The Secret to a $1 Billion Business | Savannah Bananas' Jesse Cole

Key Takeaway

Run a 15-minute friction audit today: walk through your customer’s journey from first contact to follow-up, list every point that feels slow, confusing, costly, or impersonal, and fix one. Jesse Cole built the Savannah Bananas by removing common frustrations—fees, food purchases, long waits, and dead time—then delivering unexpected delight. Don’t settle for “fine”; make one small improvement that gives customers a story worth sharing.

Episode Overview

Jesse Cole explains how the Savannah Bananas grew from a nearly bankrupt college summer baseball team into Fans First Entertainment, a billion-dollar-valued live-entertainment business. He and Ed Mylett discuss building fans rather than transactional customers, designing experiences backward from the ideal outcome, maintaining control over the customer journey, and using relentless daily improvement to create remarkable moments.

Full Transcript

Transcript of The Secret to a $1 Billion Business | Savannah Bananas' Jesse Cole from The Ed Mylett Show. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

I hear so many small business owners say the exact same thing, they just never have enough time in the day. Well, I measure time differently. I've compressed, condensed, heck, I've bent time. My first day is 6 a.m. to noon. My second day starts at noon and goes till 6 p.m. and my third day, 6 p.m. to midnight. I now get 21 days a week. Stack that up over a month, over a year, over five years, and my life's completely different than it would have been otherwise.

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Head to Cardiff.co slash ed. That's Cardiff.co slash ed. Cardiff.co. Real growth. Fast funding. Cardiff. Borrow better. College football is back, so Hilton called on me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Ooh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition, even a marching band wake-up call at 555 in 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay.

Hilton, for the say. This is the admirable show. All right, welcome back to the show, everybody. Man, I've wanted to have this dude on for a long time. I think he's one of the great, top five entrepreneurs that I'm excited about. In the world today, literally one, because it's sort of connected to baseball, but more because this dude gets culture. He gets client experience better than anybody I think on planet earth. Okay. And let me just give you some stats. First of all, you know, the Savannah bananas.

That's probably how many of you would know. That's one of the teams, but he actually has fans first entertainment. He's the owner of the banana baseball champion league. Let me tell you how popular these guys are. Okay. I want you to understand that as of April of 2026, 4 million plus people on the wait list to get a ticket to one of the games. They fill up stadiums with a hundred thousand fans. Last night he was at something with 80, 90,000 fans. Just to give you context, guys, Superbowl had 71,000 fans, okay?

They've got over 21 million followers on social media. They got a new deal with ESPN and Disney. This dude is one of the great American business stories because he gets the most important things in an AI area, which is experience and culture for the fans. I'm fired up, dude, for you to teach people all these lessons today. So this is Jesse Cole. Jesse, welcome to the show. I love it, man. Let's rock and roll. He's a, he's a Boston boy too, which I was just discovering, which means he's a good people on top of everything else.

Okay. I want to know this all for my personal edification. So you're filling up all these stadiums, which is insane to get 80,000 to get 8,000 people to come to something is no pun intended bananas. Take me back to the beginning of this just for a second, because there's a lot of entry level entrepreneurs listening to the show today. They're got their startup. They're in their third year, their fourth year, their 10th year. Where'd the idea in the first place come from and what did the early years look like for you and the company?

Yeah, well, people don't realize they think it's an overnight success, but it's, it's going on almost 20 years now. And so, yeah, I mean the bananas and it's going, are going on 11 years now, but go back before that. I spent 10 years in a little tiny town in Gastonia, North Carolina, running a college summer baseball team with no one wanting to come to the games, $268 in the bank account of the team, my first day and fans coming to the game. That's what we started as a 23 year old general manager.

Wow. Are you serious? Yeah. So people don't realize that. So I had played baseball my whole life. I was a baseball guy. I was fortunate to get division one scholarship, went down to South Carolina, played at Wofford, the dream of playing pro ball, scouts at the games, getting letters from the teams. This is going to happen. And then I tore my shoulder the senior year, just like that, right? Like that. Three tears done. Never played again. Wow. And everyone's like, you're going to go into coaching.

You've been around the game the whole, your whole life. You're going to go into coaching. And so, yeah, that's what I thought I would do. And I coached for one summer in the Cape Cod league, which I know you're familiar with. Yeah. Yeah. I realized one day I'm sitting in the dugout, the best seat in the house with the best players. All these guys go play pro. They're the best of the best. I'm bored out of my mind. I'm just sitting there. I'm like, I played my whole life, but I'm sitting there, I'm like, I know what's going to happen.

We're going to do this. We're going to try to bun them over. We're going to run. I'm like, I'm not in the game. I'm watching the game. And I realized I'm bored, man. What about the fans? Yeah. More parts of the game. So then I learned this. So I started studying Walt Disney religiously and, you know, when he took his daughters on Saturdays to Daddy Daughter Day, they'd go out to the park and, you know, went out to the carousel and, you know, went to Griffith Park.

And he said, I wish there was a place adults and kids could have fun together. And that's where the thoughts, the ideation of Disneyland came about. And I'm sitting there in the dugout. I'm thinking the same thing. I'm like, man, you know, why can't this game be fun for everyone? Even people that don't love baseball. Kids and adults. And yeah. Yes. There's 70 million people that come out to Major League Baseball games. And I get it. But like everyone, not even if you don't get the game, you can still have fun and enjoy it.

And so, yeah, we went to Gastonia, 23 years old with a kind of a big vision and we failed. We were struggling, man. We were trying to come up with grandma beauty pageant ideas, salute to underwear nights, flatulent fun nights. I was just trying everything, throwing it up against the wall. But slowly but surely there for 10 years, you know, we went from 200 fans a game to a thousand fans a game to 1500 fans a game to 2000 fans a game, started selling out and from a team losing $100,000 a year, we started to make some money.

