Speakers: Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host)
Jesse Cole: You have to create attention first. If people don’t know who you are, good luck trying to create something.
Shaan Puri: You guys have a multi-million person waitlist for tickets. On TikTok, you have 10 times more followers than the New York Yankees.
Jesse Cole: Ideas are more valuable than anything. Whatever is normal, do the exact opposite. No one comes home and says, “Did you hear this thing? It’s so normal.” You get excited about remarkable, unforgettable things.
Shaan Puri: You’re one of our Mount Rushmore type of guys because you’re playing the game on extreme hard mode and I respect you for it.
Jesse Cole: It’s way harder than I thought. So, we completely ran out of money. We had nothing left. And then Emily turned to me and said, “We have to sell our house.” So we sold our house.
Shaan Puri: Did you have conversations of wanting to quit?
Jesse Cole: I mean, it was brutal.
Introduction: Meeting the Man in the Yellow Suit [00:00:45]
Sam Parr: What’s up, guys? Oh my god, it’s Jesse Cole.
Jesse Cole: What’s up? How you guys doing?
Sam Parr: We almost wore the same thing today.
Jesse Cole: You should have. There’s a lot more going around these days because I think I’m keeping them in business.
Sam Parr: When did you start the yellow suit and yellow hat? What was the day?
Jesse Cole: It was before the Bananas. That’s the crazy thing. People didn’t even realize that. It was before the Bananas. We had a team in—you talk about First Million—we had a team in Gastonia. I was wearing this before because of P.T. Barnum. I’m inspired by him, not just to be the same regular host like everyone else.
Sam Parr: Do you know what you’re getting into at all with this?
Jesse Cole: Well, no. I’ve listened to your show and I’m ready to rock. I love the one you had with the owner of the Jazz. That was an interesting sit-down.
Shaan Puri: When I was hanging out with him, I was telling him a bunch of Savannah Banana anecdotes. I was like, “You have to do this. You have to get the grandmas on the court.”
Jesse Cole: Sure. He loves hearing all the other things he should do.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, that’s probably what he liked. He probably liked that. No, it was very well done and very well produced as well. You guys did a great job with that.
Shaan Puri: Well, thanks, man. We’re excited to have you here because you are one of our entrepreneurial Mount Rushmore type of guys. You took the gap of going from nothing to something, and the way you went from nothing to something incredible is remarkable.
Just to give people a sense, I don’t know a soul in my life who wanted to go watch exhibition or minor league baseball. That was not even a thing. And yet you guys have a multi-million person waitlist for tickets. I just looked this morning on TikTok; you have 10 times more followers than the New York Yankees. Accomplishing that blows my mind. I want you to come on here and tell your story and teach us how you think. The way you think and how that’s been applied to baseball could be applied to many other types of businesses. I think that’s the real gift you’re going to give the entrepreneurial world.
Jesse Cole: Let’s fire it up. Let’s jam.
Shaan Puri: All right. Sam, where should we start?
Sam Parr: Start at the start. Let’s spend a little bit of time abbreviating because you’ve done a lot of amazing podcasts, but set the context. 10 or 15 years ago, where were you?
The Early Days: $268 in the Bank [00:03:50]
Jesse Cole: I started as a 23-year-old general manager with a team in Gastonia, North Carolina. It was college summer baseball, which is a low level of baseball. That team only had 200 fans coming to the games and $268 in the bank account. I couldn’t pay myself for three months. It was December before I was able to take my first paycheck, and I was making $27,500. I wasn’t making a lot of money regardless, but that’s where I started. It was learning how to make college summer baseball exciting and entertaining. I did that for years and no one knew anything, but we were just experimenting and trying new things. That’s where I learned the ideas of making baseball more fun and adding new things to the show.
Shaan Puri: Why even be there? Why weren’t you an intern at JP Morgan? Why was your first job a GM of a summer league baseball team? What was the plan?
Jesse Cole: I never could have gotten a job at JP Morgan or any of those, for the record. I played ball. My whole life was baseball. My dad owned a baseball facility. I was very fortunate to get a huge scholarship to Wofford College, a Division One school in South Carolina. My goal was to play professional baseball. I was getting letters from the Mets, the Padres, the Pirates, and the Braves. I was like, “This is going to happen.” And then I tore my shoulder just like that.
