THE ED MYLETT SHOW - How to Turn Customers Into Raving Fans with Savannah Bananas Owner Jesse Cole

Episode Date: September 22, 2026

Apply for up to $500,000 in same day business funding in under 3 minutes at Cardiff.co/ED Customers come and go. Fans will drive 40 hours just to be in the room with you.   I've wanted Jesse Cole on this show for a long time, and this conversation went further than I hoped. More than 4 million people are on a waitlist for a ticket to one of his games. He's drawn crowds bigger than the Super Bowl. And he's done it by obsessing over the thing I believe matters most as AI moves into every business: how people feel when they deal with you.   This was not an overnight success. Jesse's pro baseball dream ended with a torn shoulder. He spent ten years running a team almost nobody came to see. Then he and his wife, Emily, bet everything on a college summer team in Savannah, and in the first three months, they sold two tickets. What happened next became the Banana Ball Championship League and one of the great American business stories.   I asked him the question every entrepreneur in a hard season needs answered: why didn't you quit? I share what it felt like when my own baseball dream ended. I push back on founders who build companies just to sell them, and I explain why most big exits aren't what they look like. And I challenge Jesse on what separates great entrepreneurs: they keep improving even when everything is already working.   We finish with what Jesse and Emily are building off the field, and it may be the most powerful part of the whole conversation.   Here's what you'll gain from this episode: Fans vs. Customers: Why one is transactional and the other will defend you when you make a mistake. The Friction Question: The one question that sparked Banana Ball, and how it applies to a realtor, a dry cleaner, or any business. Attention Beats Marketing: Why Jesse hasn't spent a dollar on marketing since opening night, and what he does instead. The Energy List: How Jesse found what fuels him, and why it changed the way he shows up as a leader and a dad. Lessons from Walt Disney: Two principles Jesse built his company on, including the one that explains why he won't sell. Learn, Change, Plus: The nightly habit that keeps a sold-out business from ever getting comfortable.   Two tickets in three months. That's where this started. Whatever season you're in right now, get to the next day, then the next one. You are much closer to your dreams than you realize. Peace of mind shouldn’t be optional, visit https://webroot.com/MYLETT to save 60% today. Try QUO for free PLUS get 20% off your first 6 months when you go to quo.com/mylett Shopify: The best businesses aren’t built in boardrooms. They’re built by people who just started. Free trial at https://shopify.com/mylett   👉 SUBSCRIBE TO ED'S YOUTUBE CHANNEL NOW 👈 → → → CONNECT WITH ED MYLETT ON SOCIAL MEDIA: ← ← ← ➡️ INSTAGRAM ➡️ FACEBOOK ➡️ LINKEDIN ➡️ X ➡️ WEBSITE Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Real growth, fast funding, Cardiff, borrow better. This is the Edmiron show. All right, welcome back to the show, everybody. Man, I've wanted to have this dude on for a long time. I think he's one of the great, top five entrepreneurs that I'm excited about in the world today, literally. One, because it's sort of connected to baseball, but more because this dude gets culture,

he gets client experience, better than anybody I think on planet Earth, okay? And let me just give you some stats. First of all, you know the Savannah bananas. That's probably how many of you would know. That's one of the teams. But he actually has Fans First Entertainment. He's the owner of the Banana Baseball Champion League.

Let me tell you how popular these guys are, okay? As I understand it, as of April of 26, 4 million plus people on the wait list to get a ticket to one of the games. They fill up stadiums with 100,000 fans. Last night, he was at something with 80, 90,000 fans. Just to give you context, guys. Super Bowl had 71,000 fans. Okay? They've got over 21 million followers on social media.

They got a new deal with ESPN and Disney. This dude is one of the great American business stories because he gets the most important things in an AI area, which is experience and culture for the fans. I'm fired up, dude, for you to teach people all these lessons today. So this is Jesse Cole. Jesse, welcome to the show. Yeah, I love it, man.

Let's rock and roll. He's a Boston boy, too, which I was just discovering, which means he's good people on top of everything else. Okay, I want to know this all for my personal edification. So you're filling up all these stadiums, which is insane. To get 80,000, to get 8,000 people to come to something, is, no pun intended, bananas. Take me back to the beginning of this, just for a second, because there's a lot of entry-level entrepreneurs listening to the show today.

They've got their startup, they're in their third year, their fourth year, their 10th year. Where'd the idea in the first place come from? And what did the early years look like for you and the company? Yeah, well, people don't realize they think it's an overnight success, but it's going on almost 20 years now. And so, yeah, I mean, the bananas and are going on 11 years now. But go back before that, I spent 10 years in a little tiny town in Gastonia, North Carolina, running a college summer baseball team with no one wanting to come to the games. $268 in the bank account of the team, my first day.

And 200 fans coming to the game. That's what we started as a 23-year-old general manager. Wow. Are you serious? Yeah, so people don't realize that. So I had played baseball, my whole lot, big baseball guy, was fortunate to get Division I scholarship, went down in South Carolina, played a Wofford, the dream of playing pro ball, scouts of the games, getting letters from the teams. This is going to happen. And then I tore my shoulder, the senior year, just like that, right, like that. Three tears, done. Never played. Wow. Wow. And everyone's like, you're going to go to coaching.

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

But I'm sitting there, I'm like, I know what's going to happen. We're going to do this. We're going to try to bun them over. We're going to run. I'm not in the game. I'm watching the game. And I realize, I'm bored. Man, what about the fans?

Yeah. Or part of the games. And I learned this, I started studying Walt Disney religiously. And, you know, when he took his daughters on Saturdays to Daddy Daady, they'd go out to the park. and went out to the carousel and went to Griffith Park. And he said, I wish there was a place adults and kids could have fun together. And that's where the thoughts, the ideation of Disneyland came about. And I'm sitting there in the dugout, I'm thinking the same thing.

