Sam and Shaan do a Billy of the Week on Jesse Cole and the Savannah Bananas — a baseball entertainment company that grew from $268 in a checking account and a near-empty stadium to a 3-million-person waitlist, ~$100M in revenue, and a valuation approaching a billion dollars. They dig into Jesse’s origin story, his philosophy of fan-first entertainment, “Banana Ball” rules, and the broader lessons around showmanship, unreasonable hospitality, and hiring people who are “down.”
Speakers: Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host)
Intro: Billy of the Week — Savannah Bananas [00:00:00]
Shaan: All right, this episode is a Billy of the Week. Me and Sam are so inspired by this one story, this one entrepreneur. I’m almost slightly intimidated, Sam, by the story. It’s like, oh my god, the bar has been raised of what I need to go do.
Sam: The person we talked about — I pray this makes it to them and I pray that they come on the pod. After listening to this, you’re going to agree that we have to get them on.
Shaan: Amen.
Sam: Also, the last two minutes of this podcast, we need you guys to listen. We left you guys a message.
Shaan: Yes. All right, enjoy.
The Business That Made Sam Write “Deserves a Billion Dollars” in All Caps [00:00:30]
Sam: This is the most inspiring business that I saw when I was looking at the world of sports. There were a lot of things that made a lot of money. This one not only makes a lot of money — I literally in my notes wrote down in all caps: this guy deserves a billion dollars.
Shaan: I want to be like him.
Sam: I don’t even think I’ve ever had that thought before. Right? There are a lot of people who hate billionaires. I don’t — I’m not like that at all. I think it’s great, you know, create a successful business. But I’ve never heard a story and thought, “God damn, we need to give…” It’s like if there was a Nobel Prize for business, we need to give it to this guy.
Shaan: This guy we’re going to talk about — it’s one of these stories that I think I know all about and then I go do a deep dive and I’m like, so much better than I thought.
Sam: Yeah. So much more to know.
Shaan: It’s also one of those stories where I almost didn’t want to talk about it because I thought everyone has already talked about it, but it’s just too good and there’s more to it than I even realized. And I want to have him on. So I was like, should we tell the whole story? Well, whatever. Got to do it.
Okay, here we go. We’re talking about Savannah Bananas. This is a business in baseball. The story is pretty incredible. Should we tell it from beginning, middle to end, or where should I start?
Sam: Yeah, let’s give an origin story and then where they are now.
Shaan: Okay. Actually, I’ll start with where they are, then we’ll go to the origin story.
Where They Are Now: 3 Million Waitlist, ~$100M Revenue [00:01:45]
Shaan: The where they are now is the most impressive metric: they have a 3-million-person waiting list to buy tickets to their events. You can’t buy a ticket if you want to. You basically have to win the lottery to go to their event. And that’s kind of — you know, this is a business that’s probably worth close to a billion dollars, based on what I could tell. And it’s about a hundred million in revenue.
Sam: I think they do between 70 and 100 million in revenue is my guess. I don’t know what that would be worth, but it’s definitely plausible that it will be worth a billion dollars soon, if it’s not already.
Shaan: They have more followers on TikTok and social media than every single professional baseball team, including the Yankees and the Red Sox and the Dodgers —
Sam: — combined. All MLB teams combined, these guys have more engagement. So it’s a very, very impressive business.
Okay, so what’s the origin story of the Savannah Bananas?
Jesse Cole’s Origin: From Bench Player to Baseball Innovator [00:02:45]
Shaan: So it starts with this guy Jesse. Jesse’s the founder. He’s himself a college baseball player. He wants to go, wants to make it, and I think he gets onto a college summer team or a minor league team.
Sam: Cape Cod. It’s called the Cape Cod Summer League. It’s like the premier summer league for amateur baseball.
Shaan: And “premier” is so generous. Like, that’s like saying we’re the premier podcast in the world. There’s Major League Baseball, then there’s AAA, double-A, single-A, then there’s another thing, and then there’s college summer league under all of that.
Sam: Does me filming this from my bedroom not scream “premiere”? Sam in his mother’s bedroom or something. I don’t know what’s going on.
Shaan: So he’s playing, and basically as he moves up in competition, he’s benched. He’s not good enough to play. There are better players. And he realizes while he’s sitting on the bench — “Man, the sport I loved and built my life around, had so much fun doing… when you’re watching, it’s pretty boring. It’s really fun for the 10 guys out there, but damn, baseball’s pretty boring to watch.”
Sam: He said one story. He goes, “I’m on the team and I’m supposed to be like in it, and this is so boring. What is going on?”
