Always be the challenger, with Savannah Bananas founder Jesse Cole

Jesse Cole loved baseball. He also knew most people thought it was too long and boring. So he disrupted America’s pastime by putting on a yellow tux - and an incredible show. The founder of the Savannah Bananas welcomed host Jeff Berman to Anaheim Stadium before a show recently to talk about how he’s scaling Fans First Entertainment into a growing league that sells out pro sports stadiums all over the country. Subscribe to the Masters of Scale weekly newsletter: https://mastersofscale.com/subscribe See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Jeff Berman?

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• 0:48Jeff Berman?

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• 2:11Speaker 02

  In a few hours, we get to see thousands of people that had this game on the 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, 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?

• 2:31Speaker 02

  And if you can find that and continue to build that and talk about what matters most, 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 that. It's the most contagious thing in the world.

• 2:53Jeff Berman?

  This is Masters of Scale. I'm Jeff Furman, 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.

• 3:34Speaker 03

  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 are with the greatest showman on earth, Jesse Cole. Welcome to Masters of Scale.

• 3:47Speaker 02

  I'm excited to be with you guys. Been a big fan of the show from when it first launched. So we've shared the episodes with so much of our team. So many people on our team, it's been great.

• 3:54Speaker 03

  Well, we're huge fans, and we were just talking before we turned the mics and cameras on about how you all have been capturing content kind of hoopla 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 Cole plays Yellow. Can you set the stage for us so you can open the show there?

• 4:16Speaker 02

  Well, as someone who grew up south of Boston, a huge Red Sox fan, my dad and I, we went to so many games. Back when tickets were $5, we'd sit out on the bleachers. And I was a shy, introverted kid growing up. And my dad had the opportunity to win this challenge for me to become an honorary bad boy. And so when I was five years old, I saw my first ever Red Sox game. But I was in the dugout before the game. But I was sitting by myself and one player came over and sat down next to me. And it was Hall of Famer Alicia. And he spent 20 minutes with me, this shy, introverted, five-year-old kid. He didn't have to. And that moment changed everything for me because I saw him as this larger-than-life picture. I saw the Red Sox now as this larger-than-life team. And I vowed to, one day, play at Fenway Park. And so I put everything I can into my baseball career.

• 5:01Speaker 02

  I was fortunate to have professional scouts watching me, I had a Division One scholarship, and then tore everything, my shoulder, and that ended my career. Just like that, I was done. And so that dream of playing at Fenway was over, at least I thought, until we started in the front office and how to make baseball fun. And what people don't realize is I spent 10 years with this team in Gastonia, North Carolina, that no one knew about, just trying to craft what we were doing and get people excited about coming to a baseball game before we started the Savannah Bananas. And then we started the Bananas, failed miserably, lost everything. And then after many years, made it successful, took the show on the road, and was able to sell out Fenway Park with 37,000 fans and everyone singing Yellow and lighting up the sky. And it was a moment I'll never forget. And what happened was I got some coaching jobs,

• 5:45Speaker 02

  but I also got this opportunity to be an intern for a college summer baseball team. And why would you want that? And I was like, well, it's right down the road. Let's just try it at the front office. And I realized immediately that in the front office, you could actually create a lot of the experience that happens for players. And I started to get ideas of, wow, we could change this about the game. This is boring. What if we had this? What about music here? And so immediately as an intern, I started to get the idea of what it was like toward the front office. And then I got offered a job as a general manager at 23 years old.

• 6:13Speaker 03

  Outside of a legendary baseball front office man, when those of you of yours pull back, did lots of the best, wonderfully the best things back in the 50s. But minor league and college summer league is where we've seen some experimentation in baseball. What did you try? What worked, what didn't work? Share that part of the journey.

• 6:31Speaker 02

  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. And there was no money. The team had lost over $100,000 the previous year. So I had saved money in college, I had a scholarship. So I was living off that. And it was two months in, and went to the Vet Conference.

• 6:50Speaker 03

  What other Vet Conference?

• 6:51Speaker 02

  So the Vet Conference is Mike Vek, and he brings together minor league operators, and they talk about ideas. It's all about ideas. So my mind started seeing like, we gotta think a different way. I started reading about P T Barnum, Walt Disney. And I said, let's do the things that are just a little bit different. You have beauty pageants, but what if we had a grandma beauty pageant? And so we actually got grandmas from a senior citizen home and had a grandma beauty pageant, which did not go exactly as we planned, but it was.