Everyone said, “You’re going to go into coaching, Jesse. Your dad was a coach, that’s your mindset.” I coached for one summer in the Cape Cod League, and I wanted to pull my hair out every day. It was the best players, the highest level—these guys were all going to be first-round picks—and I was in the dugout at the best seat, and I was just bored out of my mind. I used to go to the Cape Cod League games and the hot dogs were great, but it was just baseball. It was high-level, but I was bored. There’s a difference between playing and watching.
It was the first time I really, as Walt Disney thinks, put myself in the customer’s shoes. I put myself in the spectator’s shoes and I was bored. I realized I didn’t want to coach anymore. I said, “What if I got in the front office and tried to make the show and the entertainment and the experience better for fans?” That’s really where it started. That’s when I took this job as a 23-year-old general manager of one of the worst teams in the country.
Sam Parr: Isn’t there a story of Disney going to an amusement park with his daughter and he’s sitting on a bench just looking at it? He’s like, “I wish this was fun for me and her and not just her.” Isn’t there some famous story like that? And that’s where the origins of Disneyland came about.
Jesse Cole: 100%. I’ve studied Walt religiously. It was at Griffith Park with his two daughters. Saturdays were his days with his daughters and he always took them on a “daddy day.” He took them to Griffith Park and they were on the carousel. He’s sitting there and he goes, “I wish there was a place that adults and kids could have fun together.” That’s where the mindset said, “What if we created a place like that?”
I, in a weird way, was sitting in the dugout with the best seat in the house with some of the best players thinking, “I’m bored out of my mind. Why can’t this be fun for more people?” That’s where I started the journey as a 23-year-old general manager with no money in the bank account, not getting paid, on how to make this more fun. That’s where I fell in love with Walt Disney and P.T. Barnum and started studying WWE, Cirque du Soleil, and Saturday Night Live. I became obsessed with learning about entertainment, not necessarily learning about the baseball business. I wanted to learn about the entertainment business.
Transitioning to Ownership and Early Experiments [00:08:15]
Shaan Puri: Can you tell us the transition from employee to owner? What was that era?
Jesse Cole: I was a general manager for two or three years. Then I became the managing partner because the owner gave me a 5% equity stake for being a part of it. It was 2014—6, 7, or 8 years later—that I bought it from him. The team was worth very little; I made it worth a lot more. I went into owner-financing debt with him and bought it in 2014. He gave me every opportunity. I was so fortunate that the owner, Ken Silver, just let this kid run with the team and try things and experiment. We ended up having success after that first year and made the team a lot more valuable, which was a good win for all of us.
Sam Parr: And it was still a normal baseball team for the first two years, right?
Jesse Cole: Oh, no. We had grandma beauty pageants our first year. We came up with the garbage can nachos: four orders of nachos, three cheeseburgers, three hot dogs, nacho cheese, jalapeños, and donuts. We called it “heart-stoppingly delicious.” I tried to get a cardiologist to sponsor it, but no one was interested.
We did a “Dig to China” night where we literally had hundreds of people go on the field and dig in the infield dirt to get a trip to China. But when the woman won, she realized it was just a one-way flight to China—no flight back and no accommodations. We had a lot of fun. We fired our mascot for “Bear Growth Hormone” because HGH was big. We made BGH. We offered George Bush, because he just finished his term as president, an internship with us with a $1,000 stipend. We were going to get him a host family and figure it out. He turned it down.
We just came up with all crazy ideas. We were trying to get attention. I was using the P.T. Barnum book of how to create attention. We were trying everything. We got the players to dance that first year. They weren’t great dancers and every player turned me down except for four, but those four dancers did the “Jump On It” dance and they became the most popular players. We were dabbling and experimenting in no man’s land where literally no one knew who we were outside of Charlotte.
Sam Parr: You’re not even the Savannah Bananas yet. You’re still the Gastonia Grizzlies.
Jesse Cole: Yeah, the ones nobody heard about.
The Creative Process: The Idea Box [00:11:15]
Shaan Puri: I think that’s really important—the toiling in obscurity, trying things, iterating. Now, let me ask you: those ideas you just said, every one of them, I’m like, “Oh my god, what a genius idea.” I can totally see the press release and the TikTok clip. Now, to have 10 great ideas, you probably had a thousand or 10,000 bad ideas. Tell me about your practice of generating ideas. What was your system of creativity?