The Gastonia Grizzlies: $268 in the Checking Account [00:04:00]
Shaan: Yeah. So he just has this realization. Anyways, he gets his first job as general manager for a college summer league team called the Gastonia Grizzlies. Not even the Savannah Bananas yet. He gets to manage this team. Now, you might think, “Well, how does this young kid get to be the GM of a college summer league team?” Well, the team averaged 200 fans per game and had $268 in the checking account. So the team was basically on the brink. He comes on. He’s not even going to get paid at the beginning.
And so he immediately starts hustling like any entrepreneur does. He starts thinking, “All right, how are we going to turn this around? We’ve got to get fans to come to the game, buy tickets. We’ve got to sell merch. What are we going to do?” And so he starts doing a bunch of things. By day he’s working this job and by night he’s reading books about Disney and PT Barnum and the WWE and the UFC and Apple and even things like the Grateful Dead and the Beatles — how did they build their fan base? And he starts trying things: fan comes out and throws out the first pitch, dollar hot dogs, whatever. Little things like that.
And it starts to work. I’ll fast forward through this part. He basically starts to turn around the Gastonia Grizzlies. Turns it from a team about to go out of business to something with a small amount of cash flow. But again, this is a summer league team. They play 30 games, only in the summer. There’s only so much they’re going to be able to do.
Sam: But he had good ideas. There was like a “dig to China” night. I read about this or listened to it on the Acquired podcast — they were like, “So what did you do?” He was like, “Well, I put a ticket to China, like a gift certificate, something like that.”
Shaan: Yeah. And they were like, “Did anyone take it?” He was like, “Well, no — it was a one-way ticket and there was no accommodation, so no one actually went.” But basically after the game, a fan got to come out of the crowd and dig to China.
Sam: Yeah. So he does things like that. And he had a grandma beauty pageant contest. Cute stuff like that.
Hijacking News Cycles: Bear Growth Hormone [00:05:45]
Shaan: Yeah. And it actually starts to work, so he turns around the attendance. And he’s like, I’m going to do anything I can to make noise. How do I hijack existing news stories? So in baseball at the time, there’s a big scandal around HGH — human growth hormone. And he’s like, okay, we need to get in on this story. He’s like, “We fired our mascot, the grizzly bear, for taking BGH — bear growth hormone.” And he’s just doing anything he can to drum up interest.
And it starts to work. He basically spends nearly a decade — this is one thing I didn’t actually know. He spends about 10 years tinkering and experimenting with these things before he has, he said, “I had one media story cover me in my first 10 years. But I got to experiment.”
Meeting His Wife and Finding the Stadium [00:06:30]
Shaan: And along the way, what happens? He ends up meeting his future wife. How did he do that? Well, he’s like, I need to network and get to know people in minor league baseball — the one rung up from where he was. So he decides to host a free seminar. He gets minor league baseball people to come, and he’s telling them all about grandma beauty pageants and bear growth hormone and the dig to China. And they’re like, “What the hell is this guy talking about?” But he’s like, “Hey, we turned attendance from 200 fans a game to a few thousand. We 10x’d our average game attendance.” And they’re like, “Okay, maybe this guy’s not so crazy.”
There’s a woman there from Cal Ripken Baseball. And she calls one of her employees and says — I think her name was Emily — she says, “Emily, I just met your future husband.” And she’s like, “What?” She’s like, “I just met this guy. He’s as crazy and passionate and nuts about baseball as you are. You’ve got to meet him. Just call him, talk business ideas.” And they do. He ends up hiring her. For the first year, they keep it professional. But eventually they end up dating. He proposes to her at one of the games, on the field. She says yes.
And as part of the proposal weekend, she’s like, “I’m going to plan a weekend trip to Savannah, Georgia.” So they go from South Carolina to Georgia and while they’re there, she’s like — this is their idea of romance — “Let’s go check out this minor league baseball stadium.” And they walk in and they’re blown away. They’re like, “Wow, it’s like Field of Dreams. You can feel the history. Feels like Babe Ruth played here.” And they approach the stadium owner: “Hey, is there any availability?” “No, we rent it out to this minor league baseball team.” So they’re like, “Okay. If anything ever changes, you call me.” And the guy’s like, “All right, sure, buddy.”
Sure enough, a year or so later, the minor league baseball team goes to the city and demands a $35 million new stadium. The mayor’s like, “Dude, you’re a minor league baseball team. We’re not giving you a $35 million stadium.” They pack up and leave. And they call Jesse. He comes and cuts a deal — a $20,000-a-year lease — to create a team in Savannah, Georgia.
The Early Struggle: Selling Two Tickets, Moving into a Garage [00:09:00]
Shaan: Have you been to a minor league game like this?