• 7:14Speaker 03

  What happened?

• 7:15Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, Gertrude stole the show. She was 87 years old. Well, first of all, they showed up late because I should have expected that. The first question we did, Gertrude, if you could be on the cover of one magazine, what would it be and why? And she goes, of course, Playboy. And I was like, this is a part of the 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 woobie cushion giveaways. We had slook underwear nights. We had garbage can nachos, which we're still doing Savannah, which five orders of nachos, three hamburgers, three hot dogs. It's heart-stoppingly delicious. Still can't get a cardiologist to sponsor it. But all these things, we started thinking about, how do we do things? And that's where the experimentation lab started in Gastonia.

• 7:54Speaker 03

  It's one thing to say, I'm gonna take the blinders off. So we think to actually generate the ideas for the grandma beauty contest or whatever else it may be.

• 8:02Speaker 02

  We had nothing to lose. See, people realize they always put so much weight on failure. They put so much weight on an idea. When we first started, you do something, who cares? It might not go right. So we just kept doing all these different ideas. And so now we've developed kind of a system on how we generate our best ideas. We follow a Saturday Night Live model. We generate ideas on a Tuesday all-day idea sessions. Then we have a table read, and we start doing rehearsals. And we go through all that to have a brand new show every week. And I think when you take out the weight of that and just say, we're gonna try things, you find out a lot more gold. And you find gold because you're doing more. You learn more by the more you do. And so Henry Ford says, you learn by doing. And so we're just constantly doing things. So back in the day, the first 10 years of Gastonia, there was no one covering us. There was no social media. We were just testing things.

• 8:47Speaker 02

  And you'd watch how the fans react, and you'd try it again.

• 8:49Speaker 03

  There's so many people right now who are working at companies. It could be massive, 40, 50 companies or relatively early-stage startups who've had a plan. And whether it's because of AI, other exogenous forces, external forces are coming in and forcing them to have to think different. When you talk to these folks, what are you saying to them about how to inject that, let's [bleep] go with it, you know, into a process so that you take away that fear of failure and actually give yourself freedom to experiment?

• 9:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, we had a plan. We were a college summer baseball team. And then the plan changed because we watched what our fans were doing. We watched as fans were leaving games early, no matter how much entertainment we had, no matter how much dancing, celebrations, crazy moments, surprises. 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 me both. It's a late night, you're taking your kids home. No one wants a three or four-hour show. And so he saw that. We literally videotaped and were taking pictures and watching every 30 minutes. But no one told us that, hey, we want a faster show. But they act. And so we had a plan. Everyone's so focused often on their current customers. We love our fans more than anything. I will put us up against any company in the long run, I'm sure, our fans. But we're also thinking about our future fans.

• 10:02Speaker 02

  Where are our fans in a one in three or five years? And you can see little things that they react to. What time do they show up? When do they leave? How do they react to the thing where you are 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 album they're liking. No, do your fans like it? And if your fans like it, they will tell you that. And so I think the reality is it's not about what are our plans? It's you need to put more things out there and share with the world and find out what they like and what they don't like. Companies are afraid of doing that because they're afraid of the perception of what people will think. I don't care the point what people think. We're gonna fail every day. We do silly and crazy promotions. Every day, baseball traditionals criticize us. We're not for that. Who are you for? If you're trying to grow a business, you're trying to create customers, you put more out there and see if they like it. Don't do surveys.

• 10:46Speaker 02

  Just actually go do it. And that's what Walt Disney believed in. And that's what we try to do as well.

• 10:52Speaker 03

  You could easily become the most successful front office person in summer college baseball, primary baseball, or maybe in major league baseball.

• 11:01Speaker 02

  You could have been. That's a path that was available to you. Why isn't that the path you ended up taking? The greatest creators create things that they love. Often someone that's a creator, they're in a system and they're in a cog and they're creating someone else's dreams and their vision, someone board member's goal. I realized that someone who played the game and loved playing, watching, it just was never truly exciting for me. And I realized that if I stayed into this box that they put you, these are the rules of the game. This is how you have to play. These are the rules that lead. You better not break the rules or you're going to get fined. If you can get out of that box and just create things that get you excited and you believe if you get excited about, you love it, that other fans and other customers will get excited about it. That's the world I wanted to live in.

• 11:44Speaker 02

  And I just believe that something was out there that not your traditional baseball fans would love, that a family would love, that young people would love, that people just want to go have fun and not take themselves too seriously. There's the conventional world of sports, which we play a little bit in that world, but we can't control whether your team wins or loses.