I'm like, man, you know, why can't this game be fun for everyone? Even people that don't love baseball, kids and adults. And yeah, yes, there's 70 million people that come out to Major League Baseball games. And I get it. But like everyone, not even if you don't get the game, you can still have fun and enjoy it. And so, yeah, we went to Gastonia, 23 years old with kind of a big vision. and we failed. We were struggling, man. I was coming up with grandma beauty pageant ideas, salute to underwear nights, flatulent fun nights. I was just trying everything, throwing it up

against the wall. But slowly but surely, they are for 10 years. You know, we went from 200 fans a game to 1,000 fans a game to 1,500 fans a game, started selling out. And from a team losing $100,000 a year, we started make some money. But that wasn't the goal. The goal was to try to learn how to get people to come to games. And then that's where Savannah started. So Savannah came after about 10 years in Gastonia. Okay, guys, by the way, I feel like a brother here. We're born in the same hospital. South Shore Hospital in Massachusetts, well, obviously a couple years apart, unfortunately, for me. But I also played Division I one baseball, so I know what that's like. And I know what's like when the dream ends, too, right? He's also, if you're listening to the audio, because a lot of your

audio, he's also the best dressed guests we've ever had on the shows. So he's in his trademark yellow tucks and yellow hat. And if you are listening to audio at some point today, give yourself the gift of going over to the YouTube, just to get a look at what a great American an entrepreneur looks like. But so what happened, Jesse? Like, don't be humble. That's a great beginning, but to go to really one of the most scaled viral businesses really existing in the world today. I mean, millions of people waiting to get to one of your games from that time. How and why? Like, I know it's a broad statement, but how? We had to fail first. You know, I think the greatest entrepreneurs, they go through serious failure. And that actually guides them and what they do next.

So our failure, we went to Savannah, this big dream, minor league baseball in Savannah, Georgia for 90 years, professional baseball. We came in as a college summer team. People don't even realize that. I did not know that. We started as college summer, one of the lowest levels of baseball. That's what we were. But we had this big dream. We show up the stadium. Unfortunately, the previous team cut the phone lines, cut the internet lines, took everything out of the ballpark. So myself, my wife, I'm 31 years old. My wife's 28. We've got our 24-year-old team president and a couple 22-year-olds straight out of college. That's our team. But we're going to make baseball fun.

It's a brand new slate. Savannah, Georgia. We're all excited. So we start going knocking door to door. This is back in 2015, 2016. We don't even have a team named that. We're like, we're here. We're going to make baseball fun.

There's going to be dancing players. It's going to be non-stop entertainment. We were getting doors shut in our face hung up on. We literally had an event, a free event at the conference center with like steak and crab cakes and drinks and only 72 people showed up. No one even wanted to come. The conference center felt so bad that they didn't even charge us for it. They were embarrassed.

Like they felt so bad about it. Oh, my God. It was, we only sold two tickets in our first three months. Oh, my gosh. Two. And so we'd already gone into massive debt because we had to buy the team. Now, we did it through the league. So it was like we had to pay a certain amount, six figures, you know, every year for multiple years.

But we were already in tons of debt. And then we sold two tickets. our first few months. And then on January 15th, 2016, I'll never forget this moment. It's 4.45 p.m. We get the call that we overdrafted our account. We were going to miss payroll and we were out of money. So my wife and I had just been married three months.

We had just launched this brand new team. We were already massively in debt, almost a million dollars in debt. And she turns to me, and Emily goes, yes, we have no options. We have to sell our house. So we sold our house. We emptied our savings account. We found an old garage that was turned. into a studio, kind of. We got an airbed. And every day, we'd say, we just got to get to the next day,

get to the next day. And so we were grocery shopping with just $30 a week. We go to Walmart with $20 bill and a $10 bill because we didn't want to go to more credit card debt. We already so much in debt. And so 42 meals, we'd eat that and we just with whatever that food was, which wasn't real food, to be honest with the end. And we just said, we've got to get to, we got to get some attention. We got to get people to know who we are and know that we're not like every other baseball team. Because most people, what they, they're just talking. And we were just talking. no one had experienced it. We're like, we got to get to that point

so people can actually experience it. But first, we got to get attention. And so we did the name the team contest, which a lot of teams do. And we got all the generic, the spirits, the ports, the anchors, the braves. I'm like, there's already a team

in our state called the Braves. We're not going to be the Braves. And we got one suggestion the bananas. And I know we looked at each other. He said, go bananas. He said, what if we had a senior citizen dance team called the banana nanas? What about a male cheerling team

called the mananas? what about banana in the pants promotions and do music videos to can't stop the peeling. And we just, our ideas started saying that's a fun brand. And our goal, when the beginning, day one is to make baseball fun. And we said, we're going to go with it. But we knew we were going to get hit hard by embarrassment. We actually prepared our short little small little staff before. I was like, guys, when we start getting criticism, this is how we handle it.

And then we announced the team. And it was more criticism than you could ever imagine. We were getting booed in the streets when we'd wear gear. people would boo us that the town was so embarrassed that we would name the team the bananas. But nationally, Ed, it was like on sports center. It was on sports center. It got national attention. People were like, oh, this is a fun name. Is this the logo of the year? And people like, all right, you got to get attention first. And now we got to deliver on the experience. So we just got to opening day. We made every single ticket all inclusive. So think about this, Ed. Again, everything starts

for us. The name of our company is fans first entertainment. So every decision we make, we ask is their fans first. And so when we went into this, we said, all right, we got to get people that want to come to the shows, but maybe they're, you know, college summer baseball. They don't know what it is. They're not interested. Well, why don't we just make it the best value in the world? And then we wow them with the experience. So all your hamburgers, hot dogs, chicken sandwiches, soda, water, popcorn dessert all night long and your ticket, no ticket fees, no convenient fees, no service fees. We pay your taxes. $15 total. Dude. So that's, so that's what we announced in the beginning. We did that. So, so, and again,

we had no idea how to do it. And that's what people realized. Like, oh, you guys are doing some, you know, crazy little things. We don't know what we're doing until we do it. You're going to have this goal and this vision and just go do it and learn from it. And so we said, we're going to do it. And boy, did we learn that first night. We didn't know our fans were going through 10,000 pieces of meat in an hour, all right?