Sam: I’ve never been to one. Have you?
Shaan: Yeah, I’ve been to the Cape Cod League. The games — to say that you’re buying a team, it’s a little ambitious. It’s very grassroots. It’s bleachers. You’re missing the things that high school and college have: my kid is playing, or I went to school here. Minor league baseball doesn’t have either of those advantages.
Sam: Yeah. No, it’s pretty whack. You really have to care about baseball. And while all this is going on, we’ve had Dan from Overtime on, and he’s explained that basketball and football have killed it lately because they understand highlight reels and action and they’re doing a great job of telling stories. Baseball doesn’t. Over the last 15 years as social media has gotten popular, baseball has absolutely gotten left behind.
Shaan: It’s supposed to be America’s pastime. It’s not really America’s pastime at the moment.
Sam: It’s definitely the past. It’s a past time for sure.
Shaan: I think he said when he got the team, it was seller financing — the guy gave it to him and he gave him a small percentage of some profits, which were basically none.
Sam: Yeah, exactly. I think that was maybe the first team. They didn’t buy an existing team — they created one as part of the Coastal Plain League, but they owed the league a few hundred thousand to start this expansion team. But he had a little reputation from the Grizzlies. He had something. Which is why he was able to convince the stadium to give him the lease and the league to give him a team. But now he’s got to make it happen.
And it doesn’t start well. I think in the first few months he said he sold literally two tickets. He’s like, it was awful. We couldn’t give away tickets. So he tried to host a fan event, promoted it, knocked on doors, went on radio. He’s like, so few people showed up to our fan event that the conference center didn’t even charge him for the food. They felt so bad for how poorly the event went.
And basically they run out of money.
Shaan: Him and his wife.
Sam: Him and his wife. They’re running out of money. And his wife is like, “All right, let’s sell the house.” And he’s like, “What?” And she’s like, “Yeah. Let’s do it. We are all in.” So they sell the house. They move into a garage that’s kind of turned into a studio apartment. They sleep on a twin air mattress. He’s like, “Dude, we were sleeping in socks every night.” They use all their savings and they just try to keep the team alive.
And he said, “I kept going because I’d read books. Walt Disney went bankrupt with — I forgot what it’s called — his Laugh-O-Gram or whatever. PT Barnum struggled. This is just our struggle era. This is our struggle season.”
Sam: We got to coin that term — struggle season.
Shaan: Yeah. The pain cave. He’s in the pain cave.
Naming the Team: The 62-Year-Old Nurse Who Submitted “Bananas” [00:12:00]
Shaan: And he decides, “Okay, first thing we need to do is come up with a team name.” He goes to the community — because he’s trying to get the community on their side. The community didn’t really like them. They had lost their minor league baseball team and instead got this college team. So he has a naming contest.
A 62-year-old nurse submits the name. Most of the other names were like the Pirates, standard stuff. This nurse submits “Bananas.” And he’s like — Savannah Bananas. I like it. Everyone’s like, “No, you can’t do that.” He’s like, “And we have the Nanas — that’s our dance team, it’s a bunch of grandmas. And we have male cheerleaders, the Man-Nanas.” He starts coming up with all these ideas around the name.
And he ends up going to a design agency for the logo. They quote him $12,000. He’s like, “Cool. Me and my wife live off $40 a week right now. I don’t have a thousand. I definitely don’t have 12 of those thousands.” And they’re like, “Dude, just make a simple logo.” He’s like, “No. This is going to be the logo we print on everything. I’ve got to find a way to do this.” He ends up paying for it. Gets the logo and he’s so proud of it. Which is kind of amazing, because now years later, they do like 20 to 30 million a year in just merch sales. The brand has totally taken off.
Is it the same logo?
Sam: I don’t know if it’s the exact same or if they touched it up, but the core of it is the same.
The Fan-First Philosophy: Flat Tickets, No Junk Fees [00:14:00]
Shaan: So he starts coming up with all these different ways to make baseball less boring. What does he actually do? He studies the end-to-end experience of an event. He’s like, “When you buy the ticket, you see the price is whatever — $80. But when you check out, it’s $98, because there are all these fees and taxes.” So Savannah Bananas: flat $25 ticket, and they pay your taxes. You pay $25 and that’s it. They now pay millions of dollars a year just covering the sales tax for their fans. Which is kind of amazing, but it says something about what they represent. I think their company name is even called FanFirst Entertainment or something like that. That became the North Star.
He’s got this quote — he said starting in 2016, right when the Savannah Bananas got going, he was like, “I’m going to write down 10 new ideas every single day. Because it’s easy to do five or three a day, but once you get to six, seven, eight, nine, ten, you really have to start working hard. I needed to flex that muscle every day because I needed really good ideas all the time.”