But that wasn't the goal. The goal was to try to learn how to get people to come to games. And then that's where Savannah started. So Savannah came after about 10 years in Gastonia. OK, guys, by the way, I feel like a brother here born, born in the same hospital, South Shore Hospital, Massachusetts, obviously a couple of years apart, unfortunately for me. But I also played Division One baseball, so I know what that's like. And I know what it's like when the dream ends, too. Right.

He's also if you're listening to the audio, because a lot of your audio, he's also the best dressed guest we've ever had on the show. So, yeah, he's in his trademark yellow tux and yellow hat. And if you are listening to audio at some point today, give yourself the gift of going over to the YouTube just to get a look at what a great American entrepreneur looks like. But so what happened, Jesse, like, don't be humble, like that's a great beginning. But to go to really one of the most scaled viral businesses really existing in the world today.

I mean, millions of people waiting to get to one of your games from that time. How and why? Like, I know it's a broad statement, but how? We had to fail first. You know, I think the greatest entrepreneurs, they go through serious failure and that actually guides them in what they do next. So our failure, we went to Savannah, this big dream minor league baseball in Savannah, Georgia, for 90 years, professional baseball. We came in as a college summer team. People don't even realize that. I did not know that.

We started as college summer, one of the lowest levels of baseball. That's what we were. But we had this big dream. We show up the stadium. Unfortunately, the previous team cut the phone lines, cut the internet lines, took everything out of the ballpark. So it was myself, my wife. I'm 31 years old. My wife's 28. We've got our 24 year old team president and a couple of 22 year olds straight out of college. That's our team. But we were going to make baseball fun. It's a brand new slate.

Savannah, Georgia. We're all excited. So we start going knocking door to door. This is back in 2015, 2016. We don't even have a team name that we're like, we're here, we're going to make baseball fun. There's going to be dancing players. It's going to be on nonstop entertainment. We were getting doors shut in our face, hung up on. We literally had an event, a free event at the conference center with like steak and crab cakes and drinks, and only 72 people showed up. No one even wanted to come.

The conference center felt so bad that they didn't even charge us for it. They were embarrassed. Like they felt so bad about it. It was, we only sold two tickets in our first three months. And so we'd already gone into massive debt because we had to buy the team. Now we did it through the league. So it was like we had to pay, you know, a certain amount, six figures, uh, you know, every year for multiple years, but we already in tons of debt. And then we sold two tickets our first few months.

And then on January 15th, 2016, I'll never forget this moment. It's 4 45 PM. We get the call that we overdrafted our account. We were going to miss payroll. We were out of money. So my wife and I had just been married three months. We just launched this brand new team. We already massively in debt, almost a million dollars in debt. And, uh, she turns to me and Emily goes, Jess, we have no options. We have to sell our house. So we sold our house. We empty our savings account.

We found an old garage that was turned into a studio. Kind of. We got an airbed and every day we'd say, we just got to hit, get the next day, get the next day. And so we were grocery shopping, which is $30 a week. We'd go to Walmart with $20 bill and a $10 bill because we didn't want to go more credit card debt. We already so much in debt. And so 42 meals, we'd eat that and we just, with whatever that food was, which wasn't real food, to be honest with you.

And, uh, we just said, we've got to get to it. We got to get some attention. We got to get people to know who we are and know that we're not like every other baseball team because most people, what they do, they're just talking and we were just talking. No one had experienced it. We're like, we got to get to that point so people can actually experience it. But first we got to get attention. And so we did the name, the team contest, which a lot of teams do.

And, um, we got all the generic, the spirits, the ports, the anchors, the Braves. I'm like, there's already a team in our state called the Braves. We're not going to be the Braves. And, uh, we had one suggestion, the bananas. And I know we looked at each other and said, go bananas. He said, what if we had a senior citizen dance team called the banana nanas? What about a male cheerleading team called the mananas? What about banana in the pants promotions and do music videos to can't stop the peeling?

And we just, our idea started saying that's a fun brand. And our goal when the beginning day one is to make baseball fun. And we said, we're going to go with it. But we knew we were going to get hit hard by embarrassment. We actually prepared our short little, small little staff before I was like, guys, when we start getting criticism, this is how we handle it. And then we announced the team and it was more criticism than you could ever imagine. We were getting booed in the streets when we'd wear gear.

People would boo us. The town was so embarrassed that we would name the team the bananas. But nationally, Ed, it was like on sports center. It was on sports center. It got national attention. People were like, oh, this is a fun name. Is this the logo of the year? And people were like, all right, you got to get attention first. And now we got to deliver on the experience. So we just got to opening day. We made every single ticket all inclusive. So think about this, Ed.

Again, everything starts for us. The name of our company is Fans First Entertainment. So every decision we make, we ask as a fans first. And so when we went into this, we said, all right, we got to get people that want to come to the shows. But maybe they're, you know, college summer baseball. They don't know what it is. They're not interested. Well, why don't we just make it the best value in the world? And then we wow them with the experience. So all your hamburgers, hot dogs, chicken sandwiches, soda, water, popcorn, dessert all night long and your ticket.

No ticket fees, no convenience fees, no service fees. We pay your taxes. Fifteen dollars total. Dude, so that's so that's what we announced in the beginning. We did that. So so and again, we had no idea how to do it. And that's what people realize. Like, oh, you guys are doing some crazy little things. We don't know what we're doing until we do it. You're going to have this goal and this vision and just go do it and learn from it. And so we said we're going to do it.

And boy, did we learn that first night. We we didn't know our fans were to go through ten thousand pieces of meat in an hour. All right. The lines, the lines were almost two to three hours. It was a really bad experience. But you need to be willing to get through the messy to get to the great. And so what we learned with that day was like, all right, the vision of what it could be. You never pull money out of your pocket. Your kids say, hey, mom, can I have a soda?