• 12:02Speaker 03

  Right.

• 12:02Speaker 02

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

• 12:11Speaker 03

  So a lot of entrepreneurs would have built their deck. They would have gone around and pitched this idea for a new concept and raised a bunch of money or tried to and go from there. That's not what you start doing.

• 12:24Speaker 02

  Same one city world tour. Start small dream big. We had this idea, we had this full leap, 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 ever had played and I watched it. You couldn't take your eyes or how do you make that happen? I called my two college coaches, said, I got a crazy idea. Can we do this behind closed doors? They said, sure, Jesse, we'll give it a shot. And we got fired up. And we said, all right, well, let's test.

• 12:46Speaker 03

  And it didn't work right away.

• 12:47Speaker 02

  No.

• 12:48Speaker 03

  What happened?

• 12:48Speaker 02

  It never works right away. It always starts as chaos when you first begin. But then we said, all right, well, is there something here for some match? Do you not want to take your eyes? I didn't want to blink, so I was like, what's going to happen?

• 13:00Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 13:00Speaker 02

  And so when you just said, how do you make it work? People, you can't take your eyes, you can't leave your seat or you may miss something you've never seen before in baseball.

• 13:06Speaker 03

  You didn't raise outside capital.

• 13:07Speaker 02

  No.

• 13:08Speaker 03

  You're not like an independently wealthy guy spending a trust fund down or something. You save a few bucks with a scholarship. How are you even sustaining this while you're trying to get enough traction or product market fit?

• 13:19Speaker 02

  And most businesses, a lot of businesses are, hey, we got to start this, we need to raise capital.

• 13:23Speaker 03

  Right.

• 13:23Speaker 02

  Or we're going to have advertisers, sponsors, we got to get all this. Well, what we were fortunate with college summer baseball, we started a model where if we could sell the tickets and get people excited enough to come, we learned how to be successful by just selling tickets.

• 13:36Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 13:37Speaker 02

  It's everyone's like, ah, I don't know if we can get that golf event because we lost our sponsor. Well, then the event's not good.

• 13:41Speaker 03

  Right.

• 13:42Speaker 02

  If people don't want to pay to come see it, we had to make a product that people wanted to pay and come see. In college summer baseball, we were selling out every night, 4,000 seats.

• 13:49Speaker 03

  Right.

• 13:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. Now, this is after only selling two tickets in our first three months, running out of money. My wife and I have a cellar house, empty out our savings account, sleeping on an air bed with nothing. But we got them to see the show and we said, dancing players, we saw fun moments, we saw banana babies, banana bands, all that. People were like, this is something we've never seen before. So that started, you know, small, three million dollar business for making money and it's fine.

• 14:10Speaker 03

  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 were going to get there?

• 14:17Speaker 02

  We wouldn't let ourselves go there. We couldn't. We were a million dollars plus in debt. We just got married. We have to go on. There's no other option.

• 14:25Speaker 03

  So what's the inflection point then, when you've sold that house, you're sleeping on the air mattress? Have to be some moments, your wife and you were looking at each other.

• 14:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:34Speaker 03

  Deep breath.

• 14:34Speaker 02

  We didn't sleep at all.

• 14:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:36Speaker 02

  We didn't sleep at all. We'd walk the streets just thinking. And we just kept saying, get to that first show. Get to that first show. It's like my dad, you know, it's almost this, hey, get to your next at bat. Hey, forget about what happened in the last at bat, get to your next at bat. And that mindset and then swing hard in case you hit it. And so we said, we're going to get to that opening night and we're going to swing hard. Banana dance, went out and danced in the pouring rain because there was a rain delay. And we had the players doing dances and people were like, what am I watching? But it created attention. They were saying they saw something. So from that point, we started selling out every game. Well, so the business became set at a 4,000 seat stadium. So we already had a little bit of a cushion, say, hey, we can experiment. Let's go take this on the road. We had a Penske truck that we just packed all our stuff in. We didn't know how to set up merchandise. We didn't know all the logistics. We didn't know how to do sound systems at other stadiums. We didn't know anything.

• 15:22Speaker 02

  But we said, can we get enough people excited to come see it? And we sold it out. We failed miserably the first night. Sound went out. The anthem singer didn't show up, but enough good happened. That's the next day, we're on a great show and I knew right there. We had a surprise fireworks show. We had the fans stayed an hour plus after the game. They didn't want to leave, which normally games, you want to leave. And I said, this is it. And so the next year, go to seven cities, then 33, then major league stadiums, then football stadiums. You just keep expanding after you start doing it.