Sam: Let me give you the exact quote on that. He goes: “I started an idea book in 2016. Ten ideas a day. A lot are bad ideas — 70, 80% terrible. But you’ve got to work your idea muscle.”
By the way, everybody says the same thing. Go listen to the Mr. Beast podcast we did. He’s like, every day I would wake up and come up with 20, 30, 40 YouTube video ideas. He’s like, I just realized that the idea of what the video is about is the most important thing. So I’m going to think of more ideas. I’m going to open up a dictionary, go to a random page. Whatever word I pick, I’m going to brainstorm it. And on the podcast we did with him, we pulled up a random word generator and started putting in random words and he started coming up with video ideas on the spot. He’s like, I’ve been doing this since I was 12.
Banana Ball: Reinventing the Rules of Baseball [00:16:00]
Shaan: Around this time, it was still a real baseball team. They were still playing normal baseball. But then he was like, “What about all this is boring?” He’s like, “Can you believe that this is supposed to be an athletic sport and you can walk someone? Like they just get to walk to base? That’s ridiculous.” Or he said, “I brought my stopwatch and I timed how long it took from the pitcher getting set to a strike or hit happening, and I noticed the batters can step out of the box. That took 27 seconds every time.”
And he starts nailing the experience down perfectly. Because when you own a baseball team, you’re like, oh, it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. And he was like, no, no, no. Everything is broken. We have to figure this out.
Sam: Actually, the more accurate thing is — it’s broke. But that’s always the way we’ve always done it.
Shaan: So he comes up with all these crazy ideas. I didn’t realize all the rules, but it’s something like: foul balls caught by fans count as an out. Walks — the fourth ball, you still have to sprint. Games are capped. And the defense has to — every defender has to touch the ball in between a walk.
Sam: That’s crazy.
Shaan: If you bunt, you’re ejected — because there’s nothing wimpier than a bunt.
Sam: And games have to be capped at two hours. On that podcast he was like, everyone said it had to be two and a half hours. And he said, no — children need to be home at bed by a certain time, this is going to be a family event, therefore it’s a strict two hours. And he called the whole thing — I didn’t realize it had a name — “Banana Ball.”
Shaan: Now they have their own format, basically their own league. So it definitely elevated over time. But yeah, he did all those things.
Security Camera Obsession and the “Insanely Great” Standard [00:18:00]
Shaan: He also would watch security footage after the game. He could use the cameras in the stadium to see when people leave, when they get bored, when they go to their seat, how long the concessions take. He started furiously watching security footage to understand the fan experience. Today he has a team that takes a snapshot of all the bleachers every — I forget, like every 10 or 15 minutes — so he can see when people get bored, when they leave. And then he reverse-engineers: okay, what’s going on in the game right now? How do I do that better?
Not to use Mr. Beast again, but — remember when we were sitting with him and he was showing us the same thing about his videos? He’s like, “Here’s the retention curve, see this dip?” And we’re like, “Yeah, so what?” A little wiggle. He’s like, “No, no, no. That dip is 3 million people who stopped watching the video. That dip is horror. That is the worst thing in the world.” And he’s like, “What is that? That’s the ad read. So we need to make our ad read as entertaining as the content.”
Sam: And the takeaway I had from Mr. Beast, and the same one I have with this guy: you say to yourself, “When I get big, I’ll worry about that stuff.” It’s the other way around. You worry about that stuff, and then you get big.
Shaan: Yeah. You remember the Steve Jobs quote about product strategy? He used to always say everything had to be “insanely great.” And normally when people hear “insanely great,” they’re like, “Yeah, I’m going to do that.” Because they’re focused on the word “great.” And nobody can disagree with great. Yeah, who doesn’t want great? I want great. You want great. We all want great. Fantastic.
It’s the insane part. That’s the part nobody wants to do. That’s the price tag. Steve Jobs basically saying, “We’re not shipping the Macintosh because the inside casing of the machine is not finished.” And they’re like, “Steve, nobody’s ever going to see the inside.” He’s like, “But we saw it. So we’re not shipping this until that’s finished.” It’s a little insane, right? You’re going to try to do insane things. When they were doing the iPhone, they’re like, “Steve, we’ll put a little keyboard on there like the Blackberry.” And he’s like, “No, we’re not doing a keyboard.” They’re like, “We could do a digital keyboard, but it’s not so great.” He’s like, “No, we need to make it insanely great.” And they thought, “We don’t even know if this is technically possible.” He’s like, “That’s what we’re doing. So figure it out. That’s the job.”
