Always be the challenger

Note: Transcripts are automatically generated from episode audio, and are not fully corrected for spelling, grammar, and formatting.

JESSE COLE: In a few hours, we get to see thousands of people who 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 the players and cast, that’s our staff. They get excited. “Oh, you work for the team?”

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, it’s 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, it’s the most contagious thing in the world.

JEFF BERMAN: This is Masters of Scale.

[THEME MUSIC]

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 recording live at Angel Stadium, where the Savannah Bananas and the Indianapolis Clowns are playing tonight, and we’re with the greatest showman on Earth. Jesse Cole, welcome to Masters of Scale.

COLE: I’m excited to be with you guys. I’ve been a big fan of the show from when it first launched. We’ve shared the episodes with so many people on our team. It’s been great.

Copy LinkHow a childhood fan moment shaped Jesse Cole

BERMAN: Well, we’re huge fans of what you do. We were just talking before we turned the mics and cameras on about how you all have been capturing content, kind of Hoop Dreams-style, for a long time now. We’re producing a movie of the Bananas and Fans First, and we might open on you leading the crowd and singing Coldplay’s “Yellow.” Can you set the stage for us so we can open the show there?

COLE: As someone who grew up south of Boston, a huge Red Sox fan, my dad and I went to so many games back when tickets were $5. We’d sit out in the bleachers. I was a shy, introverted kid growing up, and my dad had the opportunity to win this challenge for me to become an honorary bat boy. When I was 5 years old, I saw my first-ever Red Sox game, but I was in the dugout before the game. I was sitting by myself, and one player came over and sat down next to me, and it was Hall of Famer Lee Smith. He spent 20 minutes with me, this shy, introverted 5-year-old kid. He didn’t have to. And that moment changed everything for me because I saw him as this larger-than-life pitcher. I saw the Red Sox as this larger-than-life team. And I vowed to one day play at Fenway Park.

So I put everything I had into my baseball career. I was fortunate to have professional scouts watching me. I had a Division I scholarship, and then I tore everything in my shoulder, and that ended my career. Just like that, I was done. So that dream of playing at Fenway was over, at least I thought, until we started thinking about the front office and how to make baseball fun. 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. Then we started the Bananas, failed miserably, lost everything, and then after many years made it successful, took the show on the road, and were able to sell out Fenway Park with 37,000 fans and everyone singing “Yellow” and lighting up the sky. It was a moment I’ll never forget.

What happened was, I got some coaching jobs, but then I also got this opportunity to be an intern for a college summer baseball team. Why would you want that? And I was like, “Well, it’s right down the road. Let’s just try 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. I started to get ideas of, “Wow, we could change this about the game. This is boring. What if we add this? What about music here?” So immediately, as an intern, I started to get the idea of what it was like to work in the front office. Then I got offered a job as a general manager at 23 years old.

Copy LinkUsing wild experiments to discover what fans actually love

BERMAN: Outside of the legendary baseball front office man, who I know is a hero of yours, Bill Veeck, who did lots of the best, most wonderful things back in the ’50s, Minor League and College Summer League are where we’ve seen at least some experimentation in baseball. What did you try? What worked? What didn’t work? Share that part of the journey.

COLE: I was 23 years old. I was two months into my job as a general manager. I wasn’t able to pay myself. There was no money. There was $268 in the bank account when we started. The team had lost over $100,000 the previous year.

BERMAN: Wow.

COLE: So I had saved money. In college, I had a scholarship, so I was living off that. Two months in, I went to the Veeck Conference.

BERMAN: What is the Veeck Conference?

COLE: The Veeck Conference is Mike Veeck bringing together Minor League operators to talk about ideas. It’s all about ideas. So my mind started seeing that we had to think a different way. I started reading about P.T. Barnum and Walt Disney, and I said, “Let’s do things that are just a little bit different. You have beauty pageants, but what if we had a grandma beauty pageant?” So we actually got grandmas from a senior citizens home and had a grandma beauty pageant, which did not go exactly as we planned, but it was —

BERMAN: What happened?

COLE: Gertrude stole the show. She was 87 years old. First of all, they showed up late because … I should have expected that. The first question we did was, “Gertrude, if you could be on the cover of one magazine, what would it be and why?” And she goes, “Playboy, of course.” 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 we did that.

