Banana Ball

Todd Henry [00:00:02]:

Jesse had what should have been a dream job. I mean, he got to run an organization, he got to lead a team. He got to put on events that were, at least in theory, supposed to be fun. The kind of job people envy when you tell them what you do. The kind of job that sounds like a highlight reel. But here's the thing. It didn't feel like a dream most days. It felt like answering emails, fixing broken things, trying to get people excited about something that if he was being honest, he wasn't really all that excited about himself.

Todd Henry [00:00:31]:

And that was the weird part, because it was supposed to be fun. That's literally what people were paying for. Fun. But behind the scenes, it all felt like managing a slow moving machine that nobody really wanted to be on. Even the customers who were supposed to be having a good time looked like they were politely enduring the experience instead of enjoying it. Then one day he asked himself, why does this feel like a job at the DMV when it's supposed to be Disneyland? And that's when it hit him. What if we stopped trying to be professional and started trying to be unforgettable? What if we turned it into something people couldn't stop talking about? At first, it sounded ridiculous. I mean, too risky, too off brand, too much.

Todd Henry [00:01:18]:

But at the same time, he started scribbling ideas in a notebook. Wild stuff like dancing, staff members, unexpected entrances, rules that don't even exist. A break from everything that made his industry predictable. And slowly, he realized, we can actually do this. Nobody was stopping him. And frankly, the current plan wasn't working. So why not try something completely different? So he leaned in. He bought a yellow tuxedo.

Todd Henry [00:01:48]:

He threw out the traditional playbook. He replaced boring with bizarre, bland with bold, and created a culture that felt more like a party than a business. And you know what? People showed up. At first out of curiosity, then in droves. And before long, the thing that used to bore him to tears became something magical. Not just for him, but for his team, for his fans, and eventually the world. Of course, I'm talking about Jesse Cole, the founder of the Savannah Bananas. And today on the show, we're talking about what happens when you stop playing it safe and choose to make work fun again.

Todd Henry [00:02:26]:

This is Daily Creative. Since 2005, we've served up weekly ideas to help you be brave, focused, and brilliant. My name is Todd Henry. Welcome to the show.

Jesse Cole [00:02:39]:

The secret sauce is that the greatest creators create something that they would love. So when you look at going back to George Lucas, and there was no movies that were Created like the sci fi. And he was like, I want to create this Walt Disney. He bought about, I want to create a place that adults and kids can have fun together. When you look at Howard Schultz, when he went to Italy and saw the community built on a coffee shop, it wasn't just you go to a diner and get a bad coffee. It was like, there's something else. And so they fell in love with this idea of what something could be. And so when it comes to the Savannah Bananas, you know, I was bored watching a baseball game and I wanted to create something where every second there's something exciting, something entertaining, something that you've never seen before on a baseball field.

Todd Henry [00:03:19]:

That's Jesse Cole. And as he just mentioned, he is the creator of a phenomenon called Savannah Bananas. It's a little hard to describe the bananas. It's part sport, part show, part immersive, crowd driven experience. But the one word that does describe it is fun. And Jesse draws a lot of inspiration from other big dreamers like Walt Disney.

Jesse Cole [00:03:39]:

And everyone said he was going to fail. They said, save your money, Mr. Disney, you're going to fail. And he goes, no, we're going to succeed because we're looking differently than everyone else. I want to create a place that I would love, that I'd want my kids to go to. Not that unkept, dirty, not safe, same old as everyone else. Amusement park. And so that's the ethos of a lot of, I think, great creators.

Todd Henry [00:03:58]:

Just like Walt Disney, who was inspired to create Disneyland by a trip to a rusty, worn down amusement park, Jesse grew inspiration from the sport he loved to play, but realized wasn't always so fun to watch.

Jesse Cole [00:04:11]:

So I played baseball my whole life. Was fortunate. Got a full college scholarship, was talking to professional teams, everything that was the path I was going to play professional baseball and, you know, getting Christmas cards from the New York Mets and hearing from the Padres and the Pirates, I was like, this is where I'm going. And then I tore my shoulder. That ended my career. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. So everyone thought, Jesse, you're going to get into coaching. Your dad was a coach.

Jesse Cole [00:04:32]:

You've been around the game your whole life. You love it, you're passionate. And I realized something. I loved playing the game, but I didn't love watching the game. So I went into coaching like I thought that I was going to do. And so I coached in the Cape Cod League. Cape Cod League, some of the best baseball, college, Summer Bay, all those guys get drafted. It's the best college level of summer baseball there is.