It’s the insane part of insanely great that actually matters.
The “Yes Man” Problem and Hiring People Who Are “Down” [00:21:00]
Sam: Well, I had two takeaways from reading about this guy. That’s the first one. I mean, I run a business, you run businesses, and the hard part is whether to be a dictator or an elected official. Do you just tell people, “This is what we’re doing, get on board”? Or do you delegate and say, “Let’s surface the best ideas and figure it out”? This guy does not seem like he takes the second route. He seems like he has a vision and he says, “This is what we’re doing. How wonderful is this? Let’s do it.”
And often when you have a company, you’ll say ideas and people will shoot them down — “Here’s all the reasons why we can’t do it.” And you know the phrase: “Look, do you just want a yes man?” And I’m like, yeah. I do. I want a yes man. That’s all I want. And that’s kind of what this guy did.
Have you heard some of his other stories? He’s got layers and layers of little ones. Like at the game, I think they have 11 rules. And he’s like, “Why 11?” He said: K stands for strikeout, and potassium — which is in a banana — that’s the 11th letter in the alphabet. There’s all this weird symbolism. If I told an employee that, they’d be like, “Dude, can you just let me design the logo?”
Shaan: Yeah, dude. I feel you. When you have an idea that’s either unprovable, or it seems like a little much, or it seems like it’s unserious — like maybe we should be focusing on the serious things — but you’re convinced: if we do this, it will be cool. It will be special. It will be unique.
The amount of energy it takes to bring people on board is so hard that I basically changed my criteria for who I hire. I realized I couldn’t change myself to turn that switch off, and I can’t magically change people’s minds. So I changed my hiring criteria. I used to have the Buffett thing: energy, intelligence, integrity. Those are the three things you want. And I just added a fourth: are you down?
Are you just down? If we have an idea, you’re down to do it. That doesn’t mean you say yes to every idea. It just means: look, sometimes there’s no evidence. Sometimes this is extra. Sometimes this is unproven. Sometimes this sounds bad. But we’ve got to try. Have some faith that we’ll figure it out as we go. Sometimes this sounds way out of our league and we’re punching above our weight — but why not? Why not try?
Sam: You’ve met Ben. Ben is like the most down guy in the world. And Diego is the same way. There are probably more skilled people than them at certain tasks. Sure. But I know they’re down, which means I can bring a fragile new idea — like a newborn — around them and they know how to raise that baby. They’re not going to be like, “Oh, what is this?”
Because those ideas are so fragile. If you know the other people on your team are not down, what happens is it’s not that they even shoot your ideas down — it’s that you censor yourself. You’re like, “I’m not even going to bring it up.” There’s a part of you subconsciously that just doesn’t even bring the ideas to the table, doesn’t have the conviction to say it, because you kind of know where they’re at. It’s like a friend who’s easily offended. You’re like, I’m just not going to bring this up because I kind of know where this goes.
Shaan: It’s hard to convince people to do stuff just because. At a company — especially in tech where everyone’s like, “Show me the data” — and I’m like, there is no data, brother. It’s just soul. It just feels like the right thing to do.
And in fact, we should have this guy Jesse come on the pod and really just talk about management. That would be quite interesting.
Detour: Unreasonable Hospitality and Will Guidara [00:25:30]
Shaan: I was going to ask you — you did a pod with the guy from Unreasonable Hospitality. What is that called?
Sam: Yeah. His name is Will Guidara. It’s going to be such a good podcast. So Will was a chef, but he was most famous for owning Eleven Madison Park — and it was awarded the best restaurant in the world. He’s famous for two things: one, he wrote the book Unreasonable Hospitality, and two, that book inspired one of the best episodes from the TV show The Bear, where the kind-of-dummy cousin goes to this restaurant to learn how to be a good restaurateur and starts by polishing the forks, then does the next lowest job, then the one above, sweating the details on everything.
And Will was amazing. We had this whole podcast about how tech companies can do that. His story was he started by overhearing a tourist at his restaurant say, “This trip was amazing, I got all this famous food, but I didn’t get to do one thing — I just wanted to get a New York street hot dog.” And Will, the owner, overheard that. He ran outside, bought a $3 hot dog, chopped it up nicely, put a pretty garnish on it, and served it to the tourist. And they were mind-blown. And he was like, capture that emotion — that is what we are doing from now on.
He had a budget at his restaurant to do crazy stuff. So instead of giving children’s crayons, he would have an Etch A Sketch waiting at the table for them. Just all these little small details that people normally forget to do, and he would sweat the details on them. That’s the idea of unreasonable hospitality — go above and beyond for your customers. Which is exactly what Savannah Bananas is all about.