Go, just go. Well, can I go get a burger? Yeah, just go. That is a frictionless experience. That is a fans first experience. So we had what the vision was. We just don't know how to execute it. So the next day we put we move stanchions around. We put drinks first. So people weren't just grabbing all the burgers and dogs and we made it. So now even to this day, still in Savannah, all inclusive. Everyone can get fed within five minutes at any point at our stadium.

And so that was a starting point. But that was, you know, we didn't wow them there. They were like, this is terrible. But at least they said they were getting it free. But they watched as the banana nanas danced. They watched as we lifted a baby in a banana costume up in the air and saying, no, Savannah, not here to start the game. They they watched our players went into the crowd to deliver roses to little girls in the middle of the game. They watched an experience that they'd never seen before.

That moment, everything changed. We didn't have to market again. And this is an honest, true story. Since that day, we have spent zero on marketing. My you're you're literally blowing my mind. I want you all to listen. If you're driving in your car right now, you lean in. You are now in one of the great business podcasts you will ever hear in your life. Just what he know, guys. As a real entrepreneur who scaled and built a bunch of businesses, OK, we're having a real one right now.

You're going to take a ton of lessons. I want to go back. I want to unpack a couple of things so far. Why didn't you quit? Think about the last time you called a business and nobody picked up. What did you do? You know, you did. You called the next one and your customers are doing the same thing. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Kuo. It's spelled Kuo. It's the business phone system built so you never miss a call. All your calls, texts, voicemails live in one place.

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Try Kuo for free. Plus, get 20 percent off your first six months when you go to Kuo.com slash mylet. That's Kuo.com slash mylet. So if you were to start a business right now, what would you create? What would that idea be like that you had been you've been working towards since you were a kid, but you haven't done anything with? Something that came to mind when you were in college or perhaps a passion project you've always wanted to put out into the world, but never quite gotten around to it.

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That's right. Start a free trial at shopify.com Slash my let that's shopify.com Slash my let I'm gonna ask that question and it's it's funny because and I got to ask questions about regrets and all that I never think like that. I always You you've got $30 of groceries a day hang on $30 You're three months married two people bought tickets. You did not think about quitting. You're telling me. What are the options? We had bought we owed all this money. We were in it We had we had kids that just came out of college and their parents Were trusting us to make sure that their kids took this job that we take care of them We had a 24 year old president that left a minor league job to lead this team We had a responsibility and so my mindset was like we got to get the next day Well, how can we can convince a few people to buy tickets?

What can we do the next day? How can we get a few more people? How can we get to opening night? So we can at least show them we an obligation We owed so much money to the league and to our debt and everything else that we had We had to get to that opening night. There was no option of quitting Hmm, by the way, everyone. This is just 10 years ago. This isn't like 30 years ago. So this also goes to show you You do some of the lessons that we're gonna go through here that this man and his team of employed in their business Stuff could get going first things first when I think of you Is it unreasonable hospitality?

Is that the book? Well, there's a tremendous. Yeah well I brought him in to speak to my art a group with Andy for selling I and it was one of my first introductions and I'm like, I'm actually sort of convinced that customer experience has always been the most important thing But now with AI marching its way towards us Can you just talk about you call it fans first? But some of you don't have fans you should but you have customers who you would if you were really smart in your business You'd make raving fans based on the experience but Preach and teach us lessons here as entrepreneurs.

We're at Harvard Business School with you right now in your yellow tux, right? What does customer experience mean? How important is it? And how does an entrepreneur who's good at it think it's it's everything It's it's the difference and and everything starts with us. Our name our company is fans first entertainment every decision We ask does it make fans does it create fans? And so yeah, I believe especially now with AI and the need I think there's gonna be huge pushback I think AI is here and it's gonna be here and it's not everything but like human connection.

We need that we crave that There's a difference there. And so we invest heavily in that so you think about it customers are transactional they come and go hmm Fans fans are different guys. Okay, so the future of business is not how many customers you have. It's how many fans you have So so you think about this? What what does a fan look like here? I'll give you an example You know right now every game that we have wherever we have We have fans come in from either 30 from 38 on the low end tough to 46 states Six to seven countries They wait for five years and they come in and when they come in and you see them and they show tattoos of our logos I have one fan.

This is hilarious. He's got we add new teams We have six teams now, which is crazy all of them have sold out everywhere they go including major league stadiums and After like the third team we had this guy comes because somebody goes Jesse you gotta you guys stop adding teams I keep having to add all these tattoos. I go dude. That's a you problem. That's a you That's how he feels about what we're doing I had a family come up to me after a game and Husband wife two kids and they said man, this is so on, you know, we drove into town from it's like Oh, where'd you come from?

They go we drove from Utah We drove 40 hours from Utah and we're driving 40 hours back tomorrow in my mind I'm like what is wrong with you, but they wanted to have the whole experience They want to go all in and my point is like there's a difference in a fan They will go past everywhere else to go to you how they will skip every other option That's similar to you to go to you and when things go wrong, they will defend you great example last year We made the biggest most costly mistake as a company We sent an email.

I was supposed to go out to 4,000 people We had an opportunity for some tickets in Savannah to our waitlist. We sent out to 44,000 instead I'm flying Ed. I'll never forget this. I'm flying. I land and there's message after message I'm getting blown up people ripping me apart the company apart me. They call my president. What happened? He said, you know, we made a mistake. We send the email out to many people They all expected to get tickets or have an opportunity to take as they couldn't so what do we do immediate apology?

But then it's immediately say hey, we were going to take care of you on us Any game in the country on us that cost six million dollars because over a hundred thousand plus tickets And then we said and then they weren't showing up some ad because it was free free tickets So then we actually offered to buy them back from them and they never even paid for them Just so we could get them to people that would come so And then now every day every game I have someone that was a part of that and they give me I can say we're a fan for life because of that Oh my gosh What will you do when you what do you stand for as a company?