The lines were almost two to three hours. It was a really bad experience. But you need to be willing to get through the messy to get to the grate. And so what we learned with that day was like, all right, the vision of what it could be. you never pull money out of your pocket. Your kid would say, hey, mom, can I have a soda? Go, yeah, just go. Or can I go get a burger?

Yeah, just go. That is a frictionless experience. That is a fan's first experience. So we had what the vision was. We just didn't know how to execute it. So the next day, we put, we moved stanchions around. We put drinks first so people weren't just grabbing all their burgers and dogs. And we made it.

So now, even to this day, still in Savannah, all inclusive. Everyone can get fed within five minutes at any point at our stadium. And so that was a starting point. But that was, you know, we didn't wow them there. They were like, this is terrible. But at least they said there. getting it free. But they watched as the banana nanas danced. They watched as we lifted a baby in a banana costume up in the air and saying, no, Sabanian, I'm not here to start the game. They watched

our players went into the crowd to deliver roses to little girls in the middle of the game. They watched an experience that they'd never seen before. At that moment, everything changed. We didn't have to market again. And this is an honest, true story. Since that day, we have spent zero on marketing. You're literally blowing my mind. You're literally blowing my mind. I want you all to listen, if you're driving in your car right now, you lean in. You are now in one of the great business podcasts you will ever hear in your life. Just what he, no, guys, as a real entrepreneur who scaled and built a bunch of businesses, okay? We're having a real one right now.

You're going to take a ton of lessons. I want to go back. I want to unpack a couple things so far. Why didn't you quit? Think about the last time you called a business and nobody picked up. What did you do? You know what you did? you called the next one and your customers are doing the same thing.

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I've got to ask that question. And it's funny because I got to ask questions about regrets and all that. I never think like that. You got $30 of groceries a day. Hang on, $30. You're three months married. Two people bought tickets. You did not think about quitting.

You're telling me? What are the options? We had bought, we owed all this money. We were in it. We had kids that just came out of college and their parents were trusting us to make sure that their kids took this job that we'd take care of. them. We had a 24-year-old president that left a minor league job to lead this team. We had a responsibility. And so my mindset was like, we got to get the next day. How can we get to convince a few people to buy tickets? What can we do the next day? How can we get a few more people? How can we

get to opening night so we can at least show them? We had an obligation. We owed so much money to the league and to our debt and everything else that we had. We had to get to that opening night. There was no option of quitting. By the way, everyone, this is just 10 years ago. This isn't like 30 years ago. So this also goes to show you you do some of the lessons that we're going to go through here that this man and his team have employed in their business. Stuff could get going. First things first. When I think of you, is it unreasonable hospitality? Is that the book? Of well, well, I brought him in to speak to my RTA group with Andy Fersela and I and it was one of my first introductions. And I'm like, I'm actually sort of convinced that customer experience has always been

the most important thing, but now with AI marching its way towards us. Can you just talk about, you call it fans first, but some of you don't have fans. You should, but you have customers who you would, if you were really smart in your business, you'd make raving fans based on the experience. But preach and teach us lessons here as entrepreneurs. We're at Harvard Business School with you right now and your yellow tucks, right? Yeah. What does customer experience mean? How important is it? And how does an entrepreneur who's good at it think? It's everything. It's the difference. And everything starts with us.

Our name of our company is fans first entertainment. Every decision we ask, does it make fans? Does it create fans? And so, yeah, I believe especially now with AI and the need, I think there's going to be huge pushback. I think AI's here and it's going to be here and it's everything. But like human connection, we need that. We crave that. There's a difference there.

And so we invest heavily in that. So you think about it, customers are transactional. They come and go. Fans. Fans are different. God, so good. So good. The future of business is not how many customers you have.

It's how many fans you have. Oh, my gosh. So you think about this. What does a fan look like? Here, I'll give me an example. You know, right now, every game that we have, wherever we have, we have fans come in from either 30, from 38 on the low end up to 46 states, six to seven countries.

They wait four or five years and they come in. And when they come in and you see them and they show tattoos of our logos. I have one fan. This is hilarious. He's got, we add new teams. We have six teams now, which is crazy. All of them have sold out everywhere they go, including Major League Stadiums. And after like the third team we had, this guy comes up and he comes up to me,

he goes, Jesse, you got to stop adding teams. I keep having to add all these tattoos. I go, dude, that's a you problem. That's a you problem. That's how he feels about what we're doing. I had a family come up to me after a game and husband, wife, two kids. And they said, man, this was so, you know, we drove into town from this. Like, oh, where'd you come from? They go, we drove from Utah. We drove 40 hours from Utah, and we're driving 40 hours back tomorrow. In my mind, I'm like, what is wrong with you? but they wanted to have the whole experience. They want to go all in.

My point is, like, there's a difference in a fan. They will go past everywhere else to go to you, how they will skip every other option that's similar to you to go to you. And when things go wrong, they will defend you. Great example. Last year, we made the biggest, most costly mistake as a company. We sent an email I was supposed to go out to 4,000 people. We had an opportunity for some tickets in Savannah to our wait list.

We sent it out to 44,000 instead. I'm flying, Ed. forget this. I'm flying. I land and there's message after message. I'm getting blown up. People ripping me apart, the company apart. Me, they call my president. What happened? They said, you know, we made a mistake. We sent the email out to too many people. They all expected to get tickets or have an opportunity to get tickets. They couldn't. So what do we do? Immediate apology. But then it's immediately say, hey, we are going to take care of you on us. Any game in the country on us. That cost

$6 million because over $100,000 plus tickets. And then we said, and then they weren't showing up some, Ed, because it was free, free ticket. So then we actually offered to buy them back from them and they never even paid for them just so we could get them to people that would come. So that's, and then now, every day, every game, I have someone that was a part of that. And they give me how to say,

we're a fan for life because of that. Oh, my gosh. What will you do when you, what do you stand for as a company? Do you stand for making money? You stand for creating fans. If you create fans, you will drive more money than you ever imagined about.