Shaan: Our friend George Mack has this great phrase: “They only remember the weird.” And I love that. What he means is: if you just do the expected norms, you get zero credit for that. If you don’t do them you get docked, but if you do them, you haven’t actually done anything yet. It’s still love. You have not actually done anything until you’ve done something weird.
Now, weird can be really good. It just has to be out of the ordinary. And that’s all people will remember about you. So whether you’re building a personal brand or a product or you’re the Savannah Bananas and you say, “We pay your sales tax” — that’s weird. That’s memorable. That’s something I’m talking about, and it was a decision he made 10 years ago. A decision that cost him money. But how much did it build in goodwill and brand? How much did it show, not tell, that hey, we actually give a damn about our fans?
Every single sports team will say “fans are the most important thing, we really care about our fans,” as they gouge the hell out of them. The actions and the words go in two different directions. And just by doing something weird — like paying the sales tax for the fan, or being like, “This one ticket price is all-you-can-eat concessions” — doing things that were remarkable, worth a remark, is what gets you the credit. You’re only remembered for doing what’s weird.
Sam: Did you pick anything else up from Will? Did it give you an idea of something to do in your business?
Shaan: Totally.
Sam: He said two things. He said one thing that was amazing: every mistake is an amazing opportunity to blow someone away. Because people will remember the mistake you make, and then they will remember you going above and beyond to fix it.
And when he talked about the customer experience — I had this idea and we’re implementing it at Hampton. The way Hampton works is you apply to join and three days later we’ll review your application. If you’re in one of our cities and you have the revenue threshold, we’ll invite you to interview. So we had this idea: what if everyone who applied to Hampton — which is dozens and sometimes hundreds of people a day — what if within 10 minutes we phone call them and say, “I just saw your application come through. Here’s the process. I just want you to know we see you. This isn’t just some form that no one pays attention to. I see you. I’m going to take great care of you. You may not get in, but I’m here and I pay attention.” That’s an example of what it inspired me to do.
But the idea from Will that really inspired me was how you train your staff. He said, “I’m basically a propagandist — I have to repeat the same phrases over and over and over again to get them to bind to these ideas.” And so this is where — it’s so funny you said “insanely great” — that’s the exact same thing as “unreasonable hospitality.” He said everyone likes hospitality. The unreasonable part is the hard part.
Shaan: And that was actually really wise. It’s the same thing with unreasonable, with insanely great — it’s easy to say these crazy ideas. It’s actually hard to be wacky enough to follow through on all of them.
”If Your Strategy Is Something Everyone Agrees With, It’s Not a Strategy” [00:31:00]
Sam: Dan Porter — who’s probably our closest friend who’s actually done this — when he was on the pod last time, I don’t think you were there, but he said a very similar thing. He goes, “If your strategy is something that everybody agrees with, it’s not a strategy.” So he’s like, anybody who says “we’re going to have great customer service” — cool, you and 100 other companies in your space would all agree that’s a good strategy. So it’s therefore not a strategy at all. You have to have something that people would disagree with.
For example, for Overtime in the first year, they replied to I think a million comments on social. He’s like, that’s a strategy people would disagree with. Some people would say, “That’s a waste of time.” And he was doing it himself — the founder, the CEO. That is a strategy you could disagree with. It doesn’t have to be super foolish. It just has to be not something that everybody already agrees is the thing to do.
Same thing with “unreasonable” — we all agree we should have great hospitality. How many people would agree that you should be listening for when a guest says, “Oh man, my flight’s tonight and I haven’t tried a New York hot dog, I really wanted one,” and then you leave the kitchen, go get a hot dog from a street vendor, come back, break the food code, cut it up, serve it on a dish? That’s the part that others wouldn’t even think of, let alone institutionalize as part of their core strategy.
Sam: And Will gave a really tactical bit I’d be curious to hear Jesse’s opinion on. I was like, “Okay, walk me through the profitability of this.”
Shaan: Cole is his name?
Sam: His name’s Jesse. Jesse Cole. He had two first names. Not on purpose — I wasn’t trying to be that cool. Anyway.
Will said, “I basically allocate 5% of margin to wacky stuff.” So if he’s a 20% margin business, he’s willing to go down to 15%. He uses that 5% to do wacky stuff. And he anticipates it will take most companies 6 to 12 months to make that money back. I’d be curious what Jesse says — did it take 12 months for some of these norms he was trying to create to prove out?
Shaan: I mean, how do you measure showmanship? Because this guy is pure showmanship. If you listen to this podcast, you know me and Sam appreciate good showmanship. That’s what this guy is. He’s like a modern-day PT Barnum.