• 15:49Jeff Berman?

  Still ahead, more with Jesse Cole on how he uses social media to supercharge growth.

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• 16:39Jeff Berman?

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• 17:22Jeff Berman?

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• 17:55Jeff Berman?

  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.

• 18:08Speaker 03

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

• 18:15Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 18:15Speaker 03

  And so hard often to take that in real life experience, so special and translate it on social and digital. What was that?

• 18:22Speaker 02

  Well, we spent $0 on marketing. We invest in the experience. So most people, I think, when they think about marketing is like, you got to go promote something to get people to want to buy something or take on a service. What we think about is how do you make your experience so remarkable that you capture that and just share that? So, but P T Barnum, one of the greatest promoters of all time, he said, something terrible happens without promotion. Nothing. And so I think without social media, it had a great challenge. But yes, now social media, we can amplify it, but you still have to create something truly remarkable. And that's what we try to do every night.

• 18:53Speaker 03

  You've referenced P T Barnum, you've referenced Walt Disney. There were elements of Vince McMahon and W W. We hear, 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, what's going to work for you, what to draw from them? When you're researching, you're reading about these folks, saying that these folks, what, what are you looking to latch on to?

• 19:17Speaker 02

  You start with the best in their industry. So the Grateful Dead, they were the most fan-friendly band of theirs. They let the fans record every single night. You know, they create a newsletter for them. They were speaking directly with them. They brought in their own sound because they want to be better. Like they were obsessed with communicating directly with the fans. They started selling their own tickets to fans, the fan clubs, all of that. So we said, all right, how do we do that? So we had 40,000 K Club members that had to get access to all of our tickets, furniture, special meeting rates. That could be well over a hundred thousand, but we're still learning every year and slowly growing it.

• 19:47Speaker 03

  I spent a couple of years at the NFL, ran the digital media group.

• 19:50Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 19:50Speaker 03

  There is perhaps no organization more zealous about controlling its right.

• 19:54Speaker 02

  Hundred percent.

• 19:55Speaker 03

  The National Football League and they have built a pretty darn good business doing.

• 19:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:59Speaker 03

  You guys with the fan first approach, you'll do an ESPN deal, you do a CW deal, you'll keep the rights to stream games on YouTube for free globally. When you're balancing that driving revenue and creating that fan experience, because you're still a business, right?

• 20:14Speaker 02

  I mean, we're helping this.

• 20:16Speaker 03

  So how are you striking that balance? Is it always fan first or there are moments where you go, boy, if ESPN's with 10x the dollars they're going to give us, I'm not going to livestream every game. Is that even a discussion?

• 20:28Speaker 02

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

• 20:48Speaker 03

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

• 20:52Speaker 02

  But you should always be a challenger.

• 20:53Speaker 03

  So that's exactly where I'm going. How do you maintain that challenger brand mindset as you're getting up to the top?

• 20:58Speaker 02

  So scared every day. I'm scared every day that what we've worked so hard at when we first started and sleeping on your bed, that we can lose fans. I'm scared that this stuff we built from nothing. And now it's, I guess you'd call it productive paranoia. And I have that every day that our show has to get a little bit better. Our experience has to get a little bit better. Our entertainment has to get a little bit better. Our merchandise experience has to get a little better. Our ticket experience has to get a little bit better. To some people it's like, 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 where we are this year and knowing that we're only 1% of the way where we compete. I know that and I believe that because we're venting 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. We have 16 now. It's extremely hard trying to have that level.

• 21:41Speaker 03

  And I don't think most people realize this because the bananas are becoming this phenomenon. You can't go on social without seeing you guys phenomenal. But you're now a 16 league, you've got a season, you've got an end of season tournament, right? So are you even worried about diluting the brand by expanding into these other teams?

• 21:56Speaker 02

  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. So like the party animals, which people don't realize, they have more followers than every major league baseball team on TikTok.

• 22:09Speaker 03

  Really?

• 22:09Speaker 02

  They're selling out major league stadiums without the bananas. Like 170,000 people joined the list to go see them in Detroit. Based on those numbers, we could sell out eight straight nights without the bananas.