Jesse Cole: When we first started, I learned from Bill Veeck. He was the famous owner of the St. Louis Browns and the White Sox. He was brilliant. He did “Grandstand Managers Night” where he literally let his fans in a Major League game dictate whether they were going to bunt, steal, or hit and run. He put his coach in the grandstand and it was unbelievable. He came up with Eddie Gaedel, the three-foot-seven hitter. He gave away live lobsters to fans during games. His book, Veeck as in Wreck, made a huge impact on me.
I went to his son’s conference, Mike Veeck, another unbelievable pioneer. I went to his conference when I was 23 and he said his dad always said if there’s a fire, you have to get the most important thing in the house: the idea box. Ideas are more valuable than anything. He actually gave us a wooden box—I still have it today—and we started coming up with ideas. As a 23-year-old, I started coming up with lots of them. A lot of them were ridiculous. Some worked, some didn’t. “Salute to Underwear Night” failed. “Flatulence Fun Night” failed. “Hairiest Man in Gaston County” was gross.
We did a lot of things that just didn’t work. But I started learning about ideas. The big premise I came up with is whatever is normal, do the exact opposite. No one gets excited about normal. You get excited about remarkable and unforgettable. It was literally eight years of doing that. When I think about the title of the show, My First Million, we never made a million dollars in Gastonia. It was $100,000 in total revenue the year I took over the team. The expenses were $250,000. We were doubling pretty consistently, getting to 200, then 300, 400, 500, 600, 700, 800, but we never got to a million. I ran that for eight years.
Shaan Puri: Wait, let’s recap. That’s remarkable. It took you eight years to get to a million in revenue?
Jesse Cole: No, we didn’t even get to a million in revenue. It wasn’t until Savannah that we actually reached a million dollars in one year.
Shaan Puri: And how old were you on the eighth year? You were like 32?
Jesse Cole: I was 23 when I started. Savannah was 2015. So 2016 was the first year we reached a million dollars in revenue.
Shaan Puri: How many times did smart, well-intentioned friends and family sit you down and be like, “Jesse, what are you doing out there? What’s going on?”
Jesse Cole: I was having the time of my life. Everyone I’ve come across, especially family, knows I need help in many different ways. But they saw I was having fun. Guys, think about this: we took over a team that had 50 to 100 fans most nights. My first year, we had nights where we’d get over 1,000 fans or 1,500 or 2,000. By our second year, we were selling out games. It was only a 2,000 or 3,000-seat stadium, but it was unbelievable.
Sam Parr: Were you making a profit?
Jesse Cole: Oh, yeah. By the time we had $850,000 of revenue, it was probably costing $600,000. It was a healthy profit. For college summer baseball, we were killing it. Every day, I got to create new things. I got to test those ideas in real time. Will people show up or will they not? Will they like this promotion or will they not? I got to test every day. Henry Ford at Greenfield Village said he believed in learning by doing. I’m obsessed. I want to be the fastest-learning sports organization in the world. The more we do, the more we learn.
Showmanship and the P.T. Barnum Influence [00:16:30]
Shaan Puri: You mentioned P.T. Barnum and Disney and how you obsessively studied them. What were some of the early stories that inspired you or things they did that blew your mind?
Jesse Cole: With P.T. Barnum, it was so much about how you create attention. Showmanship. He says without promotion, something terrible happens: nothing. He hired terrible performing musicians—violinists that were so bad that he put them outside of his museum so the only way you could get away from them was to come inside the museum. He would just come up with ideas and bring people together. He was a master promoter. He was also a tremendous writer. He was always writing and speaking. I took his spot as a front person. You have to have someone who truly believes in what you do. P.T. Barnum believed in his museum. He said, “Hey, some of it’s true, some of it’s not, but you’re going to come in and you’re going to be entertained.”
I was dressed like everyone else. I said, “No, I’m going to get a full tuxedo.” The first one was black and it had tails and it was 95 degrees in a North Carolina summer night and I almost melted. I said, “We’re not doing that.” So I found a yellow one that was brighter and fit the color of the Grizzlies. That’s how that started.
Bill Veeck was the most “fans first” owner ever. He would sit with the fans in the stands. He would talk to all the fans every single night. He would go “Veecking,” as I made up the term; after every game, he would go to the bars with the fans just to connect with them. When he took over the St. Louis Browns, they asked, “What time does the game start?” He goes, “What time do you want it to start?” That was his mindset. He was the first to put names on the back of jerseys. He had the exploding scoreboard with fireworks. Every other owner hated him because he was doing so much more for fans than they all were. You combine that with Walt Disney’s vision and it’s fun to do the impossible and put yourself in the guest’s shoes. Those three set the tone to combine these worlds and create something special in baseball.