Where They Are Now: Revenue, Scale, and a World Tour [00:34:00]
Sam: So where are they now? About $100 million in revenue?
Shaan: Let’s call it somewhere between 70 and 100 million. I believe the company is probably worth 500 million to a billion. They own 100% of it.
So last year, 2 million people came to their games. Two million fans. It basically doubled — went 500K, then 1 million, then 2 million. This year should be over 3 million. If you just take the lowest possible ticket price — $25, though normal tickets are $35 to $40 — 2 million fans at $25 is $50 million in just ticket sales. Then you have tens of millions in merch. They have a 3-million-person waiting list. They are now doing a world tour. It’s been up till now kind of a North America thing, but they went from minor league stadiums to doing the biggest ballparks in the country. In a two-day span they did 150,000 people watching their games. It’s insane.
We talked about Savannah Bananas two or three years ago and it wasn’t this. And he started this thing — I think he started with the Gastonia Grizzlies in 2008 or something like that. It’s been a long time. Which is why I had in all caps: this guy deserves a billion dollars. You do what he did, you deserve a billion dollars.
Sam: It’s very inspirational because he definitely has that everyday-guy vibe. I kind of get emotional reading about his story. I’m like, I’m on your team. I don’t care what you do. I’m bought in.
Shaan: Yeah. And the husband-and-wife bit is really great. I’m all in on this guy.
Harlem Globetrotters vs. WWE: Will the Schtick Last? [00:36:30]
Sam: I have a question though. Do you think this is going to be like the WWE, where it becomes a sustained thing that lasts forever? Or is this going to be like the Harlem Globetrotters, where the schtick gets tired?
Shaan: I think both. I think it is Harlem Globetrotters, not WWE. But I don’t think it needs to end. Because like — I take my kids to all kinds of entertainment. We took my kids to Monster Jam last weekend.
Sam: Can you explain Monster Jam to all of our foreign listeners, please?
Shaan: This is normally the type of thing you’re explaining to me.
Sam: Hell yeah. Please do it.
Shaan: All right. So Monster Jam is basically the best day ever for any little boy that loves Hot Wheels and trucks — which is, from my count at my son’s school, about 50% of all young boys. You’re normally at home playing with little 2-inch Hot Wheels cars. Then suddenly your parents take you to the Oakland Coliseum and you walk in and it’s literally just a dirt mound in the middle of the arena. And they have these characters like the WWE — eight or ten trucks that come out. There’s Megalodon, the shark one. And all the kids are doing the shark thing.
Sam: I went as Gravedigger for Halloween once.
Shaan: Yeah. My son has a Gravedigger thing. Gravedigger is like their Undertaker — their star character. And the trucks come out, they’re like twice the size of a Hummer, and they do tricks. They went on their back wheels. They went on their front wheels.
Sam: Dude, they do backflips now.
Shaan: Yeah. They try to do a flip, and then halftime, one crashes out and a crew comes out with fire extinguishers and tows the truck away. And you’re not going to see Gravedigger for the rest of the show. Then they have guys on dirt bikes doing tricks, which are way cooler. So it’s this two-hour family event. You get your kid a snow cone, popcorn. They get to see crazy trucks. They’re sitting there with ear muffs on because it’s too loud. Then they leave and you buy the merch and they’re super happy and you’re out $400.
Sam: That’s what Monster Jam is.
Shaan: Dude, when Gravedigger goes, it rattles your soul. It’s not just loud — it’s a feeling.
Sam: Headphones on.
Shaan: It’s so loud.
Sam: You feel it. It’s like a train going by. You feel the rattle. It’s amazing. And I’m just googling this — grain of salt — but I think it says Monster Jam sells four million tickets a year. Is that true?
Shaan: Yeah, I believe that. I mean, there were probably 10,000 people at the event I was at. And they’re there for three days and then moving to the next city. It’s just a traveling circus of monster trucks. I don’t see any reason why the traveling circus of Banana Ball can’t be a sustained thing.
So I do think the category is more like Harlem Globetrotters. It’s a family show. You’re going to come, you’re going to have a great two or three hours. You’re going to be entertained, you’re going to laugh, there are going to be dances, there are going to be some catchy things in your head. You’re going to remember a few of the characters. And then you’re going to go home, and you’re not going to tune in three nights a week like the NBA. That’s fine. It doesn’t need to be that. It’s an amazing live touring show.
Feld Entertainment: The Empire Behind Monster Jam [00:41:00]
Sam: So the guy who owns Monster Jam also owns Barnum and Bailey Circus and he’s on Forbes as being worth $3 or $4 billion.
Shaan: Who is he?