Jesse Cole [00:04:51]:

So I'm coaching in the Cape Codley, and I'm in the dugout as a coach with some of the best players in the world, and I'm bored out of my mind. I know, I know. Hey, we're going to hit and run here. We got this closer coming in. Here's the sequence. We got a three hitter. I know where we're positioning. I'm positioning us.

Jesse Cole [00:05:06]:

I know the insides of the game. And I'm still bored out of my mind. And I said, huh? If I'm bored out of mind, how many other people are also bored that they just come to a game and they leave early or they show up late and it's not that exciting for them? And I said, what if. What if every moment, everything is exciting in a baseball game? What if we created a game that it's nonstop entertainment and not just hoping someone gets a hit or hoping there's a great baseball moment? And so it was that back in she's 2007 before I started that, I started seeing, looking at it differently. And that's when I read every book on Walt Disney, every book on P.T. barnum, every book on circus lay, WWE, Grateful Dead. Your books I read. I mean, you could see I've got thousands of books behind me.

Jesse Cole [00:05:51]:

And I started learning more about the entertainment business and not about the baseball business.

Todd Henry [00:06:01]:

What if it's such an overlooked question, right? Instead of remaining trapped in a paradigm of, well, I. I guess this is how it is. This is all that's possible for me, Jesse started thinking beyond the boundaries of his industry. What if we can make every moment in a baseball game entertaining, not just long stretches of boredom punctuated by a few exciting moments. After all, there's a reason why they call it America's greatest pastime. Hmm. What if we can make the fans a part of the action, not just passive bystanders? What if we could inject showmanship into the game and make it about something more than just athleticism? What part of your work could benefit from what if? Are you stuck within the bounds of what others have done in the past? Or are you willing to ask the dangerous questions because those who ask the bravest questions ultimately get to the answers that no one could have imagined?

Jesse Cole [00:06:55]:

And I think that's the greatest creators learn from outside their industry and bring it into their industry. They are parallel thinkers. They're not just saying, hey, follow what everyone else does and does the best practices. No, you find the best practices in other industries. Bring it into yours. And that's how you become the only in your industry. Because not be a little better, not be a little faster, not be a little cheaper, become the only. And that's what we focused on becoming with the bananas.

Todd Henry [00:07:16]:

The way that you define that problem is really specific. Right? You are a disproportionately great baseball player. And then you were so good that you actually got to coach in one of the top leagues, One of the top, like, basically, like, recruiting leagues in the country. And to the point of, like, even I was bored. So if.

Jesse Cole [00:07:34]:

If every night I dreaded coming to the ballpark, I dreaded. I was. I literally. Because there was no creativity, you. You let all the opportunity for a great game to be on the hands of the players. There was no control. Walt Disney controlled the experience. As soon as you walk in, what you feel, what you smell, what you hear, what you see, everything.

Jesse Cole [00:07:54]:

Making one entrance. Every amusement park said, you have to have multiple entrances, got to be near parking. He's like, no, I want to create a story. You go into a baseball game, you just hope that it's a good game. So we even changed our language to make it, welcome to the show. Hope you enjoyed the show. The greatest show in the sports. Because even if we lose, you can still enjoy the show and everyone can walk out having a great experience.

Jesse Cole [00:08:14]:

And so that was. That was for me. I'd go to a game and I was like, well, let's hope for the best. But, you know, probably not. It's probably going to be boring. I was a pitcher and a hitter in college, so every Friday night, I got the ball. I could control the game by what pitch I'm throwing. I can control the game on how well I pitch.

Jesse Cole [00:08:29]:

And now I'm going to an assistant coach, where I can't control anything. So having that opportunity to make an impact and then make a very minimal impact, at best, hermit. But the opportunity to go into the front office of baseball, become a general manager, which comes up with the promotions, the ideas, the prices, the experience, the merchandise, the concessions, everything, you can control the entire experience. And so I was so fortunate at 23 years old to get offered the opportunity to become a general manager of a team. And the only reason you get the opportunity to be a GM at 23, it has to be the worst team in the entire country. So I took over, literally, the worst team in the entire country. In Gastonia, North Carolina, at 23 years old, there was $268 in the bank account. My first day, we had three full time, employees and payroll was on Friday, they had 200 fans coming to the games.

Jesse Cole [00:09:18]:

The previous year, the team had lost $150,000. They only brought in a hundred thousand dollars total revenue. And that was my team. And so taking that over, it was like, whoa, what a unique opportunity that I have. I couldn't pay myself, Todd. The first three months there was no money. So I had to figure out, what are we going to do to create excitement, to create entertainment, to make people want to come to this game of low level college summer baseball? That's what it was. It's not based on the baseball.

Jesse Cole [00:09:46]:

It had to be. We couldn't be in the baseball business. We had to be in the entertainment business. So we had a very unique problem right there. No one wanted to come to games. We were the lowest level of baseball. We had to find a way to get people to come. That was our initial problem, get people to come to the game.