I mean, we had Flatulence Fun Nights with whoopee cushion giveaways. We had Salute to Underwear Nights. We had garbage can nachos, which we still do in Savannah, with five orders of nachos, three hamburgers, and three hot dogs. It’s heart-stoppingly delicious. Still can’t get a cardiologist to sponsor it. But with all these things, we started thinking about how to do things differently. And that’s where the experimentation lab started in Gastonia.

Copy LinkBuilding a culture where ideas matter most

BERMAN: It’s one thing to say, “I’m going to take the blinders off.”

COLE: Yeah.

BERMAN: It’s another thing to actually generate the ideas for the grandma beauty contest or whatever else it may be.

COLE: We had nothing to lose. People put so much weight on failure. They put so much weight on an idea. When we first started, you’d do something, and who cares if it didn’t go right? So we just kept doing all these different ideas. Now we’ve developed kind of a system for how we generate our best ideas. We follow a Saturday Night Live model. We generate ideas on a Tuesday in all-day idea sessions, then we have a table read, and we start doing rehearsals and go through all that to have a brand-new show every week.

And I think when you take the weight out of it and just say, “We’re going to try things,” you find a lot more gold, and you find the gold because you’re doing more. You learn more by doing more. Henry Ford says, “You learn by doing.” So we’re just constantly doing things. Back in the day, in those first 10 years in Gastonia, there was no one covering us. There was no social media. We were just testing things, and you’d watch how the fans react, and then you’d try it again.

BERMAN: There are so many people right now working at companies. It could be massive Fortune 50 companies or relatively early-stage startups that had a plan. And whether it’s because of AI or other exogenous forces, external forces are coming in and forcing them to think differently. When you talk to these folks, when they come to you, what are you saying to them about how to inject that “let’s go” attitude into a process so that you take away that fear of failure and actually give yourself freedom to experiment?

COLE: 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, or surprises. 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. So we saw that. We literally videotaped it and were taking pictures and watching every 30 minutes. No one told us, “Hey, we want a faster show,” but they acted on it.

So we had a plan. Everyone is so focused, often, on their current customers. We love our fans more than anything. I will put us up against any company on how much we love our fans. But we’re also thinking about our future fans. What are our fans going to want in three to five years? You can see the little things they react to. What time do they show up? When do they leave? How do they react to the things we do, to 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. I think the reality is, it’s not about what our plans are. You need to put more things out there, share with the world, and find out what people 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 what people think. We’re going to fail every day. We do silly, crazy promotions. Every day, baseball traditionalists criticize us. We’re not for that. Who are you for? If you’re trying to grow a business, if you’re trying to create customers, put more out there and see if they like it. Don’t do surveys. Just actually go do it. That’s what Walt Disney believed in, and that’s what we try to do as well.

Copy LinkWhy creating your own game can beat following industry rules

BERMAN: You could easily be the most successful front-office person in summer college baseball or Minor League Baseball, or maybe in Major League Baseball. Well, you could have been. That’s a path that was available to you. Why isn’t that the path you ended up taking?

COLE: The greatest creators create things that they love. Often, someone who’s a creator is in a system, just a cog, and they’re creating someone else’s dreams, someone else’s vision, some board member’s goal. I realized that, as someone who played the game and loved playing and watching, it was never truly exciting for me. And I realized that if I stayed in this box they put you in — “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 going to get fined” —

If you can get out of that box and create things that get you excited, and you believe that if you get excited about it and you love it, other fans and other customers will get excited about it, that’s the world I wanted to live in. I believed that something was out there that not just your traditional baseball fans would love, but that a family would love, that young people would love, that people who just want to go have fun and not take themselves too seriously would love. There’s the conventional world of sports, and we play a little bit in that world, but we can’t control whether your team wins or loses.

BERMAN: Right.

COLE: But what we can control is the show. If we build the rules, if we make the rules of the game, if 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.

BERMAN: So a lot of entrepreneurs would have built their deck. They would’ve gone around and pitched this idea for a new concept and raised a bunch of money, or tried to, and gone from there. That’s not what you did.

COLE: Start doing.

BERMAN: Say more.

