Berman 19:01 I mean-

Jesse Cole 19:02 And we're a healthy business.

Jeff Berman 19:03 So, so how, how are you striking that balance? Is it always Fan First? Are there moments where you go, "Boy, if, if ESPN's coming with 10X the dollars they're gonna give us, I, I'm not gonna live stream every game"? Is, is that even a discussion?

Jesse Cole 19:17 Fans First always. We started this company to be Fans First. That's who we are and that's what we stand for. It's our mission, it's our values, and as soon as you deter away from that, you're in trou- And you, you'll have short term, you'll be glorious in the short term, and then every day you'll just lose a few fans. Two, three, four, five, and 10, and hundreds, then thousands. That's my fear.

Jeff Berman 19:40 There's a different mindset when you're the challenger brand than when you're, than when you're at the top of the mountain.

Jesse Cole 19:44 Yeah.

Jeff Berman 19:45 Um, but you should always be a challenger. Well, so that's exactly where I'm going. How do you maintain that challenger brand mindset as, as you're getting up to the peak of the mountain?

Jesse Cole 19:52 So scared every day.

Jeff Berman 19:53 Please.

Jesse Cole 19:54 I'm scared every day that what we've worked so hard at when we first started and sleeping on the airbed, that we can lose fans. I'm scared that this, that we've built from nothing, and now it's, I guess you'd call it productive paranoia, and I have that every day, that our show has to get a little bit better, our experience has to get a little bit better. Um, our entertainment has to get a little bit better. Our merchandise experience has to get a little better. Our ticket experience has to get a little bit better. That, um, to some people would say, "Ooh, that sounds unhealthy." To me, it fires me up.

Jeff Berman 20:22 Yeah.

Jesse Cole 20:22 It excites me. I love looking back at where we were last year and look at where we are this year, and knowing that we're only 1% of the way to where we can be. I know that and I believe that. Because we're inventing a lot of it as we go. It's gonna be messy. It's hard. Every time we do a new show, it's hard. And we have six teams now. It's extremely hard trying to add that level.

Jeff Berman 20:38 And I don't think most people realize this-

Jesse Cole 20:39 Yeah

Jeff Berman 20:39 ... because the Bananas are, become this phenomenon.

Jesse Cole 20:42 Yeah. 100%.

Jeff Berman 20:42 You can't go on social without seeing you guys. Phenomenal. But, but you're now a six-team league. You've got a season.

Jesse Cole 20:47 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Berman 20:47 You've got a, an end of season tournament.

Jesse Cole 20:49 100%.

Jeff Berman 20:49 Right? So are you even worried about diluting the brand by expanding into these other teams?

Jesse Cole 20:54 100%. That's, that's a huge fear. So you have to make every single show so distinct and so unique and so different. And so I- we've invested millions in each show. So, like, the Party Animals, which people don't realize, they have more followers than every Major League Baseball team on TikTok.

Jeff Berman 21:08 Really?

Jesse Cole 21:09 They're selling out Major League stadiums without the Bananas. Like, 170,000 people joined the list to go see them in Detroit. Based on those numbers, four tickets, we could sell out eight straight nights-

Jeff Berman 21:19 Sure

Jesse Cole 21:19 ... without the Bananas. The Clowns, our newest team, which obviously paying tribute to the Major League team with what they did, was unbelievable. I mean, we're bringing Broadway-type singers-

Jeff Berman 21:27 Yeah

Jesse Cole 21:27 ... a brass band that's unbelievable. We have acts we haven't shared yet, but from Cirque du Soleil. I want people every night to see these shows and be like, "I've never seen that on a baseball field. I've seen the Bananas, but I've never seen something like that." And it's very hard because they all just get started.

Jeff Berman 21:41 And d- does each of the new teams, can they build that brand on their own? Or how do you think about integrating them with, like, the Bananas?

Jesse Cole 21:48 So they are getting, they're creating fans every night. The Local Beach Coconuts are, their merchandise is right up there at number two because that brand is so fun that when they start playing at the end of the game, everyone's chanting Local Beach and Coconuts. And so they can build off each other, but you have to make it distinct.

Jesse Cole 22:04 You have to make it... They think, "Oh, that's just another one of the Bananas teams. We're in trouble." That's a huge fear of mine, is we gotta continue to come up with new ideas and push the envelope.

Jeff Berman 22:11 The Dodgers have a home game tonight.

Jesse Cole 22:13 Yeah.

Jeff Berman 22:13 I checked right before we sat down.

Jesse Cole 22:14 Yeah.

Jeff Berman 22:15 The, the very cheapest seat in the stadium is 80 bucks. It's at the, at the top. If I wanna be in even the bleachers-

Jesse Cole 22:21 Yeah

Jeff Berman 22:21 ... or in the lower bowl, I'm into the hundreds of dollars per ticket. Um, you guys have kept a, a very low fixed ticket price.