But that's not what it's about. So every decision we make, no matter what, it's about the fans. It's why every game is free on YouTube, no matter what. It's why there's no, ticket fees, no convenience fees, no service fees. That's why there's no shipping fees. It's why every decision, like everything is guided by that. And it's helped drive us more

than to a different level than we ever imagined. Less than one. You guys got to stop having customers and develop fans. Number two, you got to stand for something. That's a $6 million check to write. That's easy to say on a podcast. That's totally different to actually do in real life, you guys. How do, now I'm, let's let's step out. I don't have a baseball. That's more money than the team brought in the first seven years to give me an idea. When we You're just a coastal playing college summer team. That's more money than we brought in each year for seven years. Now, obviously, these differences are playing in front of millions of fans.

But that gives you a context of what that looked like for us. Massive. My gosh. Okay, so help us all. I don't have a baseball team. Let's say I'm listening. I'm a realtor. I sell life insurance.

I got a dry cleaners. You know, I have a supplement company. How do I create the experience? Meaning, how do you think? Do you sort of like literally walk in this? stadium in the shoes of the fan and then create from there? How should the person listening to this begin to develop an experience? Because a lot of them will go, well, baseball game, that's an experience. Closing a mortgage, that's not an experience. And you're wrong. Yes, it is an experience

because that's where the referrals will come from, et cetera. So how does this entrepreneur think about creating that experience from where out? Well, two things. I truly believe the starting point of all innovation starts from putting yourself in the customer's shoes and asking what are the friction points in the experience. So let's look at some of the most innovative companies in 20, 30 years. You think of Uber, all right? Where the friction points in the cab experience? You think about Netflix. Were there friction points in the blockbuster experience? You know, you think about all of these. And so for us, we are at whatever company you're in, a realtor, what are the things that people hate about the experience as buying a house, selling a house? What are

the process, a dry cleaner, what do people don't like about it? And when you start there, it's crazy because I'm a very positive guy. I realize baseball, to many, it was too long, too slow, and too boring. So we look at every single part of the game. And that's why we develop banana ball. So what's crazy right now, Ed is I started writing out ideas in 2018. I've learned this, you know, Hal Elrod helped me a lot with this, Miracle Morning, and it's just writing every day. And I started writing 10 ideas a day. And I looked at baseball and I said, what are the boring parts of baseball? I said, mound visits. No one in the world gets excited for a mound.

Oh, I hope they have a lot of mound visits today. I'm hoping for at least three to four mound visits, and I'm going to get my money's worth. Right. No one wants that. Or like, I remember watching a major league game back in the day, the Dodgers, Yassil Pueig, if you remember, Yassil Pueig. And I was watching and he'd step out of the box and work on his batting gloves. And I started timing it and was taking 25 to 30 seconds in between every pitch. It was a three minute, a bad, and it wasn't even in the box.

Gosh. And then I was, I was like, huh, what else? I was like, what else? I was like, walks. This is an athletic sport. And there's a play called a walk and you just slowly jog where nothing really happens. Boring, all right? And I was like, what else?

The games are over three hours. This is when I started writing this. I was like, we just need a two-hour time game. And I actually was filming our fans. So people don't realize, we talk videotape and pictures of our crowd every 30 minutes from when they got in for an entire season. Because you can ask surveys of people. You know, you can ask surveys.

And this is one of the reason Steve Jobs is so against surveys. They'll say one thing. act watch what they do there's a difference we watched at nine o'clock good influx of people started leaving two hours in nine 30 good luck it was a lot more no matter what we could have fireworks we could have a show it was just around that two hour point so I said we're going to make a two hour game

and everyone said Jesse you can't the average game's three hours I go we're going to make a two hour game because our fans are showing it and you want them to want more not less there's no one that goes to a movie and said how was the movie oh it was a great movie I left in the middle When you create a customer experience, a fan experience, how do you always create something that they'll want more? You've got to build your whole experience from when they first walk in to when they leave.

So the friction points, too long, too slow, too boring, nonstop entertainment. You get nickel and dimes, all right? No ticket fees, no convenient fees, no service fees. People don't realize this. All our tickets right now are $40, $50, and $60. On the secondary market, they're going for $300 to $1,000. We can sell so much more, but you don't because you want to keep having it to create fans, not to create more revenue.

Long-term fans over short-term profit. It's a big difference there. And that's how we guide everything. Oh, my gosh. I don't get excited that much when I'm hearing business conversations. This is as good as it gets. I'm just going to tell you. Go back one more thing.

You said early on you had to get attention. Yeah. You got it because the experience was so good. It exploded. Would you say that to like a little bit? local realtor or someone who's got a supplement company, you also need to somehow work on getting attention, like people knowing you exist. Everybody has a marketing plan, okay?

Who has an attention plan? There's a big difference. Attention beats marketing 1,000% of the time. When you look at, you know, very fortunate, I think between our teams, we're over 40 million now, social media followers. Every week, we try to create something on a baseball field that people have never seen before. And then we capture it and we share it. We're not out there saying, come to our baseball games.

We're saying we're going to create a remarkable moment and capture that. And that might create attention. You know, like, for instance, like, we had a guy show up to our tryouts many years ago. And he was an average ball player. And at the end of the tryout, he said, hey, I brought my stilts. Do you want me to wear him? I go, not really. And he goes, really?

I go, unless you can hit him them. He goes, I can hit him. No way. I didn't know this. He had never hidden stilts in his life. But this kid. I love the guy. So bold and courageous.

He's like, I'm going to do it. He puts on his stilts, which he had, they were like old stilts when I was a kid. He had like dog collars tying around. It was the most unsafe stilts you could ever have on. He goes into the batters box and I watch the first pitch, he hits a line drive. And everyone stopped what they were doing and they watched. And I remember right after we're having a meeting with the coaches. And the coaches were like, all right, we got our rosters.