COLE: 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 99 minutes, and the players said it was the most fun they’d ever had playing. And when I watched it, you couldn’t take your eyes off it.

BERMAN: How do you make that happen?

COLE: I called my two college coaches and said, “I got a crazy idea. Can we do this behind closed doors?” They said, “Sure, Jesse, we’ll give it a shot.” We got fired up and said, “All right, let’s test it.” And it didn’t work right away.

BERMAN: What happened?

COLE: It never works right away. It always starts as chaos when you first do it. But then we said, “All right, is there something here? Is there some magic? Do you not want to take your eyes off it?” I didn’t want to blink because I was like, “What’s going to happen?” And so Wayne said, “How do you make it so people can’t take their eyes off it? They can’t leave their seat, or they may miss something they’ve never seen before in baseball.”

Copy LinkWhy Jesse Cole didn’t raise money for Savannah Bananas

BERMAN: You didn’t raise outside capital.

COLE: No.

BERMAN: You’re not an independently wealthy guy spending down a trust fund or something. You saved a few bucks with a college scholarship. How are you even sustaining this while you’re trying to get enough traction or product-market fit?

COLE: In most businesses, it’s, “Hey, we’ve got to start this. We need to raise capital. Or we’ve got to have advertisers, sponsors, we’ve got to get all of this.” What we were fortunate with in summer college baseball was that we started a model where, if we could sell the tickets and get people excited enough to come, we could be successful just by selling tickets. Everyone’s like, “Oh, I don’t know if we can do that golf event because we lost our sponsor.” Well, then the event’s not good enough. If people don’t want to pay to come see it, we’ve got to make a product that people want to pay to come see. In summer college baseball, we were selling out every night — 4,000 seats a night.

Now, this was after selling only two tickets in our first three months, running out of money, my wife and I having to sell our house, empty our savings account, and sleep on an air mattress with nothing. But we got them to see the show, and they saw dancing players. They saw fun moments. They saw Banana Babies, Banana Band, all that. People were like, “This is something we’ve never seen before.” So that started it. Small, $3 million business — we’re making money, and it’s fine.

BERMAN: Was there a moment where you and your wife looked at each other and said, “This isn’t going to work”? Was there a moment where you lost faith, or you just weren’t sure you would get there?

COLE: We wouldn’t let ourselves go there. We couldn’t. We were a million dollars-plus in debt. We’d just gotten married. We had to go on. There was no other option.

BERMAN: So what’s the inflection point then? You’ve sold the house, you’re sleeping on the air mattress — there had to be some moments when you and your wife looked at each other and just took a deep breath.

COLE: We didn’t sleep at all.

BERMAN: Yeah.

COLE: We didn’t sleep at all. We’d walk the streets just thinking. And we kept saying, “Get to that first show. Get to that first show.” It’s like my dad always said, “Get to your next at-bat, and forget about what happened in the last at-bat. Get to your next at-bat.” And then he’d say, “Swing hard in case you hit it.” So we said, “We’re going to get to that opening night, and we’re going to swing hard.” The Banana Nanas went out and danced in the pouring rain because there was a rain delay. We had the players doing dances, and people were like, “What am I watching?” But it created attention. They were saying they saw something they’d never seen before. From that point, we started selling out every game. So the business became a 4,000-seat stadium sold out every night.

So we already had a little bit of a cushion to say, “Hey, we can experiment. Let’s go take this on the road.” We had a Penske truck that we packed all our stuff in. We didn’t know how to set up merchandise. We didn’t know the logistics. We didn’t know how to do sound systems at other stadiums. We didn’t know anything. But we said, “Can we get enough people excited to come see it?” And we sold it out. We failed measurably. The first night, the sound went out. The anthem singer didn’t show up. But enough good happened. We got to the next day, put on a great show, and I knew right there. We had a surprise fireworks show. The fans stayed an hour-plus after the game. They didn’t want to leave, whereas normally after games, you want to leave. And I said, “This is it.” So the next year, you go to seven cities, then 33, then Major League stadiums, then football stadiums. You just keep expanding after you start doing it.

BERMAN: Still ahead, more with Jesse Cole on how he uses social media to supercharge growth.
Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find this conversation and more on our YouTube channel, and be sure to check out the link in the show notes to subscribe to our newsletter.