Jesse Cole 22:28 Yeah.

Jeff Berman 22:28 How do you?

Jesse Cole 22:29 Our goal is very simple. It's to create fans. If your goal is to make money, we could charge a lot more, and we've been told to do that by every consultant. "Well, you could be making this." The average ticket price in the secondary market's over $200.

Jeff Berman 22:42 Right.

Jesse Cole 22:42 For us, it's 40, 50, and $60 with no ticket fees, no convenience fees. We pay your taxes. It's a different game. You have, if you're a public company, they would say there's $100 million right there. Just ch- charge what you should charge.

Jeff Berman 22:53 Yeah.

Jesse Cole 22:54 No interest to us. And we even built a secondary market to deter the whole secondary market. [laughs]

Jeff Berman 22:58 Yeah.

Jesse Cole 22:58 And it's all face value, which just costs us money.

Jeff Berman 23:01 Yeah.

Jesse Cole 23:01 We're literally doing t- developing, putting all the money into it, taking all the fees. That's all on us, just so our fans can get tickets at the price that we believe is, is best.

Jeff Berman 23:10 The, the other thing that I imagine a, a private equity investor dying-

Jesse Cole 23:13 Yeah

Jeff Berman 23:13 ... to get in your business would say is, "Okay, fine, Jesse, do it that way. Do it your way."

Jesse Cole 23:17 Yeah.

Jeff Berman 23:17 "But let's go use this ticketing platform for everyone else who wants-"

Jesse Cole 23:20 Yeah.

Jeff Berman 23:20 "... to invent it." Is that part of the plan? Is that part of the equation?

Jesse Cole 23:23 Well, yeah, if you follow, I guess if you look at what Amazon did, I mean, that's great. I mean, Bezos and the group built something that could handle their infrastructure and say, "Wow, a lot of people could use that as well."

Jeff Berman 23:32 AWS.

Jesse Cole 23:33 100%. AWS, which is the most profitable part of their business, billions of dollars. Yeah, I think there's a world where our ticketing, uh, platform that we have built and our secondary marketplace could be used. But right now we gotta get it to a point where it is so great for our fans that we are right there, like, it is perfect. Like, it is almost at perfect for our fans, that we want to put it out to everyone else, and that's gonna be a long way. Again, our goals aren't to make a lot of money. Our goals are to create the best experience.

Jeff Berman 24:01 I get that, and also the more money you make, especially if you're not charging fans for it, the more you can offer. Right?

Jesse Cole 24:08 Yeah, I mean, obviously that's, that's a lot. Like, we are investing a lot more in our show, millions of dollars. Our broadcast, we invest $13 million this year, which we're not getting that. Like, it's free on YouTube. Um, so that's part of our ethos. We will invest more. Again, another Bezos, they continue to invest for the long game. We're learning how to do a broadcast at a high level. We're learning ... We have 16 full-time truck drivers that are driving our trucks around the country with all of our equipment and merchandise. We didn't know how to do a trucking logistics company, but we have to now because we're in 75 stadiums, all in 45 states, and soon we'll be international. We have no idea how to do that.

Jeff Berman 24:41 You're building a, a fan experience.

Jesse Cole 24:42 Yeah.

Jeff Berman 24:43 All of a sudden you're building technology-

Jesse Cole 24:44 Yeah

Jeff Berman 24:44 ... a ticketing platform.

Jesse Cole 24:45 Yeah.

Jeff Berman 24:45 You're building a, a logistics company-

Jesse Cole 24:47 Yep

Jeff Berman 24:47 ... with the trucking. How are ... When, when a new challenge like that comes up, how are you figuring out what to do?

Jesse Cole 24:51 Well, it depends on what part of the business. So, like, w- you know, I think we learn this, again, you look at Walt Disney and Roy Disney. Walt was focused on all the creative and Roy was focused on all the operation, how you pay for it. And, you know, we have an amazing president who's been with us since day one, Jared Gordon. He is gung ho on the operations and figuring it out, and he always finds a way. You know, his, his mindset is, "We'll figure it out. We'll figure it out. We don't know, but we'll figure it out, and it's gonna be messy. It'll cost us a little bit more as we figure it out, but eventually we'll get it." When it comes to creative, that's what I focus on. I'm focused on how do we create the show? What's our next step? What's our next event that's gonna be larger than life? What's our original music that we're creating? What's the next media thing we're doing? I spend all my time there. He spends all his time focused on how do we actually take care of our fans and make this happen.

Jeff Berman 25:32 Mm.

Jesse Cole 25:33 And when we work well, we work very well together.

Jeff Berman 25:35 There are, um, a lot of leaders running, uh, um, consumer businesses-

Jesse Cole 25:41 Mm-hmm

Jeff Berman 25:41 ... who, uh, would love to have a little bit of your system. Uh, Brian Verlap, uh, was my boss at the NFL.

