Jesse Cole & Savannah Bananas
The most interesting fact about Jesse Cole is not that he built a billion-dollar sports franchise. It is that he spent eight years failing at it first.
From 2008 to 2016, Cole ran the Gastonia Grizzlies, a team that drew 200 fans per game and had 1 million in annual revenue. He got exactly one media story in a decade. Most people would call this a waste of time. Cole calls it his laboratory.
During those years, he ran a grandma beauty pageant. He staged a “Dig to China Night.” He fired his mascot for “Bear Growth Hormone.” He experimented obsessively with what makes people laugh, what makes them return, what makes them tell their friends. None of it worked well enough to matter financially. All of it worked well enough to teach him something.
The Economics of Attention
Cole operates on a principle that sounds obvious until you watch how few businesses actually follow it: attention comes before everything else.
“I believe attention beats marketing 1,000% of the time.”
When the Savannah Bananas launched in 2016, locals hated the name. The team got booed marching through the St. Patrick’s Day parade. A 62-year-old nurse had submitted “Bananas” to a naming contest, and Cole picked it over safer options because he understood something counterintuitive: controversy generates conversation, and conversation generates tickets.
The math proved him right. Within months, the team had national press coverage. Within a year, they sold out their stadium. Today, more than 3 million people sit on a waitlist for tickets, and the Bananas have 10 times more TikTok followers than the New York Yankees.
The Fans First Inversion
Most sports teams optimize for two customers: broadcasters and sponsors. Cole eliminated both.
The Bananas have no sponsorships. They turned down TV deals. They built their own ticketing system, their own merchandise warehouse, their own broadcast operation. This leaves tens of millions of dollars on the table annually. Cole estimates that adding sponsors, TV partnerships, and shipping fees would generate $50-100 million immediately.
He has no interest.
The logic runs like this: sponsors and broadcasters do not attend games. Fans do. Every decision that prioritizes a sponsor over a fan creates friction that compounds over time. A beer company logo on the outfield wall seems harmless. But it leads to discussions about placement, which leads to contractual obligations, which leads to decisions made for the wrong reasons.
Instead, the Bananas charge $25 per ticket. That price includes all fees, all taxes, and all-you-can-eat concessions. They pay the sales tax for fans rather than passing it through. The result is a business that serves exactly one customer.
Their internal company is literally named “Fans First Entertainment.” They codified 11 principles (watch full explanation):
- Fanatical about the fan
- Entertain always
- Play the long game
- Whatever’s normal, do the exact opposite
- Ideas are everything
- Constantly curious
- Everything speaks
- Fewer things done better
- Relentlessly resourceful
- Uphold the highest standards
- Always Plus the Experience
The seventh principle comes directly from Walt Disney, who obsessed over details guests would never consciously notice but would feel in their bones. Cole applies it to everything from bathroom cleanliness to the font on signage.
The 27-Second Problem
Cole brought a stopwatch to baseball games and timed them. He discovered that between the moment a pitcher starts his windup and the moment a ball is hit or a strike is called, roughly 27 seconds pass. That 27 seconds includes batters stepping out of the box, pitchers shaking off signs, and coaches visiting the mound.
Traditional baseball accepts this pacing. Cole saw it as the reason attendance has declined for decades.
So he invented Banana Ball, a variant of baseball with 11 rules designed around one insight: the game must serve the audience, not the players.
The rules include:
- Games cannot exceed 2 hours
- Batters cannot step out of the box
- No mound visits
- If you bunt, you are ejected
- Foul balls caught by fans count as outs
- If tied after 9 innings, a 1-on-1 showdown decides the winner
The number 11 is intentional. K is the 11th letter of the alphabet. K is also the symbol for potassium. Bananas are famously high in potassium. This is the kind of detail that matters to exactly no one and delights everyone who notices.
The Idea Machine
Since 2016, Cole has written 10 ideas every day in dedicated notebooks. He estimates 70-80% are terrible. The practice is not about quality; it is about volume.
“You got to work your idea muscle.”
The organization runs on a production schedule modeled after Saturday Night Live. Every Tuesday, staff submit “OTT” ideas (Over The Top) by midnight. At 10am Wednesday, the team reviews them. By 4pm, they table-read the best ones. Every single game features 10-15 promotions that have never been done before.
They test new ideas with a group called VIB (Very Important Bananas) before rolling them out broadly. The feedback loop is tight enough that they can iterate mid-season.