[AD BREAK]

Copy LinkInside Savannah Bananas’ social media success

It strikes me that 20 years ago, this would’ve been a heck of a lot harder to do, in part because you just didn’t have the range of social media.

COLE: Correct.

BERMAN: And it’s often so hard to take that real-life experience, so special, and translate it on social.

COLE: Yeah, on digital.

BERMAN: What was that?

COLE: We spend $0 on marketing. We invest in the experience. Most people, I think, when they think about marketing, believe you have to promote something to get people to want to buy something or sign up for a service. What we think about is, how do you make your experience so remarkable that you capture it and then share it? P.T. Barnum, one of the greatest promoters of all time, said, “Something terrible happens without promotion: nothing.” So I think without social media, it’d be a great challenge. But now, with social media, we can amplify it. You still have to create something truly remarkable, and that’s what we try to do every night.

BERMAN: You’ve referenced P.T. Barnum, you’ve referenced Walt Disney. There were elements of Vince McMahon and WWE here. There were elements of Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead. When you’re looking at these folks who’ve innovated and created these extraordinary fan-friendly experiences, how are you determining what’s going to work for you, what to draw from them? When you’re researching, reading about, and talking about these folks, what are you looking to latch on to?

COLE: You start with the best in their industry. The Grateful Dead were the most fan-friendly band of their time. They let the fans record every single night. They created a newsletter for them. They were speaking directly with them. They brought in their own sound because they wanted to be better. They were obsessed with communicating directly with the fans. They started selling their own tickets to fans through the fan clubs, all of that. So we said, “All right, how do we do that?” We have 40,000 K Club members who get access to all of our tickets, furnishings, special meet-and-greets. That could be well over 100,000, but we’re still learning from it every year and slowly growing it.

BERMAN: I spent a couple of years at the NFL and ran a digital media group.

COLE: Yes.

BERMAN: There is perhaps no organization more zealous about controlling its rights than the National Football League, and they have built a pretty darn good business doing it. You guys, with the fans-first approach, will do an ESPN deal, you’ll do a CW deal, you’ll keep the rights, bring games on YouTube for free globally. When you’re balancing driving revenue and creating that fan experience, because you’re still a business, right?

COLE: We’re a healthy business.

BERMAN: So how are you striking that balance? Is it always fans first? Are there moments where you go, “Boy, if ESPN offers 10 times the dollars they’re going to give us, I’m not going to livestream every game”? Is that even a discussion?

COLE: No. 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. As soon as you drift away from that, you’re in trouble. You’ll be glorious in the short term, and then every day you’ll lose a few fans — two, three, four, five, then 10, then hundreds and thousands. That’s my fear.

Copy LinkAlways be the challenger

BERMAN: There’s a different mindset when you’re a challenger brand than when you’re at the top now.

COLE: Yeah. You should always be a challenger.

BERMAN: That’s exactly where I’m going. How do you maintain that challenger-brand mindset as you’re getting up there?

COLE: I’m scared every day. I’m scared every day that what we’ve worked so hard for since we first started, sleeping on the airbed, that we can lose fans. I’m scared that this was built from nothing, and now it’s, I guess you’d call it, productive paranoia. I have that every day: that our show has to get a little bit better, our experience has to get a little bit better, our entertainment has to get a little bit better, our merch experience has to get a little better, our ticket experience has to get a little bit better. Some people say, “Oh, that sounds unhealthy.” To me, it fires me up. It excites me. I love looking back at where we were last year and looking 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 going to 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 maintain that level.

BERMAN: I don’t think most people realize this because the Bananas are becoming a phenomenon.

COLE: Yeah, 100%.

BERMAN: You can’t go on social without seeing you guys. It’s phenomenal. But you’re now a 16-team league. You’ve got a season. You’ve got an end of season.

COLE: 100%.

BERMAN: Have you been worried about diluting the brand by expanding into these other teams?

COLE: 100%. That’s a huge fear. So you have to make every single show so distinct and so unique and so different. We’ve invested millions in each show. The Party Animals, which people don’t realize, have more followers than every Major League Baseball team on TikTok.

BERMAN: Really?