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

Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh. So, okay, I'm processing what you just said. I'm actually thinking of one of my businesses where these points are of inflection are that are just so their constraints to actually scale in it. You're just making me really think for a second. By the way, he has two books. One's called Fans First. The other is called Find Your Yellow Tucks. I think that's all I need to say based on listening to him so far. I think you guys are going to want to get the books. How about this? I'm watching you. I was talking about this was John Gordon, who you know as well today. There's a little invisible thing that I think great entrepreneurs do in their businesses. And I know you'll take none of the credit, but I want you to take a little credit.

on this or explain it, okay? You bring monster energy to the table, no pun intended. Like there's an energy, you bring an appropriate energy relative to the type of business you're in. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs go, okay, I got my scaling plan, I got my get attention plan, I got my marketing plan, we're working on the experience. And then they don't pay attention to their own personal energy

they bring to meetings, to strategy, to the client, to everything. You have that. Are you conscious of it? How important is it? I used to not have it. I know people think, no way. There was a big aha that happened for me. And I think a lot of people, we talk about it with our team all the time now,

everyone says, Jesse, you have so much energy. And they go, why? I go, because I do what gives me energy. And they go, what do you mean? I go, I do every day what gives me energy. And that brings more energy out of me. And they go, what are you talking about? I go, when I was running that Gastonia team, there was three of us running an entire team.

Yes. Every day, I would go out. and I'd sell sponsorship, which I don't do anymore. I don't even, that's a whole other mindset. I don't believe people wake up and say, I want to be advertised to or I want to be marketed to today. So that's a whole other mindset of friction that we're working on. That's why we eliminated all the ads from our stadium in Savannah,

which is absolutely crazy. So, but yes, oh yeah, which is, I mean, we do things on conventional because every decision comes from, is it fans first? And I don't think any fan comes to a stadium says, I want to see a lot of billboards at their stadium. Or I want to get announcements telling me to go here or do this or do that. They want to be entertained. So we'll throw away hundreds of millions of dollars now to do what's best for our fans.

But my point was back then I was doing that at it. I was selling sponsorship. I was like, man, selling another sponsorship. Like, why am I doing this? I'm now in the concession stand. I'm working on food. I'm operations. I'm putting up signs and doing all this.

Every day I came home and I was exhausted. And then I realized, I looked back and said, what are my best days been? Ooh, all right. Here's my best days. I'm coming up with ideas. Come with the new promotions. I'm creating new things. I'm sharing.

I'm either out speaking to a local rotary, telling them these crazy things that we're doing, or I'm growing. I'm learning from someone like you. And believe me, I listen to more podcasts right behind me. I have thousands of books. Every day I learned what my energy list was. It's creating, sharing, and growing. And if I do things on my energy list, I'll show up the best I ever been.

Every day I'll show up. And at the end of the day, when I go with my kids, I am coming to be the best dad because I did what gave me energy all day. And as an entrepreneur, that can be really hard because you're doing a lot of different things. But once you become so good at what you do with your energy, you can start hiring people that that gives them energy. There are some people that love finances. Yeah. And I have one financial meeting a year and it's less than two hours. For the business that we are, and you can see what we're valued at and all that stuff, that is crazy.

But it doesn't give me energy. It's like what Walt Disney said, money doesn't excite me. Ideas excite me. That's what fires me up. So I think how you show up is also about what you do, what you do on a daily basis. is are you doing the things that give you energy? If you're not, do an energy audit. Find out how do you get someone else doing those things

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Obviously, I know his story well enough to know that the guy's failure rate was just massive forever until he was successful. But what do you model from him? What did you take? Like this is the big lesson. This is the big thing I got from Walt Disney. Well, there's two. There's, I mean, I've read so many, but there's two that I can take. One can be more on vision and the other one is more on the business side.

And so when you look vision and, you know, he said it's kind of fun to do the impossible. He always imagined what the perfect experience was and worked backwards from that. And so what most people do, they think like, all right, hey, this is a good, hey, this is a good industry band. This is a good opportunity. This is something that can win right now. Well, what is the ultimate best perfect version of? even work backwards. You know, when he said, he's the first one to come up with sound on animation, first one to add color. He had the multi-plane camera. He said, you know what? What if I create a full-length

animation film in Snow White? No one ever done that. He said, but we can do it in a different level. And he said, oh, what are normal amusement parks? You know, there's the carnies. They're dirty. They all have the same rides. There's no, there's no type of theme behind all of it. And he said, well, what's the perfect one? And then he said, you know, huh, all right, what about even when I'm eating a hot dog, you know, all right, what's, when I finish this, where should the trash can be based on the rabbit? He's like, this is the perfect experience. When I go on a ride, how long should it be? What's the land?

He just always imagined what the perfect experience and worked backwards from there. And it was never, ever about money. He was always obsessed with plusing the experience. That's our 11th fans first principle. We will always plus the experience. We will never settle with, that's good. You know, fine is the F bomb in our organization.

If you say that's fine, you're not going to be with us. Like, that's not what we do. And so that was, it's the vision of the guest experience. What he called the guest, obviously we look at fans. And then the next one from really strategic. strategic business, control, control. You want to see how a company is going to lose their way, they lose control. You want to see how it's going to happen?

Watch a company go IPO. Yeah. Over the next three, five years, watch when they bring in private investors. You know, watch with private equity. Watch what happens. So here's what happened to Walt. He learned this. Like, that's why I'm so grateful when things go wrong.

I am so grateful. I get fired up because Walt, he had some of the worst things that could happen. him. He literally created this unbelievable character, you know, the rabbit, Oswald. He created this character that was stolen from him by mince. He lost it. And then he lost his rights to MGM. He lost those. And he's like, oh, all right. And then he built Disneyland, his crown jewel. And then he lost everything around it, all the land. He called it the neon jungle. So what did he do? I'm going to buy 27,443 acres in Florida. I'm going to create my own government district, the Reedy Creek district. So I have complete control and no one can tell me what I can't do because I know what's best for my guess.

And I'm going to go all in on creating it. I'm not going to everyone else coming in to try to take away and make it about money. So give an example, what do we do? We run our ticketing system. We do all of our ticketing. We go to Yankee Stadium, Fenway Park. We sell the tickets. We built our own secondary ticket marketplace at our face value now as well with all tickets at face value.