Do you stand for making money who stand for creating fans if you create fans? You will drive more money than you ever imagined about but that's not what it's about. So every decision we make no matter what It's about the fans. That's why every game is free on YouTube. No matter what it's why there's no ticket fees. No convenient fees No service fees. That's why there's no shipping fees It's why every decision like everything is guided by that and it's helped drive us more than to a different level than we ever imagined Less than one you guys got to stop having customers and develop fans number two.

You got to stand for something That's a six million dollar check, right? That's easy to say on a podcast That's totally different to actually do in real life. You guys how do now? I'm up. Let's let's step out. I don't have a baseball That's more money than the team brought in the first seven years to give you an idea when we were just a coastal playing college Summer team that's more money than we brought in each year first seven years now I've these difference we're playing in front of millions of fans, but that gives you a context of what that looked like for us Massive my gosh.

Okay, so Help us all I don't have a baseball team. Let's say I'm listening. I'm a realtor. I sell life insurance I got a dry cleaners, you know, I have a supplement company. How do I? Create the experience meaning how do you think do you sort of like literally walk in the stadium in the shoes of the fan? And then create from there How should the person listening to this begin to develop an experience because a lot of them will go well baseball game That's an experience closing a mortgage.

That's not an experience and you're wrong Yes, it is an experience because that's where the referrals will come from etc. So how does how does this entrepreneur think about? Creating that experience from where our well two things. I truly believe the starting point of all innovation Starts from putting yourself in the customer's shoes and asking what are the friction points in the experience? So let's let's look at some of the most innovative companies last 20 30 years Yeah, you think of uber? All right, we're the friction points in the cab experience you think about Netflix where their friction points in the blockbuster experience You know, you think about all of these and so for us we are whatever company you're in a realtor What are the things that people hate about the experience as buying a house selling a house?

What are the process a dry cleaner? What people don't like about it? And when you start there, it's crazy Because I'm a very positive guy. I realized baseball to many was too low to too long too slow and too boring Every single part of the game and that's why we develop banana ball. So what's crazy right now? It is I started writing out ideas in 2018 I've learned this, you know Hell Elrod helped me a lot with this miracle morning and it's just writing every day and I started writing 10 ideas a day And I looked at baseball.

I said, what are the boring parts of baseball? I said mound visits no one in the world gets excited for a mound. Oh, okay. Hope they have a lot of mound visits today I'm hoping for at least three or four mound visits and I'm gonna get my money's worth right? No one wants that or like I remember watching a major league game back in the day the Dodgers Yeah, seal Puig if you remember y'all seal please and I was I was watching and he'd step out of the box and work on His batting gloves and I started timing it and was taking 25 to 30 seconds in between every pitch It was a three-minute a bad and wasn't in the box Boring and then I was like, huh?

What else I was like walks This is an athletic sport and there's a play called a walk and you just slowly jog where nothing really happens All right, and I was like what else the games are over three hours this is when I started writing this It's like we just need a two-hour time game. I actually was filming our fans So people don't realize Will you tell the videotape and pictures of our crowd every 30 minutes from when they got in for an entire season? Because you can ask surveys of people, you know, you can ask surveys and this is why it's one of the reasons Steve Jobs Is so against surveys they'll say one thing at watch what they do.

There's a difference We watched at nine o'clock good influx of people started leaving two hours in 930 good luck It was a lot more no matter what we could have fireworks. We could have a show It was just around that to our point So I said we're gonna make a two-hour game and everyone said Jesse you can't the average games three hours I go we're gonna make a two-hour game because our fans are showing it and you want them to want more not less There's no one that goes to a movie and said, how was the movie?

I was a great movie. I left in the middle How do you always create something that they'll want more you gotta build your whole experience from when they first walk in to when they leave So the friction points too long too slow too boring non-stop entertainment Get nickel-and-dimes. All right, no ticket fees. No convenient fees. No service fees People don't realize this all our tickets right now are 40 50 and $60 on the secondary market. They're going for 300 to $1,000 I'm not even kidding. I'm not even kidding I'm not even kidding.

I'm not even kidding $1,000 So much more but you don't because you want to keep having it to create fans not to create more revenue Long-term fans over short-term profit. It's a big difference there. And that's how we guide everything. Oh my gosh I don't get excited that much. Well, you know when I'm hearing business conversations, this is as good as it gets I'm just gonna tell you go back one more thing. You said early on you had to get attention Yeah, she got it because the experience was so good it exploded Would you say that to like a local realtor or someone who's got a supplement company?

You also need to somehow work on Getting attention like people knowing you exist. I understand. Everybody has a marketing plan. Okay, who has who has an attention plan? There's a big difference Attention beats marketing 1,000 percent of the time when you look at you know, very fortunate I think between our teams were over 40 million now social media followers every week We try to create something on a baseball field that people have never seen before and then we capture it and we share it We're not out there saying come to our baseball games We're saying we're gonna create a remarkable moment and capture that and that might create attention You know like for instance like we had a guy show up to our tryouts many years ago And he was an average ballplayer and at the end of the tryout.

He said hey, I brought my stilts Do you want me to wear him? I go not really and he goes really I go unless you can hit him them He goes I can hit him them. No, I didn't know this. He had never hidden stilts in his life, but this kid He puts on his stilts which he had they were like old filter as a kid He had like dog collars tying around is the most unsafe stilts you could ever have on he goes into the batter's box and I watched the first pitch he hits a line drive and Everyone stopped what they were doing and they watch and I remember right after we're having a meeting with the coaches And the coaches were like, all right, we got our rosters and I go, where's the kid on stilts?

They go he's not he's not good enough. I go he hits on stilts and they go he can't make the team Just see I go you guys find a way to figure out this. I'll be back I come back and they say all right, we can make an entertainment roster spot I go we better and so now you think about this he's getting Millions upon millions of views hundreds of thousands of followers because he's doing something people haven't seen before What is the normal experience do the exact opposite?

Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh, so Okay, I'm processing what you just said I'm actually thinking of one of my businesses where these points are of inflection are that are just so Their constraints to actually scale in it. You're just making me really think for a second By the way, he has two books one's called fans first. The other is called find your yellow tux I think that's all I need to say based on listening to him so far I think you guys are gonna want to get the books.

How about this? I'm watching you I was talking about this was John Gordon who you know as well today There's a little invisible thing that I think great entrepreneurs do in their businesses And I know you'll take none of the credit, but I want you to take a little credit on this or explain it. Okay? You bring monster energy to the table. No pun intended like there's an energy right you bring an appropriate energy Relative to the type of business you're in and I think a lot of entrepreneurs go.

Okay. I got my scaling plan I got my get attention plan. I got my marketing plan We're working on the experience and then they don't pay attention to their own Personal energy they bring to meetings to strategy to the client to everything you have that Are you conscious of it? And how important is it? I used to not have it. I know people think no way There was a big aha that happened for me. And I think a lot of people we talked about with our team all the time now Everyone says Jesse, you know, you have so much energy.

They go. Why I go because I do what gives me energy And they what do you mean I go I do every day what gives me energy and that brings more energy out of me and They go. What are you talking about? I go when I was running that gas. Don't you team? There was three of us running an entire team Today, I would go out and I'd sell sponsorship, which I don't do anymore. I don't even buy that's a whole nother mindset I don't believe people wake up and say I want to be advertised to I want to be marketed to today So that's a whole nother mindset of friction that we're working on It's why we eliminated all the ads from our stadium in Savannah, which is absolutely crazy So but I yes.

Oh, yeah, which is I mean we do things unconventional because every decision comes from is it fans first? And I don't think any fan comes to a stadium says I want to see a lot of billboards at their stadium Or I want to get announcements telling me to go here or do this or do that. They want to be entertained So we'll throw away hundreds of millions of dollars now to do what's best for our fans But my point was back then I was doing that it I was selling sponsor.

I was like man selling another sponsorship like Why am I doing this? I'm now in the concession stand. I'm working on food. I'm operations I'm putting up signs and doing all this every day. I came home and I was exhausted And then I realized I looked back. I said, what are my best days been? Oh, all right. Here's my best days I'm coming up with ideas come with the new promotions. I'm creating new things. I'm sharing I'm either you know out speaking to a local Rotary telling them these crazy things that we're doing or I'm growing I'm learning from like someone like you and believe me.

I listen to more podcasts right behind me. I have thousands of books Every day I learned What my energy list was It's creating sharing and growing and if I do things on my energy list, I'll show up the best I ever been every day I'll show up and at the end of the day when I go with my kids I am coming to be the best dad because I did what gave me energy all day and as a Entrepreneur that can be really hard because you're doing a lot of different things But once you become so good at what you do with your energy, you can start hiring people that that gives them energy There are some people that love finances Yeah One financial meeting a year and it's less than two hours for the business that we are And you can see what we're valued at and all that stuff.

That is crazy, but it doesn't give me energy It's like what walt disney said money doesn't excite me ideas excite me. That's what fires me up So I think how you show up is also about what you do What you do on a daily basis are you doing the things that give you energy if you're not Do an energy audit find out how do you get someone else doing those things and do what fires you up every day? And you'll be the best version yourself for everyone else that you interact Are you sick of dealing with a slow computer?

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What did you take? Like there's this is the big lesson This is the big thing. I got from walt disney. Well, there's two there's there's I mean i've read so many But there's two that one can be more on vision and the other one is more on the business side And so so when you look vision and you know, he said it's kind of fun to do the impossible He always imagined what the perfect experience was and worked backwards from that And so what most people do they think like, all right.

Hey, this is a good. Uh, hey, that's good industry, man This is good opportunity. This is something that can win right now Well, what is the ultimate best perfect version and work backwards? You know when he said he's the first one to come up with sound on animation first one to add color He had the multi-plane camera. He said you know what what if I create a full-length animation film in snow white? No one ever done that he said but we can do it in a different level and he said oh What are normal amusement parks, you know, there's the carnies.

They're dirty. They all have the same rides There's no there's no type of theme behind all of it. And he said well, what's the perfect one? And then he said, you know, huh? All right. What about even when i'm eating a hot dog, you know? All right What's when I finish this where should the the uh trash can be based on the rabbit? He's like this is the perfect experience when I go on a ride. How long should it be? What's the length he just always imagined what the perfect experience and worked backwards from there and it was never ever about money He was always obsessed with plussing the experience that's our 11th fans first principle We will always plus the experience we will never settle with that's good You know fine is the f-bomb in our organization If you say that's fine, you're not gonna be with us like that's not what we do And so that was it's the vision of the guest experience what he called the guest obviously we look at fans um, and then the next one from really strategic business control control You want to see how you want to see how a company is going to lose their way?

They lose control You want to see how it's going to happen? Watch a company go ipo. Yeah over the next three five years watch when they bring in private investors You know watch private equity watch what happens So here's here's what happened to walt. He learned this like that's why i'm so grateful when things go wrong I am so grateful. I get fired up because walt he had some of the worst things that could happen He literally created this unbelievable character, you know, the the rabbit oswald He created this character that was It was stolen from him by mince.

He lost it and then he lost his rights to mgm He lost those and he's like, oh, all right, and then he built disneyland his crown jewel And then he lost everything around it all the land. He called it the neon jungle. So what did he do? I'm gonna buy 27 443 acres in florida. I'm gonna create my own government district the reedy crit district So I have complete control and no one can tell me what I can't do because I know what's best for my guests And i'm going to go all in on creating it I'm, not going to everyone else coming in to try to take away and make it about money.