• 22:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:20Speaker 02

  The clowns are newest team, which also paying tribute to the major league team with what they did is unbelievable. And we're bringing Broadway type centers, a brass band that's unbelievable. We have acts, we haven't shared yet, but from Circus LA. I want people every night to see this show and be like, I've never seen that on a baseball. And it's very hard because they're all just getting started.

• 22:37Speaker 03

  Can they build that brand on their own or how do you think about integrating them with the bananas?

• 22:41Speaker 02

  They're creating fans every night. The local beach coconuts are, their merchandise is right up there at number two. Because that brand is so fun that when they start playing at the end of the game, everyone's chanting local beach and coconuts. And so they can build off each other, but you have to make it distinct. You have to make it, they think, oh, it's just another one of the bananas teams we're in trouble. That's a huge fear of mine is we got to continue to come up with new ideas.

• 23:02Speaker 03

  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?

• 23:12Speaker 02

  Our goal is very simple. It's to create fans. Your goal is to make money. We could charge a lot more. And we've been told to do that by every consultant, you could be making this. The average ticket price in the secondary market is over $200. For us, it's 40, 50 and 60 dollars with no ticket fees, no conveniences, we pay your taxes. It's a good game. If you're a public company, they would say there's a hundred million dollars right there. It's hard what you should charge.

• 23:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:36Speaker 02

  No interest to us. And we've been built a secondary market to deter the whole secondary market.

• 23:40Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 23:41Speaker 02

  And it's all face value, which just costs us money. Yeah, we're literally doing, developing, putting all the money into it, taking all the fees. That's all on us. Just so our fans can get tickets at the price that we believe is best.

• 23:51Speaker 03

  The other thing that I imagine a private equity investor down to get in your business would say is, okay, fine, Jesse, do it that way, do it your way. But let's go use the ticketing platform for everyone else. Is that part of the plan?

• 24:02Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, if you follow, I guess, if you look at what Amazon did, I mean, it's great. Bezos and the group built something that could handle their infrastructure and say, wow, a lot of people could use that as well. AWS, 100% AWS, which is their most profitable part of their business, billions of dollars. Yeah, I think there's a world where our ticketing platform that we have built and our secondary marketplace could be used. But right now we got to get to a point where it is so great for our fans. It's almost at perfect for our fans that we want to put it out to everyone else. And that's going to be a long way. Again, our goals aren't to make a lot of money. Our goals are to create the best experience.

• 24:33Speaker 03

  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?

• 24:40Speaker 02

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

• 25:12Speaker 03

  You're building a fan experience. All of a sudden you're building technology, you're taking a platform, you're building a logistics company with the trucking. When a new challenge like that comes up, how are you think what to do?

• 25:21Speaker 02

  Well, it depends on what part of the business. So like, you know, I think we learned this again, you look at Walt Disney and Roy Disney. Walt was focused on all the creative and Roy was focused on all the operation, how you pay for it. You know, we have an amazing president who's been with us since day one, Jared Gordon. He is gung ho on the operations and figuring it out. He always finds a way, you know, his mindset is we'll figure it out. We don't know, but we'll figure it out and 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 do we create show? What's our next step? What's our next event that's going to be larger than life? What's our original music that we're creating? What's the next media thing we're doing? I spend all my time with it. He spends all his time focused on how do we actually take care of our fans and make this happen? We work very well together.

• 26:00Speaker 03

  There are a lot of leaders running consumer business and who would love to have a little bit of your system. Brian Rorla was my boss at the NFL. He's now running the PGA tour. Brian calls and says, Jesse, one note, should I be doing different?

• 26:17Speaker 02

  At the PGA tour?

• 26:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:19Speaker 02

  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, it's okay to celebrate. It's okay 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 an entrance music as a golfer comes out? Why does it have to always be quiet? I, you know, again, there's obviously movies and Happy Gilmore and all talking 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. Doesn't take away from sport, it's amazing to watch. But you haven't seen the athletes have as much fun.

• 26:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:57Speaker 02

  And whether you're a golfer, whether you're football with it, it's like football channel that said, hey, we're going to have touchdown sellies. We're all good. Like celebrate, have fun. You know, that's good. And that's become a part of our society now. That didn't hurt the game. It added to the game. So why don't you embrace that? If you're in golf, it's like 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 walkups. We're going to have celebrities doing singing. It is going to be the most fun golf tournament in the world. Just testing for once. Well, purists will hate it. But you might draw a whole new audience that you'd be surprised and they'd come out at the time of their life.