No ticket fees, no convenience fees. We do our own broadcast. We run our own merchandise. we do everything in-house that we can control because we want to control the guest experience, the fan experience from when they first interact until the end, and that's how you create fans. As soon as you lose a little bit control,

as soon as you have someone from the outside that wants to make a little bit more money, you lose experience and you start losing fans. And so that I learned from Walt, and I'm obsessed with it. And it's control, not just for control sake, it's because that's how you create the best experience for fans when you can check everything,

from the first impression to the last impression. I just keep going to my head like stuff I want to ask you. So I want you to go back. You're a little throwback. Maybe it's the Disney influence. I don't know. You and I both know. And I talked about this with Hershevec from Shark Tank a few weeks ago.

He was on the show. And I'm like, I liked what the show's done. But I said, I think one of the huge problems that Shark Tank's created is entrepreneurs now start businesses to sell them. And as quickly as they can, they want to get investors and capital in there. take chips off the table. And that just causes you to do all kinds of stupid decisions. But what you just said that I had not thought about is the lack of control over the business. And so, you know this Instagram, Lamborghini, exits your business, take on investors,

dilute the shares, blah, blah, blah. And the other thing, too, I was telling my sons and my nephews this this weekend, do you know how many entrepreneurs you guys, you've heard, they exited for 400 million. Everyone thinks they got 400 million. I'm like, you don't know their debt, you don't know how much they diluted, you don't know how much private equity came in. We had a guy come in the sold his company for $900 million and he walked with 30 is actually what he got at one of our events. So now talk to these people who maybe they are moving forward a little bit and they're tempted to bring in some capital, not because they have to have it to scale, but because they want to take some chips off the table or that's just like the thing to do. I'm not going to take away.

I mean, everyone has their own goals and their own interests. And if you're trying to make a lot of money, you're trying to do, you know, you have your own goals. I'm not focused on the next quarter. I'm focusing on the next quarter century and beyond. So it's just a different. mindset. You know, I think if you look at history, you can just look at what happened. I mean, in all these companies, I mean, the story of Whole Foods and John Mackey, it's just, you know, it's amazing. So much heart into building Whole Foods. And then all of a sudden, you get private equity involved. You got things change. And in many ways, he said he was forced to, he was forced to sell the Amazon. It's not the same company. That's, that's, that's, to me, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a

tragedy. Because I think founders often, often start things with the right intention. There's a, there's a need, You know, I believe the world is hungry for more fun and more joy and to be brought together. And that's why we bring these people together all over the world and all over the country with banana ball. And so, yeah, I think, again, why are you starting something? You know, you go to the root of everything. You know, I was a, I was an only child. Parents got divorced and I was just always trying to look for, you know, joy and people and being around people and just fun. And I always wanted to feel that.

And I always had a little chip on my shoulder. You know, I always wanted to, you know, still a guy that wants to make his dad proud. But, you know, I feel something. You know, when you, at the end of a day, it's your great day because you sold something, or is it because of how you made people feel or the impact of your product? And so, again, I think it's intention on everything. But yeah, I just, if you look at the history of all, just go back through the history. There's very few companies.

Costco is one. But think about Costco what they did. He said, I'm going to keep that $1.50 hot dog value meal, no matter what. We've heard the story. They stay true to who they. are. And there's only a very small handful of those companies that stay true to who they are. And so, yeah, in the scheme of things, that's us. My wife and I, we own 100% of this team. You know, we are, we're not, we get, you know, and we've been valued at well over a billion dollars now. And it's like,

I don't care. I want to create a billion fans. I could care less about the dollar evaluation. I want to make sure all our people are taking care of. And if you look at our players, our cast and staff and everyone, it's at a high level. Take care of them. But make sure we do what drives us, what fires us up. And that's making people feel something. You wait three, four years on a list to come to our game. We want you to have the best night of your life. And we want to spread to your friends, to your neighbors, to your family. That joy, that fires us up. If you do that, everything else takes care of itself. Are you a psycho? Like, are you, uh, like, I mean, like competitively, too, like, I see the kind guy who's all about other people, but you and I both know. We, we know what

it takes to win. And typically, one of those little things in there for the great ones is there's a level of dog in them that you can't measure by looking at them. They got this heart of a champion thing, whether they're competitive with other people or they're competitive with their capacity or potential is. Like, take us in your personality a little bit. Extremely competitive. Extremely competitive, but not against anyone else. I don't even think about our competitors.

I'm extremely competitive against ourselves on how do we get better every single day. So here's an example. We're playing at Neeland Stadium, University of Tennessee 101,000. And we put on a great show. It was a great game. And a show, I mean, there was trick plays. I mean, 30 trick plays. It went down to the wire.

Home runs, walkoffs, all big dance elements. It was a great show. And I'm on top of the world. I'm having time of, I was in the upper deck for two innings because we always want to make sure we'd win the upper deck. So our cast and our character,

our players, we're all around. But I started hearing rumblings during the game, like the sound wasn't working in the upper deck. And we were like, and they were like, yeah, it's an old same, it doesn't work. I wasn't, I got home. And so, you know, we finished the show. We have, we stay until the last fan,

signed autographs. We do have a whole show. I mean, it goes late. We have our fans first talk 1 a.m. I get home in the hotel 132. And I start seeing the comments and the messages and the emails. Hundreds of people disappointed because they couldn't hear. I was devastated.

I didn't sleep that night. The next day I sent a personal video to every single fan that messaged me, every comment. I gave them a refund and a credit. I was devastated. And I went to our team and we said, what are we going to do? How can this not happen? We lost control. We didn't control the sound at the stadium. And so when you look at that, I look at that as a great moment in the scheme of things, because we're not going to let that happen again. And you have to go through those moments.

You've got to get through the messy to get to the great. People don't realize our first major league stadium in 2024 we played at Houston. Our ticket system completely shut down. There's a lot of reasons, let's just say it's shut down. And it was brutal. You better believe than the next game, we had Fort Knox behind it, and we were ready to go at Fenway Park. It didn't go down.