COLE: They’re selling out Major League stadiums without the Bananas. One hundred seventy thousand people joined the list to go see them in Detroit. Based on those numbers, we could sell out eight straight nights without the Bananas. The Clowns, our newest team, which obviously pays tribute to the Major League team and what they did, was unbelievable. We’re bringing in Broadway-type singers, a brass band that’s unbelievable. We have acts we haven’t shared yet 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.” And it’s very hard because they’re all just getting started.

BERMAN: Can they build that brand on their own, or how do you think about integrating them with the Bananas?

COLE: They’re creating fans every night. The Loco Beach Coconuts — their merchandise is right up there at No. 2 because that brand is so fun that when they start playing at the end of the game, everyone’s chanting Loco Beach and Coconuts. So they can build off each other, but you have to make it distinct. If people think, “Oh, that’s just another one of the Banana scenes,” we’re in trouble. That’s a huge fear of mine. We’ve got to continue to come up with new ideas.

Copy LinkChoosing long-term loyalty over short-term ticket revenue

BERMAN: The Dodgers have a home game tonight. I checked right before we sat down. The very cheapest seat in the stadium is 80 bucks. You guys have kept a very low, fixed ticket price. How do you-

COLE: 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 who says, “You could be making this.” The average ticket price in the secondary market is over $200. For us, it’s $40, $50, and $60, with no ticket fees. No convenience fees. When you pay your taxes, it’s a different game. If you’re a public company, they would say there’s $100 million right there. You charge what you should charge. That has no interest to us. We even built a secondary market to deter the whole secondary market, and it’s all face value, which just costs us money. We’re literally developing it and putting in all the money, taking all the fees on ourselves, just so our fans can get tickets at the price we believe is best.

BERMAN: The other thing that I imagine a private equity investor trying to get in your business would say is, “OK, fine, Jesse, do it that way. Have it your way. But let’s go use this ticketing platform for everyone else.” Is that part of the plan?

COLE: Well, yeah. If you look at what Amazon did, it was great. Bezos and the group built something that could handle their infrastructure and said, “Wow, a lot of people could use that as well.”

BERMAN: AWS.

COLE: One hundred percent, AWS, which is the most profitable part of their business, billions of dollars. I think there’s a world where our ticketing platform and our secondary marketplace could be used, but right now we’ve got to get it to a point where it is so great for our fans, almost perfect for our fans, before we’d want to put it out to everyone else. And that’s going to be a long way off. Again, our goals aren’t to make a lot of money. Our goals are to create the best experience.

BERMAN: 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?

COLE: Yeah. Honestly, we are investing a lot more in our show, millions of dollars. In our broadcast, we’re investing $13 million this year, and we’re not getting that back. It’s free on YouTube. So that’s part of our ethos: We will invest more. Again, like Bezos, they continue to invest for the long game. We’re learning how to do a broadcast at a high level. We have 16 full-time truck drivers driving our trucks around the country with all of our equipment and merchandise. We didn’t know how to run a trucking logistics company, but we have to now because we’re in 75 stadiums in 45 states, and soon we’ll be international. We have no idea how to do that.

BERMAN: You’re building a fan experience. All of a sudden, you’re building technology, a ticketing platform, and a logistics company with the trucking. When a new challenge like that comes up, how do you think about what to do?

COLE: It depends on what part of the business. I think we learned this. You look at Walt Disney and Roy Disney. Walt was focused on all the creative, and Roy was focused on all the operations, how you pay for it. We have an amazing president who’s been with us since day one, Jared Orton. He is gung-ho on the operations and figuring it out. He always finds a way. His mindset is, “We’ll figure it out. We don’t know, but we’ll figure it out. It’s going to be messy. It’ll cost us a little bit more as we figure it out, and eventually we’ll get it.” I’m focused on how we create the show. What’s our next step? What’s our next event that’s going to be larger than life? What original music are we creating? What’s the next media thing we’re doing? I spend all my time there. He spends all his time focused on how we actually take care of our fans and make this happen. We work very well together.

Copy LinkWhy you need to break the rules

BERMAN: There are a lot of leaders running consumer businesses who would love to have a little bit of your assist. Brian Rolapp was my boss at the NFL. He’s now running the PGA Tour. Brian calls and says, “Jesse, one note: What should I be doing differently?”

COLE: At the PGA Tour?