David Novak, the former CEO of Yum Brands, told Cole he was “one of the greatest parallel thinkers I’ve ever seen.” The compliment captures something important. Cole studies the Grateful Dead’s policy of letting fans record shows. He studies MrBeast’s international dubbing strategy. He studies Taylor Swift’s 3-hour-45-minute concert sets. Then he adapts what he learns to baseball.
His morning routine follows Hal Elrod’s Miracle Morning framework: read first, because input affects output. Then write. Then generate ideas. He calls it “create before you consume.”
The Struggle Season
In January 2016, three months after getting married, Cole and his wife Emily ran out of money. It was January 15th at 4:45pm. They had nothing left.
Emily suggested selling their house. They did. They moved into a garage and slept on a twin air mattress. Their grocery budget was $30 per week, calculated to cover exactly 42 meals.
“She got an airbed, a twin airbed. We realized that we could only grocery shop with just 20 bill and a $10 bill into Walmart for 42 meals.”
Cole frames this period not as suffering but as education. Walt Disney went bankrupt before creating Disneyland. P.T. Barnum lost everything multiple times. The struggle season, in Cole’s telling, is when the foundation gets built.
Emily, who Cole met at a Cal Ripken Baseball conference, became the first employee and co-owner. Her boss had told her that day, “I just met your future husband.” The prediction proved accurate in ways no one anticipated.
The World Builder
Cole is not building an empire. He is building a world.
The distinction matters. Empires expand through conquest and acquisition. Worlds expand through imagination and detail.
The Bananas are planning a theme park called Bananaland. Each team they create connects to a future themed land in that park. The Loco Beach Coconuts will have a beach-themed area. The Indianapolis Clowns, a historic Negro League team they are reviving, will have a 1940s-50s circus theme with contortionist batboys, juggling vendors, and a human cannonball.
This is not baseball with entertainment added. This is entertainment that happens to include baseball.
“We’re building a sport. We are completely misunderstood. People think we are the Harlem Globetrotters.”
The comparison to the Harlem Globetrotters frustrates Cole because it misses the ambition. The Globetrotters play exhibition games. The Bananas are creating a new sport they believe children will play on playgrounds.
The Metrics That Matter
Cole has one financial meeting per year. He does not track revenue daily or monthly.
Instead, he tracks:
- How long fans wait in merchandise lines
- How fast fans get fed (goal: 5 minutes; achieved in Savannah)
- Trick plays per game
- Game duration
These are the metrics that matter to customers. Revenue is a lagging indicator of customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction is a leading indicator of revenue.
The approach requires ownership. Cole and Emily own 100% of the business. They have taken zero outside investment. He explained the logic simply: shareholders would push for easy wins. Charge shipping fees. Add sponsors. Take the TV deals.
“If a shareholder would say, ‘Start charging taxes, start doing shipping fees, start having more sponsorship, take the huge TV partnerships,’ there’d be easy probably 100 million just like that. That doesn’t interest me.”
The Long Game
In 2024, the Bananas drew 2 million fans. They filled football stadiums with 81,000 people. They are planning events at 100,000-seat venues like Kyle Field and Neyland Stadium.
The business is estimated to generate 1 billion. Cole has no plans to sell.
His vision is simple and vast: there will be a world where the first ball a child picks up is a yellow Banana Ball. There will be a world where Banana Ball is played globally.
Whether this happens is unknowable. What is knowable is that Cole spent eight years toiling in obscurity, lost everything, rebuilt from nothing, and now operates one of the most valuable sports franchises built in the last decade.
Sam Parr put it this way: “If there was a Nobel Prize for business, we need to give it to this guy.”
The statement sounds hyperbolic until you study what Cole actually built. Then it starts to sound measured.
Key Principles
Whatever is normal, do the exact opposite. If baseball games are slow, make them fast. If tickets have hidden fees, make pricing transparent. If players ignore fans, have them stay two hours after games for autographs.
Control everything. Cole builds ticketing, merchandise, broadcast, and entertainment in-house. It leaves money on the table and quality on the field.
Ideas are a practice. Ten ideas a day, every day, for a decade. Most are bad. The muscle matters more than any single rep.
Metrics follow customers. Track what customers experience, not what accountants count.
The struggle season teaches. Eight years of failure. Selling a house. Sleeping on an air mattress. These are not obstacles. They are tuition.
Sources
- The (Improbable) Story of Savannah Bananas’ Rise to a $1B Empire — Full interview with Jesse Cole
- He turned a broke team into a billion dollars — Sam and Shaan analysis episode