So So give an example, what do we do? We run our ticketing system. We do all of our ticketing. We go to yankee stadium fenway park. We sell the tickets We built our own secondary ticket marketplace at our face value now as well with all tickets at face value No ticket fees. No convenient fees. We do our own broadcast. We run our own merchandise We do everything in house that we can control because we want to control the guest experience the fan experience From when they first interact till the end and that's how you create fans as soon as you lose a little bit control As soon as you have someone from the outside that wants to make a little bit more money You lose experience and you start losing fans And so that I learned from waltz and i'm obsessed with it and it's control not just for control sake It's because that's how you create the best experience for fans when you can take everything from the first impression to the last impressions you uh I just keep going in my head like stuff.

I want to ask you so I want you to go back You're a little throwback, maybe it's the disney influence I don't know you and I both know and I I talked about this with hershevik from shark tank a few weeks ago He was on the show and i'm like, I like what the show's done But I said I think one of the huge problems that shark tank's created is entrepreneurs now start businesses to sell them And as quickly as they can they want to get investors and capital in there and take chips off the table And that just causes you to do all kinds of stupid decisions But what you just said that I had not thought about is the lack of control over the business and so You know this instagram lamborghini exit your business take on investors dilute the shares blah blah blah And the other thing too, I was telling my sons and my nephews this this weekend Do you know how many entrepreneurs you guys you've heard they exited for 400 million?

Everyone thinks they got 400 million. I'm like, you don't know their debt. You don't know how much they diluted You don't know how much private equity came in We had a guy come in that sold his company for 900 million dollars and he walked with 30 Is actually what he got at one of our events So now talk to these people who maybe they are moving forward a little bit and they're tempted To bring in some capital not because they have to have it to scale But because they want to take some chips off the table or that's just like the thing to do I'm not i'm not going to take away I mean everyone has their own goals their own interests and if you're trying to make a lot of money you're trying to do You know, you have your own goals.

Uh, i'm not focused on next quarter I'm focusing the next quarter century and beyond so it's just a different mindset, you know, I I think If you look at history, you can just look what happened. I mean in all these companies I mean the story of whole foods and john mackie. It's just you know, it's amazing So much heart into building whole foods and then all of a sudden you get private equity involved You got it things change and in many ways he said he was forced to sell the amazon It's not the same it's not the same company that's that's that's to me that's a that's a tragedy Um, because I think founders often often start things with the right intention There's a there's a need You know, I believe the world is hungry for more fun and more joy and to be brought together and that's why we bring these people together all over the world and all over the country with banana ball and so um Yeah, I I think again.

Why are you starting something? You know you go to the the root of everything, you know, I was a uh I was an only child my parents got divorced and I was just always trying to look for you know, uh, joy in in people and being around people and just fun and And I always wanted to feel that and I always had a little chip on my shoulder, you know I always wanted to uh, you know still a guy that wants to make his dad proud but you know, I I feel something You know when you at the end of the day It's your great day because you sold something or is it because of how you made people feel?

Or the impact of your product and so again, I think it's intention on everything Um, but yeah, I I just if you look at the history of all Just go back through the whole history There's very few companies costco is one but think about costco what they did He said i'm gonna keep that dollar 50 hot dog value meal No matter what we've heard this story they stay true to who they are And there's only a very small handful of those companies that stay true to who they are and so, uh, yeah in the scheme of things, that's awesome my wife and I we own 100 of this team, uh, you know, we are we're not we get You know and we've been valued at well over a billion dollars now and it's like I I don't care I want to create a billion fans.

I could care less about the dollar valuation I want to make sure all our people are taken care of and if you look at our players our cast and staff and everyone It's at a high level take care of them But make sure we do what drives us what fires us up and that's making people feel something You wait three four years on a list to come to our game We want you to have the best night of your life And we want to spread to your friends to your neighbors to your family that joy That fires us up if you do that everything else takes care of itself.

Are you a psycho? like are you uh, like I mean like competitively to like I see the the kind guy who's all about other people but you and I both know we we know what it takes to win and typically one of those little things in there for the great ones is There's a level of dog in them that you can't measure by looking at them They got this heart of a champion thing whether they're competitive with other people or they're competitive what their capacity or potential is like take us in your Personality a little bit extremely competitive.

Um extremely competitive but not against anyone else I don't even think about our competitors. I'm extremely competitive Uh against ourselves on how do we get better every single day? So here's an example. Um We're playing at neyland stadium university of tennessee 101 000 and we put on a great show It was a great game and a show. I mean there was trick plays I mean 30 trick plays it went down to the wire home runs walk-offs all big dance elements It was it was a great show and i'm on top of the world I'm having time I was in the upper deck for two innings because we always want to make sure we'd win the upper deck So our cast and our character our players were all around but I started hearing rumblings during the game like the sound wasn't working in the upper deck and We were like and they're like, yeah, it's an old same.

She doesn't work. I wasn't I get home and so, you know, we finished the show. We have we we stayed till the last fan signed autographs We did have a whole show. I mean it goes late. We have our fans first talk 1 00 a.m I get home in the hotel 132 And I start seeing the comments and the messages and the emails hundreds Of people disappointed because they couldn't hear I uh I was devastated. I didn't sleep that night the next day I sent a personal video to every single fan that messaged me every comment.

I gave them a refund and a credit Um, I was devastated And I went to our team and we said what are we going to do? How can this not happen? We lost control and we didn't control the sound at the stadium and so when you look at that I look at that as a um, The great moment in the scheme of things because we're not we're not gonna let that happen again And you have to go through those moments you got to get through the messy to get to the great people don't realize Our first major league stadium in 2024.

We played at houston Our ticket system completely shut down There's a lot of reasons but let's just say it's shut down And it was brutal You better believe than the next next game We had fort knox behind it and we were ready to go at fenway park. It didn't go down our first game on espn Prime time television the transmission went out. We literally lost transmission our first time on prime time television went out Every single time we do something big for the first time we will have challenges.