• 27:37Speaker 03

  Let me go to the other end of the spectrum. Um, Reid Hoffman is a co-founder of LinkedIn. A lot of it's not known 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?

• 27:53Speaker 02

  It's not because it's very easy to just go and do whatever else. You see this every, you know, TikTok takes this for answer, answer, I'm taking 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 life, as I've heard many times. You know, get millions, 2 million, 5 million, 10 million to love you as opposed to hundreds of millions that can't kind of like you.

• 28:13Speaker 03

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

• 28:24Speaker 02

  Do what gives you energy. Biggest game changer for me happened about six years into my professional journey. I was with the Gastoni 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, and then I realized that what were my best days? What did I do during this? I was, oh, I was coming up with ideas. I was creating, I was sharing, I was on a podcast, I was talking about what we're doing. I was growing, I was learning from some of the best of the best. And so I created my original list. And I said, these are the three things, these buckets, creating, sharing, growing. If I do that every day, everything else takes care of itself. You know, people always ask me, it keeps you up at night. To me, that's the one, that's what gets you up in the hole. And so for someone that's graduating high school, graduating college, what gets you fired up?

• 29:09Speaker 02

  What gets you excited to do that you could do for hours? Time just flies by. You know, often people are watching the clock in the jobs. What is it that you don't even realize? Like at the ballpark, it's 12 hours go by. I'm like, oh my goodness, it's showtime.

• 29:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:21Speaker 02

  Because we're doing things that we love around people that we love to do it. That's the difference. And so what I, I just think about that, it's, it's one of those things every day that you get truly excited to. Not necessarily a 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 that work on their craft more than anyone else. They do things that no one else will do because they love it. And that's, that's what drives it.

• 29:43Speaker 03

  I have to tell you, I mean, anyone who's watching or listening is your energy is infectious, your enthusiasm is infectious. But here's the thing that has struck me, especially being here, same thing for your team. The people who work around you, and I don't mean just the players, I mean Taylor who works in the secondary. There's a spirit which 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. It's just, there's an energy that you don't get most places and.

• 30:12Speaker 02

  It's joy.

• 30:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:13Speaker 02

  It's joy. And I think the world needs more of that. And when you have people run a whole company that were doing it for the right reasons, because it brings joy, because we get to feel it. In a few hours, we get to see thousands of people that had this game on the 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, getting excited to high five us. And that's not just players and cast. That's our staff. They get excited. Oh, you work for the team? That. And if you can find that and continue to build that and talk about what matters most, and it's not about the money, it's not about the sales, 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 that. It's the most contagious thing in the world. And so that gives me energy and I hope it gives all of our team energy because every day we get to do special things and enjoy it.

• 31:00Speaker 03

  Well, I'm confident they were watching, listening, taking joy away from this. Thanks for being, I appreciate you.

• 31:05Speaker 02

  Thanks so much.

• 31:11Jeff 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 just wonderful as the Savannah Bananas. But the lessons from Jesse's scale journey are essential for all of us. The one that struck me most watching his team rehearse for a show: joy. It's contagious, it's good for business, and lord knows, we need more of it. I'm Jeff Berman. Thank you for listening.

• 31:53Jeff Berman?

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• 32:33Speaker 04

  Humans will never be more intelligent than AI.

• 32:36Speaker 05

  There's going to be two types of companies. Those who are great at AI, and those that went out of business because they weren't.

• 32:41Speaker 06

  How do we build a future that is human-centered?

• 32:47Speaker 07

  I'm Rana Elkhayubi, and on my podcast, Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone. Every week, I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future, and we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives. Find Pioneers of AI wherever you tune in.

• 33:16Speaker 08

  Hey, listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show, because every Friday, we release a second Rapid Response exclusively in the Rapid Response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely, from Ford CEO to NASA's administrator, to the lessons from the Devil Wears Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find. Just search Rapid Response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode. I hope to see you there.

• 33:53Jeff Berman?

  Masters of Scale is a Wait What original. Our executive producer is Eve Trow. Senior supervising producer is Tricia Bobita. Associate producer is Masha Makatenina. Video editor is Noah Walstein. Senior talent executive is Stephanie Stern. Mixing and mastering by the audio boys, Aaron Bastinelli and Brian Pugh. Original music by the legendary Ryan Holiday. Our head of podcasts is Leetam Malad. Visit mastersofscale.com to find the transcript for this episode and to subscribe to our newsletter. And be sure to check out our YouTube channel.