Todd Henry [00:09:58]:

Jesse spent a long time learning the baseball business, which was very different from playing the game. In fact, just like many creators, he spent a long time just kind of incubating, experimenting.

Jesse Cole [00:10:10]:

See, people don't realize that the overnight success of the Savannah Banana spent 10 years with the team in Gastonia, North Carolina doing that and grandma beauty pageants, flatulence, fun nights that failed, Salute to underwear nights, Dig to China nights, you name it, we tried it and learned every day on what worked and what didn't work. And then that kept building this idea of entertainment.

Todd Henry [00:10:32]:

At some point then there was some kind of breakthrough that happened for you. What was that moment or what was the season when things began to break through for you?

Jesse Cole [00:10:41]:

Well, that first year in Gastonia, we went from 200 fans to. We had nights with over 2000 fans. So all of a sudden I started seeing. And then the next year we started selling out games and started creating some attention and doing things that were different. I mean, literally a midnight game and that thousands of fans came to, you know, that's the complete opposite of normal. Why would you have a game start at midnight? The owner thought I was crazy like Jesse. I just, I couldn't tell you no, because you're so passionate about it. I was like, I want to find a way.

Jesse Cole [00:11:07]:

So it started there. But then, you know, Savannah was the biggest breakthrough because we were able to start with a brand new team. So Gastonia had a team for seven years. Then I ran it for 10 years. We brought up to fourth in the country in attendance, started selling out games, won championships, had success. All that was profitable became a You know, team worth over a million dollars did well, but the, the, the Savannah was really where it all started because we could launch. You could just, you had a blank slate. Just like Walt Disney with, with, with the Disneyland.

Jesse Cole [00:11:34]:

He could do something brand new. And with the bananas, we could really create from nothing. And that was exciting for us. But we failed the first six months pretty badly.

Todd Henry [00:11:43]:

How so?

Jesse Cole [00:11:44]:

Well, we sold two tickets in our first three months. So we showed up. It was an abandoned stadium. Myself, my wife, our 24 year old team president, three 22 year olds. Everything was taken out of the ballpark. The former team cut the phone lines, they cut the Internet lines, they took everything out. They had professional baseball for 90 years. We were college summer baseball in that same league that Gastonia was in.

Jesse Cole [00:12:03]:

And we came out with this big vision. We're gonna make baseball fun. We're gonna do all this. We sold two total tickets in our first few months. On January 15, 2016, I got the phone call at 4:45pm that we'd overdrafted our account. We were missing payroll, we were out of money. So then Emily turned to me. We had to sell our house.

Jesse Cole [00:12:20]:

So we sold our house, emptied our savings account. We're sleeping on an airbed grocery shop, which is $30 a week. We did that for months. That was nine years ago. And we realized that we were marketing like everyone else, Promoting like everyone else. But no one had experienced how we were different than everyone else. So, you know, marketing isn't what you say, marketing is what you do. And so they had to experience it.

Jesse Cole [00:12:42]:

We spend $0 on marketing, but we invest everything in the experience in the show now and capture that and that becomes everything that goes out. That's why we have over 30 million followers now. It's because of what we do during our games, not what we say we're going to do. And so yeah, we had to name the team the Bananas. So we went big. So everyone was saying, name the team Spirits, Anchors, Ports, the Braves. I'm like, there's already a team called the Braves in Georgia. We're not going to be the Braves.

Jesse Cole [00:13:04]:

And we said we got to go big. And so we did the Bananas. And we had the idea of a senior citizen dance team called the Banana Nanas. So women in their 70s that dance a male cheerleading team called the Mananas. But now they're just the dad Bod cheerleading squad. A mascot named split music videos to can't stop the peeling banana in the pants promotions where you throw bananas in the top deck and people catch them in their pants. And we just thought of a banana baby that we lift up in the air with a baby in a banana costume and saying, nah, Savannah throwing out the first banana instead of the first pitch. We just.

Jesse Cole [00:13:35]:

What most people do is they name a team. They don't think of the extensions on how do you build a brand that creates an experience? And so the bananas embodied everything we want to do to make a game fun. And so that first night we were wearing green uniforms because we weren't quite right. And literally we actually wore green uniforms and we played terrible. Todd, we played terrible. We made six errors. But they watched the banana nana stance as we lifted the banana baby. They watched their players went into the crowd and delivered roses to little girls for the sweethearts of the game.

Jesse Cole [00:14:04]:

They watched all these moments. The players were on the front gate, they were in the back gate. They broke down all the barriers. They had fun. Since that moment, we've sold out every single game. And now the waitlist is over 3.5 million for tickets.