Sam: It’s called Feld Entertainment. So Feld owns Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus. They own Monster Jam. They own Monster Energy Supercross. And they own Sesame Street Live. The owner’s name is Kenneth Feld. It’s a huge, 30,000-person company according to Wikipedia.
Shaan: Unbelievable. And this is also stuff that’s super AI-proof, right? Live, out-of-home entertainment. It’s only going to go up. Because people always crave something that’s different from what they have in abundance, which is digital online entertainment. And these things are scarce. Especially if you can do what WWE’s done or Monster Jam’s done — where people start to become fans of certain players, teams, characters in the show. That’s always going to be an entertaining thing.
Sam: By the way, his father started the Ringling Brothers Circus, and his son Kenneth eventually took it over, and that’s who owns Monster Jam now.
Shaan: Just imagine — the family business is we run Monster Jam. We started the Ringling Brothers Circus. Like, what is the dinner table like?
Sam: It’s so much better than what we do. I wonder if the Cole family — the owners of Savannah Bananas — I imagine they have children now. I wonder how awesome that is, to see your parents do a job like that.
Shaan: Yeah. It’s also tough. You’re on the road all the time. It’s live events. It’s messy. You don’t get to just push a button.
Sam: When I ran The Hustle, we called the send button on a sale the “money button.” We’d say, “You guys ready? We’re going to click the money button.” Click. And every time I hit send, at one point we were making like 30 or 40 grand a day. I was like, “All right, click the money button.”
Shaan: And this guy does not have a money button. He has a money button where he has to get on the bus for two weeks.
Sam: Yeah. It’s a little different. A lot more money probably than what I made, but yeah. It’s a money bus.
Closing: Write Down 20 Crazy Ideas and Call for Jesse Cole [00:44:00]
Shaan: All right, we ended up spending the whole episode on the Savannah Bananas. But that’s cool. I think we should just call it that.
Sam: Is that it? Is that the pod?
Shaan: Yeah. I think we should all go brainstorm ideas for the craziest marketing things we could do in our business now. Write down 20 totally out-of-the-box ideas and do that every day for the next 60 days until you have three ideas that are going to be attention-getting and unreasonable in some way.
And here’s — all right, so we did this thing called the Gentleman’s Agreement before, where people would click like on our YouTube page if they’ve ever watched more than one video of ours. That was the way of paying it forward. I have a request, Shaan, for our listeners.
Sam: You and I have — well, we’ll do a two-parter. First: if you have a connection to Jesse Cole, I want him on the pod. We want him on the pod. I don’t have any connections to him. Do you?
Shaan: No.
Sam: Yeah. So I would love to get him on the pod. If you can help us get him on, that’s you fulfilling the Gentleman’s Agreement. But I think we’ve got to do a second one now — with Spotify, right?
Shaan: Yeah. People don’t know this, but we doubled on Spotify last month. Spotify is growing like crazy as a podcasting platform. It used to be like 5% of our streams, then 10%, then 15%. It’s like 25, 30% of our streams now. It is exploding. We added our video to Spotify. So if you have Spotify, you can watch the podcast there. There are comments, we’re replying to comments, and we’re really investing in it.
If you listen to music on Spotify, if you got a Spotify account, just type My First Million and click follow. It’s totally free. You’ll have reserved your space in the Gentleman’s Hall of Fame, which we are creating.
Sam: I didn’t know where that sentence was going.
Shaan: A Gentleman’s Hall of Fame. When I think of a Gentleman’s Hall of Fame, it looks a little different than just a bunch of nerds clicking a button on their Spotify. But also — leave a comment on Spotify for this episode and we’ll reply to all of them, so long as it’s not like 5,000. As long as it’s less than 5,000, we’ll reply to every single comment, even if it’s just “what’s up.”
Sam: Hold on. Would Jesse Cole say “as long as it’s less than 5,000”? Were you listening to the podcast, sir? What kind of not-Savannah-worthy comment was that? It’s not called Reasonable Hospitality, Sam. It’s Unreasonable.
Shaan: We’re tiptoeing our way in.
Sam: This is me getting in the pool at a pool party. Half an hour in, I’m still under the nipple line and I’m just like, “Hey, I just take my time, okay? I just need my time to get in.” I will get in.
Shaan: Okay. Every comment — seriously, make a comment on Spotify. That signals you’re listening there and I think it’s going to make us go up in the rankings. I think two weeks ago we were the 35th most popular podcast in the world on Spotify.
Sam: All categories.
Shaan: All categories, not just business. So we’re going to game the system in front of everyone. Just comment on Spotify and we’ll reply. All right. That’s it. That’s the part.