Rock Bottom: Selling the House [00:19:45]
Shaan Puri: All of that is inspiring because the company—I don’t know if it’s real, but the headlines say it’s worth a billion dollars—is incredibly successful. But for the first handful of years, did you feel embarrassed? Were you like, “I don’t know if this is going to pay off. I’m risking my reputation. I look silly right now.” Did that fear come into play?
Jesse Cole: A thousand percent. We’ve been criticized every step of the way. I’ve been embarrassed many steps of the way. Our first eight or nine years in Gastonia, we did everything. It was myself, my wife, and one or two other team members. We put out “Show Tonight” signs around town just to try to convince people to go. We did the trash before the game, the hiring, the concessions, operations. We did everything and it was exhausting. People criticized us.
When we went to Savannah, the criticism and skepticism reached an all-time high. You had professional baseball for 90 years and then all of a sudden there was a college summer baseball team coming in. They just had the New York Mets affiliate the year before us. The city wasn’t going to invest because no one was coming to the games. All the professional Savannah teams were the lowest in the league in attendance. We came in and said we’re going to make baseball fun. They were like, “Sure you are. We’ve heard that before, kid.”
We sold two tickets in our first three months. We were hung up on every day. My wife would walk into shops and restaurants to offer a free launch event with free food and drinks, and she’d be told, “Get out.” It was brutal.
Shaan Puri: Did you have conversations about wanting to quit?
Jesse Cole: You couldn’t because we were now seven figures in debt. We had to buy the team and do the startup. We hired people. We had nothing. We were in debt and we had all these young people right out of college that we were responsible for. There were no options for quitting. It was just: how do we convince these people to believe in us? The only way to do that was to show them. As Steve Jobs says, no one knows what they want until you show it to them. We were talking, talking, talking. That’s not good marketing. Marketing is creating an experience and showing people.
Shaan Puri: You seem like an incredibly optimistic guy. But at this point, there’s a lot to be optimistic about. In the era we’re talking about, things were not going well. You sell two tickets in three months, you’re seven figures in debt. Nobody’s optimistic 100% of the time. What’s the “rock bottom” scene in the movie?
Jesse Cole: We got the phone call at 4:45 p.m. on January 15th, 2016. That was when we were out of money. We completely ran out of money. We couldn’t cover payroll. I moved about $3,000 over that I had in my own account to cover the rest of the payroll. Then we emptied out our savings account to cover us for another couple of weeks. Then Emily turned to me and said, “We have to sell our house.”
So, we sold our house. People don’t know the timing of this: Emily and I had just got married on October 10th, 2015. We got the keys for Savannah that same week. Within three or four months, we’re completely out of money. Our first year of marriage, we have nothing left and we have to sell our house. We found an old garage that I would like to say was turned into a studio, but it really wasn’t. It was the grossest thing I’ve ever imagined living in. It was the only thing we could afford. She got a twin air bed. We realized we could only grocery shop with $30 a week and we couldn’t use credit cards because we already maxed them out. We would go into Walmart with a $20 bill and a $10 bill for 42 meals. That was a tough time.
She kept me going. I think all entrepreneurs can spiral a little bit. I was like, “Em, what are we going to do? This is bad. Everybody’s saying no to us.” But she said, “Jesse, we did this. We have to get to that first game.” She lifted me up. The first thing was naming the team. We had to get people to understand who we were.
Naming the Bananas and the Backlash [00:25:15]
Jesse Cole: We did a “Name the Team” contest. Everyone said, “Be the Spirits, be the Ports, be the Anchors.” I was like, “There’s a team in Georgia called the Braves. We’re not going to be the Braves, guys.” But there was one person that suggested Bananas. I remember we looked at each other and said, “Yeah, Go Bananas.” We thought of the Banana Nanas senior citizen dance team, the Man-anas male cheerleading team, a banana baby that we lift up before the game, and a banana band. We said we have to go. It is perfect.
Then we announced it and we got crucified. We were ripped apart locally. It was so bad. I’ll never forget the St. Patrick’s Day parade two weeks after we announced. We’re wearing green banana shirts and we’re getting booed walking through town. Literally, people are booing.
Sam Parr: Were they baseball purists or did they think you were insulting the town?