Our first game on ESPN, primetime television, the transmission went out. We went on this transmission, our first time on primetime television, went out. Every single time we do something big for the first time, we will have challenges, we'll have adversity. But what gets you up the next day?

What fires you up to get to the next day? next at bat. And so when we have those challenges, when we do things that haven't been done before, I mean, we now sell out cruise ships. We don't know how to do a cruise ship, entertain for five straight days. And there's things that go wrong. But if you have the mindset, we're going to compete ourselves, we've got to do and then learn. It's the people that are afraid to actually go out and do something. There's the one, those people that don't accomplish things. And so that competitiveness drives me every day. What are we going to do next that's never been done before? And how are we going to get through that adversity and challenge to get to that next at bat?

Because you get to the next at bat, watch out, because here we come. I love you, bro. Why has traditional sports not taken elements of what you're doing and juiced their own experience? Like, I mean, I know MLBs, they've shortened the at bats and all that, but like, I'm just curious as to your thoughts about it. It's just outside the picture, but like, usually imitation is the highest form of flattering. Like, you're packing places out. And like, for example, why aren't like these U.S. FLs or these secondary football, like, what are they thinking? Like, there's a model. Why do you think traditional MLB or NFL is not doing more of it?

And especially these other startup sports that are trying to be in the lane of their other sport, but not be like them. Why aren't they copying you or adding elements of it? Hard. It's really hard. You know what the easy way to grow in business? You increase prices. You start selling more sponsorship. You get bigger TV rights.

You increase your cost. You keep the prices on parking and concessions. You know what the hard way is? To keep prices the same like we do every year. Keep prices the same and try to drive a business. It's hard. It's hard at a 7 o'clock show to open the plaza with a rope drop at 2 o'clock and have all your players greeting the fans as they walk in from 2 to 3 o'clock.

It's hard to put an hour and a half show from 3 to 4.30 with all of our cast, all our performances, our DJs, our live bands. It's hard to have the entire team, out and meet every fan at 4.30 before you open the plaza. It's hard to have a two and a half hour pregame show with over a hundred different skits and promotions before the game starts. It's hard than to have a two-hour show where you're doing 10 to 15 things you've never done in front of a live crowd every single night. It's hard than to have a post-game plaza party for over an hour with all new entertainment as fans are leaving. And then it's hard to stay to the

last fan leaves and sign autographs. It's extremely hard. That's why it's... Bro, masterclass. By the way, some of you are 90% were through with this interview and you still don't even know what we're talking about. And so what I mean by as a league, go just check out the banana baseball championship league. Get on the ticket list. You will have, guys, you can already tell. By the way, for no other reason than to support a great American entrepreneur and his family and his team. But for your own family to have the experience of your life, it's just, you've all seen some clip on Instagram, right?

Of the guys dancing on the mound or doing a backflip when they throw a guy out at first, that's these guys. and that's like a millimeter of 1% of what they do. You said earlier, fine is not okay. I got a couple more questions for you. And I've loved this, bro, by the way, anything I can ever do for you. I mean it. I would love to support you. Not that you need it, but I'm here to support you.

You're a treasure. But, you know, okay, I know people. There's some people listening and go, I already kind of check those boxes. Like, we're really good on the customer experience, man. We got it. Fans first. Yeah, we got it. Check the box.

Yeah, bring your energy. Got it. You know, be competitive. Got it. And I don't think they get that there's levels to this game. So you have come up with a recipe and a formula that is working from that two hour before the game to shaking the last hand at 1.30, right? Having said that, here's my hallucination. I think you're constantly still looking at the process to innovate and make it better.

And I think the average entrepreneurs like, we got it. Whereas you are constantly reevaluating. Listen, everyone. most people reevaluate when it's not working great entrepreneurs which is my suspicion of what jesse's going to say they're evaluating and tweaking when it is working would you agree with me that that's the difference and do you do that yeah we've an lCP so every single night learn change plus every night every single night we meet with our departments so so you know like we have and i i share this you know i learned this from bezos i you know his shareholder letters i think are a masterclass on how he

thought about Amazon, which is just very fascinating about long-term thinking, customer service. So I said, I'm just going to, we're not a public company. We have no obligation to share all our numbers, what we're doing, who we are. But I did it in 2026. I'm going to continue it every year. I have a video out and I wrote all the things. And, you know, I share, hey, you know, there's a world where all of our fans have to be served merchandise within 10 to 15 minutes. It is almost impossible right now because at one of our games, you know, we could have, say, a major league stadium. We're having 15 to 20,000 people, people buying merchandise, all within a couple hours. It's impossible.

But that is our, what are we going to do? How are we going to add this? What do we do here? How do we add this? What do we get this over here? We just keep looking at every option. Our show, which is our biggest differentiator, you know, sports are always focused on the competitive. We are competitive. You never know who's going to win. Like, it's a league. But our show is our differentiator. We look at every single music block. What comes in? What's the promotion? What's the sound? What's the blocking? What's the timing? How do we come off from the inning? How do we go right into it? How is there no dead air any moment? And so learn, change

plus. So we'll have, at the end of the night, we have reports sent from our show. We also merchandise, they'll send one. The broadcast is unbelievable because that's an area which we haven't spent much time on, but we're investing $13 million this year in our own broadcast so we can control it. They sent a whole detail, learn change plus on how to get better. And it's that mindset of your constantly improving, continuous improvement, that we know we're never going to have a perfect show. But each day we get a little bit closer. And I think that's that obsessiveness that drives us and we get fired up and we just hit one more thing. one more thing.

We got a little bit better tonight, and it's a little bit of better show. And that's our goal. I want a fan who came to a show two years ago and say, oh my goodness, it's not even close. This is 100 times better. Because if you look at history, Ed,

we learned a lot of the Globetrotters. I have a lot of respect that they're going 100 years, but they've also kept the show pretty similar. And they said, you know what? It's, hey, we're going to do the, here comes to the confetti. Here comes the slow motion. That scares the crap out of me.