BERMAN: Yeah.

COLE: I’d break the rules. Let fans have fun. Let golfers have fun. People want to connect with the athletes. They want to connect in a way where it’s OK to celebrate. It’s OK to have fun. Why don’t the golfers come through high-fiving all the fans? Or why don’t they actually have some entrances? Why isn’t there entrance music as a golfer comes out? Why does it always have to be quiet? There are obviously movies like Happy Gilmore that talk about that. And there’s a world now where I think people are looking for entertainment nonstop. We have seen amazing golf shots. We have seen home runs. We have seen touchdowns. It doesn’t take away from the sport. It’s amazing to watch.

But you haven’t seen the athletes have as much fun. Whether you’re a golfer or you’re in football, it’s like when football said, “Hey, we’re going to have touchdown celebrations. We’re all good. Celebrate, have fun.” That’s become a part of our society now. That didn’t hurt the game. It added to the game. So why not embrace that? If you’re in golf, embrace those moments. Let’s just do this one tournament. We’re going to have music pumping. We’re going to have live bands. We’re going to have entrances. We’re going to have certain walk-ups. We’re going to have celebrities singing. It is going to be the most fun golf tournament in the world. Just test it once. Golf purists will hate it, but you might draw a whole new audience and be surprised. They’d come out and have the time of their lives.

BERMAN: Let me go to the other end of the spectrum. Reid Hoffman is the co-founder of LinkedIn. LinkedIn is not known as where the party happens. If you’re giving one product note to LinkedIn right now, what are you asking them to do or change to make it more fun, more content-friendly?

COLE: It’s tough because it’s very easy to just go do what everyone else is doing. You see this everywhere. TikTok takes this from Instagram. Instagram takes this. Meta takes this. It’s very easy. 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, I’d rather get 1 million, 2 million, 5 million, 10 million people to love you as opposed to hundreds of millions who just kind of like you. I kind of look at it like that.

Copy LinkJesse Cole: Do what gives you energy

BERMAN: If someone who’s about to graduate college comes up to you and says, “Jesse, what do I do? The entry-level jobs are disappearing. I’m really not sure what to do.” What’s the piece of advice you’re giving?

COLE: Do what gives you energy. The 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 beverage, I was doing operations, and every day I was spent. Then I realized: What were my best days? What did I do during my best days? 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. So I created my energy list. And I said, “These are the three things, these buckets: creating, sharing, and growing. If I do that every day, everything else takes care of itself.” People always ask me, “What keeps you up at night?” To me, that’s the wrong question.

It’s what gets you up in the morning. So for someone who’s graduating high school or graduating college, what gets you fired up? What gets you excited to do something you could do for hours and time just flies by? Often, people are watching the clock in their jobs. What is it that you do and don’t even realize it? At the ballpark, 12 hours go by, and I’m like, “Oh my goodness, it’s showtime,” because we’re doing things that we love around people that we love doing it with. That’s the difference. So what I’d think about is: What are those things every day that you get truly excited to do? Not necessarily your passion, but what gives you energy? What makes you want to do a little bit more and a little bit more? Because the truly great people are the ones who work on their craft more than anyone else. They do things that no one else will do because they love it, and that’s what drives me.

BERMAN: I have to tell you, anyone who’s watching or listening, your energy is infectious. Your enthusiasm is infectious. But here’s the thing that has struck me, especially being here: the same thing is true for your team. The people who work around you, and I don’t mean just the players on the field. I mean Taylor, who works with me directly. There’s a spirit here that you don’t feel at most places. And I hope you see it. I hope you feel it. It’s also important to offer that feedback. There’s an energy here that you don’t get in most places.

COLE: It’s joy.

BERMAN: Yeah.

COLE: It’s joy, and I think the world needs more of that. When you have people throughout our whole company doing it for the right reasons, because it brings joy, because we get to feel it, that matters. In a few hours, we get to see thousands of people who 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?” 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, it’s 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, it’s the most contagious thing in the world. 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.

BERMAN: Well, I’m confident that everyone watching and listening is taking joy away from this. Thanks for bringing the good vibes.

COLE: Thanks so much.

BERMAN: 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 wonderful as the Savannah Bananas. But the lessons from Jesse’s scaling 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.