Jesse Cole: Both. It was an embarrassment to the city. Nationally, though, we were like SportsCenter’s “Logo of the Year.” Nationally, people thought it was fun and cool. Locally it was bad, but at least people knew who we were. I believe attention beats marketing 1,000% of the time. You have to create attention first. If people don’t know who you are, good luck trying to create something.
Then when we said every single ticket is all-inclusive—all your burgers, hot dogs, chicken sandwiches, soda, water, popcorn, dessert, all night long, no ticket fees, $15—people were like, “What?” They started paying attention. We showed them the Banana Nanas and the players dancing. People were expecting us to fail. We sold out opening night. They all came out and they wanted to see it. People had to wait three hours for food because we didn’t know we were going to go through 10,000 pieces of meat in an hour. But they watched the show, they watched the fun, and that’s when it changed.
Parallel Thinking and Learning from the Best [00:28:45]
Sam Parr: I’ve watched a bunch of interviews of you now. I’ve noticed that you do a few things consistently. You name-drop all the time: Henry Ford, Bill Veeck, Walt Disney, Steve Jobs, P.T. Barnum. Do you find a couple of lines in books and say, “That’s it, that’s what we have to do”? You’ve said you make a list of 10 new ideas every single day. Can you talk about that?
Jesse Cole: Walt Disney said curiosity keeps leading us down new paths and we will keep trying things and experimenting. It’s my curiosity. I’ll go very deep on subjects. I have an entire bookshelf of every book on Walt Disney and Disney World—maybe 100 books. Then I have a whole section on P.T. Barnum, Amazon, Steve Jobs, ESPN. I have every book on Taylor Swift; she’s fascinating. Marvel, Grateful Dead—all these different worlds because there’s a blueprint on how to create something truly special.
In most traditional sports, it’s the same thing: you’re competing to win. Our game is to compete to create fans and entertain. I want to learn from the greatest entertainers in the world. I’ll go very deep and earmark every single page. I’ve done book reports on Built to Last.
Sam Parr: Tell me about a book report. What is that?
Jesse Cole: We did this as a team. For many years, we actually paid our people to read. We paid them to do book reports. We’re obsessed with learning. Now we do team books that we read as a group. A book report for me is the biggest takeaways, the things that lead to “fans first” ideas and parallels. David Novak, the former CEO of Yum! Brands, said I’m one of the greatest parallel thinkers he’s ever seen. I asked what that meant, and he said I can see something and then make it my own in a parallel path. If I see something the Grateful Dead did—bringing the sound in-house, letting fans record—I can see that and follow suit.
Shaan Puri: What did you steal from Jimmy (MrBeast)?
Jesse Cole: The biggest thing was the YouTube growth and how he looks outside of the country. 70% of his views come from outside the US. You better believe that we immediately started hiring Spanish-speaking broadcasters and Japanese-speaking broadcasters. We’re going to start having our games and social go all over the world. That was the one thing I was like, “All right, what in YouTube can we do right now to grow an audience?”
Shaan Puri: We did an episode with Jimmy and he talked about the same 10 ideas a day thing. He said the most important thing in a YouTube video is the premise. I’m curious, are you still doing that? Is there a sticky note on your desk right now with 10 ideas you wrote this morning?
Jesse Cole: I have the idea book right here. It says “2025 Ideas Banana Ball.” Today I was working on our two newer teams. I’m working on the Indianapolis Clowns, which we brought back—one of the most famous Negro League teams. It’s all the clowns’ characters: dynamic contortionist, bat boy, juggling hawkers, juggling ball boy, an umpire that’s a mime, trampoline coaches, strongman, balloon artist, ringmaster, human cannonball. I start listing ideas on how we want to build.
Shaan Puri: Do you do this first thing or do you take meetings first?
Jesse Cole: Hal Elrod’s book Miracle Morning was a game-changer for me in 2015. I realized that most people don’t start their day on purpose; they start with other people’s news and social media. “Win the morning, win the day” became a huge thing. I have three kids under seven years old. I get up very early and I read, because your input affects your output. I’m re-reading Amazon Unbound right now. Then I start writing in my journal. I have an idea bucket from the day before so I can start thinking about it before I go to sleep.
It doesn’t feel like work. If I come up with good ideas, I’m fired up the rest of the day. You have to create before you consume. Today, we just launched our first-ever “Fans First” ticket marketplace. On the secondary market, people are spending $400 to $700 for tickets and often getting scammed. We built our own: face value, no markups, no fees. That fires me up because we’re going to learn and experiment.