And, you know, people don't realize. The Globetrotters, the 1940s and 50s, They were the most popular sports team in the world. And it wasn't even close. They sold 75,000 tickets in Berlin. They were selling out Madison Square Garden multiple times. Will Chamberlain chose to play for them before going for the Lakers. They even beat the Lakers in a game with George Miking.

And then something happened. They said, you know what? Oh, this is good. Let's just replicate that. Let's just make another Globe Charter's team and another Glob Charter's team. And we know what a good show is and do the same show over and over and over again. That lesson sits on me every single day. And especially when someone says you're like the Globe Charters,

I go, oh, yeah, hey, 100 years is great. I have so much respect. That's amazing. Not many companies make it 100 years. I don't want to be the Globetrotters. I want to be doing things in 10, 20, 30, 100 years. You never imagined in sports. You never imagine from an event.

And that's the innovation that drives me and drives our organization. Yeah, you're going to do it. By the way, my book's called The Power of One More. So I love that it's one more, one more, one more. I love that. By the way, now he's fired up. He's like going side to side. You know, the other thing a great entrepreneur does,

and people think, oh, you're helping him promote what he does charitably. It's not. I believe that great entrepreneurs, great people are wired to give back immediately. And it's something I evaluate in my friends that if you've had God's blessings and great grace in your life, you know, what are you doing outside of the business but connected to it that shows that you're giving back? Because I think that indicates humility, which means you're going to have some longevity. Never mind the fact, but just doing something good is important. And so you and your wife and the company have Bananas Foster, which is just the best name for a charity.

Just tell us what you and Emily are doing with it because I'm actually really interested in helping too. So what do you guys do? Thank you. So my wife, she's the heart of this company. You know, as I'm constantly focusing on innovating, she's constantly thinking about our people. And every day she thinks about our people. And she grew up in a very close family. And in 2020, she shared with me, she goes, Jesse, do you know,

know there's 400,000 kids in the U.S. who don't have a permanent home. And I go, what are you talking about? She goes, foster care. She goes, Jesse, we got to do something. And we had our two-year-old, you know, son at that point. She said, Jesse, we got to do something. And so she shared with me and said, let's get licensed. So in the middle of COVID, we got licensed. We had a two-and-a-year-old girl joined us and going through some challenges in adversity. And, you know, the goal in foster care is always reunification, get the kids back to their family. And with her case, Kenna, that that wasn't an option. And then about a little less than a year later, a girl, a six-day-old baby who was in the NICU battling everything, we got the call and she joined us. And again, reunification wasn't the

perfect scenario there. And so those two girls joined in our family and amazing girls, and watching their journey has been one of the most rewarding things I've ever experienced. But as we did that, and Emily said, Jesse, we experienced it for two or three years foster care, the challenges with DSS, the challenges with everything. They're low staffed and just not many families are, I mean, we have families in our community that have bringing in 10 kids at once because no one else wants to do it. She said, Jesse, we got to do something. And I was like, well, what is our, you know, big goal and what we do with banana balls? Let's bring people together.

Well, what's more powerful than bringing a family together? And so we thought about this. And we remember we were walking, having a long walk. And I share with her. I go, what if it's called bananas foster? And she goes, well, that's a good name. I go, what are we going to do? And I said, well, again, start with whatever's normal do the exact opposite.

How do most nonprofits start? They talk about all the bad, all right? And then they share that. what about honoring the good? And so going the opposite way. So we said, what if? How many people out there do I actually know these hero foster families that are doing everything they can for years with no accolades, no recognition, and it's extremely hard?

How do we honor them? So we said, well, what if at every game, we find a foster family in that community that's really made a huge difference. And we tell their story. We bring them out on the field. we have all the players go out to them, give them flowers and have a moment. And can you imagine the whole stadium standing to give a standing ovation to this family for what they did and recognizing them? And by doing that every single night, do you think that will get some more families that are interested in being a part of that?

And so three years ago, we started doing it. And it is every single game, we have six teams, multiple all around the country. Every game in the middle of the game, we honor our family. Maybe they've had 150 kids through their home. They've helped 10 families reunite. They've adopted 12 kids. They're part of the foster care system, all this. And I watch people not being told to stand, just stand and get big standing ovations.

And I told Emily, I said, Emily, this is going to be a long journey. 400,000 kids without a permanent home. But think about this. We only sold two tickets when we started the Savannah bananas. And now we have a wait list approaching five million for tickets. What if in 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years, there's a wait list in this country of families that want to become foster families. my goal and that's the vision. Bro, you're special.

You're special. I just got to tell you. It's like, I don't know if I ever done a better podcast. By the way, how many of you raise your hands think Jesse and I should buy the Red Sox together? Come on. At some point. What can we do together?

Bro, thank you for teaching us today. And it makes me feel good that you exist. And I want to support your business. I want to support your mission. I want to support your cause. and I really admire you. Thank you. I really admire you, bro.

And I introduced you as a, one of the great American entrepreneurs, and I mean it. And you actually made me even feel stronger about that after having a great conversation with you. There's the only thing I ask of you, about every 18 months, 24 months, I'll like you just come back on.

Love to, love to. And I mean this. I look up to you and what you've done and showing up constantly over and over again for so many years. And that's the difference. So I appreciate you. And this was truly one of the most enjoyable conversations I've ever had.

So thank you. Yeah, bro. So awesome. Everybody, you need, if you have anybody in your life who is inclined to start a business or is currently involved in one in any way, they need to listen to this last hour. And I also think you should go get both of his books. And this is the real stuff today. I'm actually, I never get to the end of the show where I'm actually a bit emotional just

because I'm really grateful that you exist, bro. I've said this twice now because I want entrepreneurs to do it the right way and to do it ethically and to give back and to bring an energy and an innovation. How about that, guys? What does everybody else do and do the exact opposite? Like just so good, bro. So anything else you want to send them to, direct them to where they can get more info on you or the company or anything? No, I mean, we're out there. Like I said, we try to keep every game free on YouTube.

We keep all our stuff out there. We just believe in sharing and bring joy to the world. So however, we're very easy to connect with. Let's put it that way. All right, God bless you, everybody. Share this episode. Max out. This is the Edmireland Shaw.