Todd Henry [00:14:15]:

From two tickets sold to 3.5 million on the waitlist in nine years, selling out football stadiums in major league baseball parks, being interviewed on 60 Minutes. By any stretch of the imagination, this is just wild success. But what are the principles that make banana ball, well, brilliant? In just a minute, Jesse is going to share some of the principles that he and his team use to craft great experiences night after night. And you can use them in your work as well. Stick around. We'll be right back.

Jesse Cole [00:15:02]:

So what people don't realize is when we get compared to the Globetrotters. I understand the comparison. It's the worst comparison. Every single night we do 10 to 15 brand new things we've never done in front of a live crowd. Every single night. Every single night. You never know who's going to win. Every single night, we are obsessing over creating new moments.

Jesse Cole [00:15:18]:

So we follow Saturday Night Live. So picture Saturday Night Live at scale. So snl Every single Saturday for half the year, they have a completely brand new show with a brand new host and completely brand new skits. Some work, some don't. Some become cultural moments, some don't. So we follow their documentary. Monday they do the pitch session. Tuesday we do our idea pitch session.

Jesse Cole [00:15:38]:

So it's otts over the top ideas. So literally 10 o' clock in the morning we start, each team has their own. Our creative team, our marketing team. Then our players have their own. All day Tuesday, we come up with a ton of ideas. Then we get together. Myself, we our vice president of Marketing. Our creative director, our director of entertainment, videographer.

Jesse Cole [00:15:56]:

We get together and say, what are the best ones that can create the biggest moments? And then we start writing scripts. Then we do a table read. We do a table read. We go over, we do that. Then we start doing rehearsals. Rehearsals literally all the week leading up to it. Then we get to the ballpark, we rehearsals again. And then even on Vib often, which is our very important banana exclusive, they come in early.

Jesse Cole [00:16:14]:

We do more rehearsals in front of them. And just to see the reactions a little bit, see how they get, see how they act. And then we put it live. And some work, some don't. But we capture everything and then share it with the world. And so people don't realize, like, we're growing, you know, a million followers every single month. Even our Party Animals team has more followers than every Major League baseball team. Our second team, they sold out their tour.

Jesse Cole [00:16:34]:

It's because every night we're obsessing on creating new moments, new ideas, new things for the fans. And so ideas are everything. As our fifth fan's first principle, it drives this company. We are constantly doing new things every single night. That so we can learn faster than anyone else. So we learn what works, what doesn't work faster than anyone else. Because we learn in front of a live crowd and in front of our digital crowd. We're sharing what connected, what didn't work, what.

Jesse Cole [00:16:55]:

How was the reaction? What was the pop. What did this? How was this when we went to the upper deck, what was the reaction here? And so, and then after every night, we do an lcp. Learn change plus. So we go through the entire script. What did we learn? What would we change and what are we going to. Plus another Walt Disney term. So it's the obsession with ideas and speed of learning that drives the innovation and keeps us moving faster than most organizations right now.

Todd Henry [00:17:18]:

Jesse's energy for his work is inspiring. And understand these aren't just empty platitudes he's spouting. He really does this every single day.

Jesse Cole [00:17:27]:

Like, I have my idea book right now. Like, I'm fired up because we're working on our scripts right now. We got two NFL stadiums this weekend, Friday, Saturday, 150,000 fans, nationally televised on ESPN. And we're going to do some crazy things. And I'm fired up because they might not work or they will work unbelievably well. Either way, we're going to create fans. And fans now defend us when things don't work because they know we're trying for them. We're only trying to make it new for them and uni and we keeps it fun for us.

Jesse Cole [00:17:52]:

If I get bored, if we're doing the same thing every night, I give up. I'm done. But because every night there's new things, there's new adventures, there's new things we've never done that keeps it exciting. But go back to the beginning. Create something that you would love. Create something that you would never get bored with. And if you don't ever get bored with it, I've seen hundreds of games. Good luck to that fan that comes that first game.

Jesse Cole [00:18:13]:

I got to come back because I missed something. I got to see more of this. I got to have this joy, this fun, this creativity. So that's where it comes from.

Todd Henry [00:18:23]:

Jesse Cole is the founder of the Savannah Bananas. If you can get to a show, I guarantee it will be an experience unlike anything you've ever seen. He's also the author of a book called Fans First. If you'd like to hear the full interview with Jesse Cole, you can do so for free@dailycreativeplus.com that's where you can get bonus content from every episode, including all of our full interviews. Thanks so much for listening. My name is Todd Henry. You can find my seven books, my speaking and my workshops and more all about my work@todhenry.com until next time. May you be brave, focused and brilliant.