Jesse Cole 25:48 Yep.

Jeff Berman 25:49 He's now running the PGA Tour. Brian calls and says, "Jesse, one, one note."

Jesse Cole 25:54 Yeah.

Jeff Berman 25:54 "What should I be doing different?"

Jesse Cole 25:55 [laughs] At the PGA Tour?

Jeff Berman 25:58 Yeah.

Jesse Cole 26:01 I'd break the rules. Let fans have fun. Let golfers have fun. People wanna connect with the athletes. They wanna connect in a way it's okay to celebrate. It's okay to have fun. Why don't the golfers come through high-fiving all the fans more? Why don't they actually have some entrances? Why isn't there an entrance music as a golfer comes out? Why does it have to always be quiet? You know, I, I ... You know, and again, there's obviously movies and have Gilmore and all talking about that. And there's, there's a world now where I think people are looking for entertainment nonstop. We have seen amazing golf shots.

Jeff Berman 26:34 Mm.

Jesse Cole 26:34 We have seen home runs. We have seen touchdowns. Doesn't take away from the sport. It's amazing to watch. But you haven't seen the athletes have as much fun.

Jeff Berman 26:42 Yep.

Jesse Cole 26:43 And whether you're a golfer, whether you're a football, whether it ... It's like football channel that said, "Hey, we're gonna have touchdown celly. We're all good. Like, celebrate. Have fun. You know, that's good." And that's become a part of our society now. That didn't hurt the game. It added to the game. So why don't you embrace that?

Jeff Berman 27:00 True.

Jesse Cole 27:00 If you're in golf, it's like embrace those moments. Let's ... You know, at least let's just do this one tournament. We're gonna have music pumping. We're gonna have live bands. We're gonna have entrances. We're gonna have certain walk-ups. We're gonna have celebrities doing singing. It is gonna be the most fun golf tournament in the world. Just test it for once. Golf purists will hate it, but you might draw a whole new audience that you'd be surprised, and they'd come out and have the time of their life. Maybe.

Jeff Berman 27:24 Let me go to the other end of the spectrum.

Jesse Cole 27:27 Yeah.

Jeff Berman 27:27 Um, uh, Reid Hoffman is the-

Jesse Cole 27:29 Yeah

Jeff Berman 27:29 ... is the co-founder of LinkedIn.

Jesse Cole 27:31 Yeah. A lot of respect.

Jeff Berman 27:32 And LinkedIn is not known where the party happens. If you're giving one product note to LinkedIn right now, uh, what, what are you, what are you asking them to do or change to make it more fun, more consumer friendly?

Jesse Cole 27:43 Yeah. It, it's tough 'cause it's very easy to just go and do what everyone else is doing. You see this every ... You know, TikTok takes this from Instagram, Instagram takes this, Meta takes it. I wouldn't try to do what everyone else is doing. I would lean in on what makes them different. And love is better than like, as I've heard many times. You know, get million, 2 million, 5 million, 10 million to love you as opposed to hundreds of million that-

Jeff Berman 28:02 Yeah

Jesse Cole 28:02 ... kinda like you.

Jeff Berman 28:03 If someone's about to graduate college that's coming up to you and, and saying, "Jesse, like, what, what do I do? Like, I, I ... The entry level jobs are disappearing. I'm really not sure what to do." What's the piece of advice that you'd give?

Jesse Cole 28:15 Do what gives you energy. Biggest game changer for me happened about six years into my professional journey. I was with the Gastonia Grizzlies and I was doing everything. I was doing hiring, I was doing sales, I was doing food and bev, I was doing operations. And every day I was, I was ... And then I realized that what were, were my best days? What did I do during my best days? And I was, ooh, I was coming up with ideas. I was creating, I was sharing. I was on a podcast. I was talking about what we're doing. I was growing. I was learning from some of the best of the best. And so I created my energy list. And I said, "These are the three things. I'll hit these buckets: creating, share, and grow." If I do that every day, everything else takes care of itself. And so that gives me energy, and I hope it gives all of our team energy, because every day we get to do special things and bring joy.

Jeff Berman 28:59 Well, I, I, I, I'm confident everyone watching, listening is taking joy away from this.

Jesse Cole 29:03 [laughs]

Jeff Berman 29:03 Thanks for being my guest.

Jesse Cole 29:03 Appreciate it.

Jeff Berman 29:04 Thanks, Jesse.

Jesse Cole 29:04 Thanks so much.

Jeff Berman 29:04 Yeah. Thank you. Thanks again to the man in the yellow suit, Jesse Cole, for joining us. Not everyone is bold enough to create something as wacky and wild and just wonderful as the Savannah Bananas. But the lessons from Jesse's scale journey are essential for all of us. The one that struck me most watching his team rehearse for a show, joy. It's contagious, it's good for business, and Lord knows we need more of it. I'm Jeff Berman, thank you for listening. [outro music]