We'll have adversity But what gets you up the next day what fires you up to get to the next at bat? And so when we have those challenges when we do things that haven't been done before I mean we we now sell out cruise ships We don't know how to do a cruise ship entertain for five straight days and there's things that go wrong But if you have the mindset we're going to compete ourselves We got to do and then learn it's the people that are afraid to actually go out and do something There's the one those people that don't accomplish things.

And so that competitiveness drives me every day What are we going to do next that's never been done before? And how are we going to get through that adversity and challenge to get to that next at bat? Because you get to the next at bat watch out because here we come. I love you, bro. Why has a traditional sports not taken elements of what you're doing and juiced their own experience like I mean, I know mlb's they've shortened the at bats and all that but like I'm, just curious as to your thoughts about it's just outside the picture but like usually Imitation is the highest form of flattery like you're packing places out And like for example, why are like these usfl's or these secondary football like why what are they thinking like there's a model Why do you think traditional mlb or nfl is not doing more of it?

And especially these other startup sports that are trying to be In the lane of their other sport, but not be like them. Why aren't they copying you or adding elements of it? hard It's really hard, you know the easy way to grow a business you increase prices You start selling more sponsorship. You get bigger tv rights You increase your cost. You keep the prices on parking and concessions You know what? The hard way is to keep prices the same like we do every year keeping prices the same and try to drive a business It's hard It's hard at a seven o'clock show To open the plaza with a rope drop at two o'clock and have all your players Greeting the fans as they walk in from two to three o'clock It's hard to put an hour and a half show From three to four thirty with all of our cast all of our performances our djs our live bands It's hard to have the entire team march out and meet every fan at four thirty before you open the plaza It's hard to have a two and a half hour pre-game show with over a hundred different skits and promotions before the game starts It's hard than to have a two-hour show where you're doing 10 to 15 things You've never done in front of a live crowd every single night It's hard than to have a post-game plaza party for over an hour with all new entertainment as fans are leaving And then it's hard to stay till the last fan leaves and sign autographs.

It's extremely hard. That's why it's bro Masterclass, by the way Some of you are 90 we're through with this interview and you still don't even know what we're talking about And so what I mean by as a league go just check out the banana baseball championship league Get on the ticket list You will have guys you can already tell by the way for no other reason than to support a great american Entrepreneur and his family and his team but for your own family to have the experience of your life It's just you've all seen some clip on instagram, right of the guys dancing on the mound or doing a backflip When they throw a guy out at first, that's these guys and that's like a millimeter of one percent of what they do You said earlier fine.

It's not. Okay. I got a couple more questions for you And i've loved this bro, by the way anything I can ever do for you. I mean it I I would love to support you not that you need it, but i'm here to support you Um your treasure But you know, okay. I I know people There's some people listening and go, I already kind of checked those boxes. Like we're really good on the customer experience, man. We got it. Fans first. Yeah, we got it. Check the box.

Yeah, bring your energy. Got it. You know, be competitive. Got it. And I don't think they get that there's levels to this game. So you have come up with a recipe and a formula that is working from that two hour before the game to shaking the last hand at 130, right? Having said that, here's my hallucination. I think you're constantly still looking at the process to innovate and make it better. And I think the average entrepreneur is like, we got it. Whereas you are constantly re-evaluating.

Listen, everyone, most people re-evaluate when it's not working. Great entrepreneurs, which is my suspicion of what Jesse's going to say, they're evaluating and tweaking when it is working. Would you agree with me that that's the difference? And do you do that? Yeah, we have an LCP. So every single night, learn, change, plus every night, every single night we meet with our departments. So so, you know, like we have and I share this, you know, I learned this from Bezos. You know, his shareholder letters, I think, are a masterclass on how he thought about Amazon, which is just very fascinating about long term thinking, customer service.

So I said, I'm just going to we're not a public company. We have no obligation to share all our numbers, what we're doing, who we are. But I did it in 2026. I'm going to do it every year. I have a video out and I wrote all the things. And, you know, I share, hey, you know, it's there's a world where all of our fans have to be served merchandise within 10 to 15 minutes. It is almost impossible right now because at one of our games, you know, we could have, say, a major league stadium.

We're having 15 to 20,000 people, people buying merchandise all within a couple hours. It's impossible. But that is our what are we going to do? How are we going to add the stand? What do we do here? How do we add this? What do we get this over here? We just keep looking at every option. Our show, which is our biggest differentiator, you know, sports are always focused on the competitive. We are competitive. You never know who's going to win. Like it's a league. But our show is our differentiator.

We look at every single music block. What comes in? What's the promotion? What's the sound? What's the blocking? What's the timing? How do we come off from the inning? How do we go right into it? How is there no dead air any moment? And so learn change plus. So we'll have at the end of night, we have reports sent from our show. We also merchandise. They'll send one. The broadcast is unbelievable because that's an area which we haven't spent much time on, but we're investing 13 million dollars this year in our own broadcast so we can control it.

They sent a whole detail. Learn change plus on how to get better. And it's that mindset of you're constantly improving, continuous improvement that we know we're never going to have a perfect show. But each day we get a little bit closer. And I think that's that obsessiveness that drives us. And we get fired up. We just hit one more thing. One more thing. We got a little bit better tonight and it's a little bit of better show. And that's our goal. I want a family came to a show two years ago and say, oh, my goodness, it's not even close.

This is a hundred times better. Because if you look at history, we learned a lot of the Globetrotters. I have a lot of respect that they're going a hundred years, but they've also kept the show pretty similar. What it's a we're going to do that. Here comes the confetti. Here comes the slow motion. That scares the crap out of me. And, you know, people don't realize the Globetrotters, the 1940s and 50s, they were the most popular sports team in the world. It wasn't even close. They sold seventy five thousand tickets in Berlin.

They were selling out Madison Square Garden multiple times. Will Chamberlain chose to play for them before going for the Lakers. They even beat the Lakers in a game with George Mikey. And then something happened. They said, you know what? Oh, this is good. Let's just replicate that. Let's just make another Globetrotters team and another Globetrotters team. And we know what a good show is and do the same show over and over and over again. That lesson sits on me every single day, especially when someone says you're like the Globetrotters.

I go, I a hundred years is great. I have so much respect. That's amazing. Not many companies make it a hundred years. I don't want to be the Globetrotters. I want to be doing things in ten, twenty, thirty hundred years. You never imagined in sports. You never imagined from an event. And that's the innovation that drives me and drives our organization. Yeah, you're going to do it. By the way, my book's called The Power of One More. So I love that it's one more, one more, one more.

I love that. By the way, now he's fired up. He's like going side to side. You know, the other thing a great entrepreneur does and I people think, oh, you're helping him promote what he does charitably. It's not. I believe that great entrepreneurs, great people are wired to give back immediately. And it's something I evaluate in my friends that if you've had God's blessings and great grace in your life, you know, what are you doing outside of the business but connected to it that shows that you're giving back?

Because I think that indicates humility, which means you're going to have some longevity. Never mind the fact that just doing something good is important. And so you and your wife and the company have bananas foster, which is the best name for a charity. Just tell us what you and Emily are doing with it, because I'm actually really interested in helping, too. So what do you guys do? So my wife, she's the heart of this company. You know, it's I'm constantly focused on innovating. She's constantly thinking about our people.

And every day she thinks about our people. And she grew up in a very close family. And in 2020, she shared with me, she goes, Jesse, you know, there's 400000 kids in the U.S. who don't have a permanent home. I go, what are you talking about? She goes, foster care, foster care. I go, she goes, Jesse, we got to do something. And we had our two year old son at that point. She said, Jesse, we got to do something. And so she shared with me and said, let's get licensed.

So in the middle of COVID, we got licensed. We had a two and a half year old girl join us and going through some challenges and adversity. And, you know, the goal in foster care is always reunification, get the kids back to their family. And with her case, Canada, that that wasn't an option. And then about a little less than a year later, a girl, a six day old baby who was in the NICU battling everything. We got the call and she joined us. And again, reunification wasn't the perfect scenario there.

And so those two girls joined in our family and amazing girls. And they're watching their journey has been one of the most rewarding things I've ever experienced. But as we did that, and Emily said, Jesse, we experienced it for two or three years, foster care, the challenges, the DSS, the challenges with everything there, they're low staffed and just not many families are. I mean, we have families in our community that have bringing in 10 kids at once because no one else wants to do it. She said, Jesse, we got to do something.

And I was like, well, what is our big goal in what we do with Banana Ball? Let's bring people together. Well, what's more powerful than bringing a family together? And so we thought about this. And we remember we were walking, having a long walk. And I share with her, I go, what if it's called Bananas Foster? And she goes, well, that's a good name. I go, what are we going to do? And I said, well, what again, start with whatever's normal, do the exact opposite. How do most nonprofits start?

They talk about all the bad. All right. And then they share that. What about honoring the good? And so go in the opposite way. So we said, what if, how many people out there do actually know these hero foster families that are doing everything they can for years with no accolades, no recognition? And it's extremely hard. How do we honor them? So so we said, well, what if at every game we find a foster family in that community that's really made a huge difference? And we tell their story, we bring them out on the field.

We have all the players go out to them, give them flowers and have a moment. And can you imagine the whole stadium standing to give a standing ovation to this family for what they did and recognizing them? And by doing that every single night, do you think that we'll get some more families that are interested in being a part of that? So three years ago, we started doing it. And it is every single game. We have six teams, multiple around the country, every game in the middle of the game.

We honor a family. Maybe they've had 150 kids through their home. They've helped 10 families reunite. They've adopted 12 kids. They're part of the foster care system, all of this. And I watch people not being told to stand, just stand and give standing ovations. And I told Emily, I said, Emily, this is going to be a long journey, 400,000 kids without a permanent home. But think about this. We only sold two tickets when we started the Savannah Bananas. And now we have a waitlist approaching 5 million for tickets.

What if in 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years, there's a waitlist in this country of families that want to become foster families. Thank God. And that's the vision. Well, you're special. You're special. I don't know. I just got to tell you, it's like, I don't know if I've ever done a better podcast. By the way, how many of you raise your hand and think Jesse and I should buy the Red Sox together? Come on. At some point, what could we do together? Um, bro, thank you for teaching us today.

And it makes me feel good that you exist. And I want to support your business. I want to support your mission. I want to support your cause. Um, and I really admire you. Really admire you, bro. And, uh, I introduced you as a, uh, one of the great American entrepreneurs and, um, I mean it. And you actually made me even feel stronger about that after having a great conversation with you. Here's the only thing I ask of you about every 18 months, 24 months. I like you just come back on.

Love to love to, and I mean this, I look up to you and what you've done and showing up constantly over and over again for so many years. And that's, that's the difference. So I appreciate you. And this was, this was truly one of the most enjoyable conversations I've ever had. So thank you. Yeah, bro. So awesome. Uh, everybody, you need, if you have anybody in your life who is inclined to start a business or is currently involved in one in any way, they need to listen to this last hour.

And I also think you should go get both of his books. And, um, this is the real stuff today. I'm actually, I never get to the end of the show where I'm actually a bit emotional just because I'm really grateful that you exist, bro. I've said this twice now because I want entrepreneurs to do it the right way and to do it ethically and to give back and to bring an energy and an innovation. How about that guys? What does everybody else do and do the exact opposite?

Like just so good, bro. So anything else you want to send them to direct them to where they can get more info on you or the company or anything? No, I mean, we're out there. Like I said, we try to keep every, we keep every game free on YouTube. We keep all our stuff out there. We just believe in sharing and bringing joy to the world. So, um, however, we're very easy to connect with. Let's put it that way. All right. God bless you. Everybody share this episode, max out.

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