Meeting the Giants and World Building [00:35:45]
Shaan Puri: You’ve now gotten into some pretty interesting rooms. Who have you met that was a “wow” moment for you?
Jesse Cole: Whenever I get a call with one of these people, I’m picking their brain like crazy. One that stood out was Bob Iger a couple of months ago. I have so much respect for how he made creative the heartbeat of Disney. That was a 30-minute conversation and I walked out fired up. I’ve talked to heads of WWE, actors, and musicians. I enjoy hosting people more at our shows. Watch how we start entertaining seven hours before the game. Watch how we stay two hours after the game. Taylor Swift does a three-hour and 45-minute set because she wants to over-deliver. We look to over-deliver with everything.
Sam Parr: When I hear you talk, I think I would never want to compete against this person. You don’t seem motivated by money or particularly competitive with the outside world. You must have a chip on your shoulder. What caused it?
Jesse Cole: I certainly have a chip on my shoulder, but that’s not what I’m chasing. I was an only child and I always wanted to make my dad proud. But then I didn’t get drafted and I tore my shoulder. I think I’ve been misunderstood. We’ve gotten criticism every step of the way. People say, “How dare you leave traditional baseball to create this silly sport called Banana Ball?”
I have a folder saved of people saying it’s a fad and our 15 minutes are up. I write back, “Thanks for the inspiration.” We are building a sport. There will be a world where the first ball a kid picks up is a yellow banana ball. Banana Ball will be played all over the world because of the entertainment level.
Money—10 years ago we had nothing. Now we’re very fortunate, but I chase moments. Our first game at Fenway Park, I was a kid who grew up south of Boston with a goal to play there. We had the largest crowd of the year. Everyone was singing “Yellow” by Coldplay with their flashlights. I was on the field saying, “Look at what we get to do together.” Or our first football stadium with 81,000 fans. We’re going to do a 100,000-seat stadium. We’re going to play on aircraft carriers and at beaches. Those moments fire me up.
Shaan Puri: You’re like a joyful version of Dana White or Vince McMahon. Dana says he’s in the business of moments.
Sam Parr: I’m psychoanalyzing you a little bit. You’re doing something where you’re saying, “I’m creating a world.” You’re world-building. You create these rules and processes that you actually abide by. You have 11 rules of Banana Ball. You have the “One City World Tour.” There’s intention and meaning to everything. A lot of entrepreneurs don’t have the courage to say, “This is the world I’m building and here are the rules.” Did you always have that in you?
Jesse Cole: My “five people” have been Walt Disney, Steve Jobs, and Jeff Bezos. Walt Disney was a world builder. You better believe we will build a “Banana Land,” the first-ever sports and entertainment theme park. Every team we build has that point of view. We built the “Loco Beach Coconuts” and we’re going to build the local beach.
Start small, dream big. We call it a “World Tour” even when it was one city because that is our vision. We’re doing the Superdome and the Patriots’ stadium. We’re doing Kyle Field and Neyland Stadium with over 100,000 fans. Control is a big part of this. Most people give up control. We built our own ticket system. We do all the merchandise in-house. We do our logistics, entertainment, and broadcast in-house. We leave millions of dollars on the table because we do it all on YouTube. When you do it all in-house, you afford yourself the opportunity to learn and fail, and you connect closer with your fans. Walt Disney wanted to control everything when people came into his theme park. He couldn’t control a movie theater, but he could control Disneyland.
The Business Model: No Sponsors, No Fees [00:44:15]
Shaan Puri: Did you raise money for this or do you control 100% of the business?
Jesse Cole: We went into a lot of debt. It was just my wife and I, and we paid that off very quickly after our first two years. Selling out games is good for the business model, and the merchandise has been bigger than anybody imagined. We get offers daily at this point, but we’ve turned them all away because they’re interested in a return and controlling aspects. If an investor said to start charging taxes, shipping fees, or adding more sponsorship, there would be an easy $50 to $100 million just like that. But that doesn’t interest me. My wife and I own it 100% and we don’t plan to change that ever.
Shaan Puri: Do you pay attention to the finances at all?
Jesse Cole: I focus on the metrics that matter most to your customers. I pay attention to the speed of every game. I pay attention to how long the merchandise lines are. I pay attention to how many trick plays there are. My goal is to get everyone through the merch line within 10 minutes. We’re not close to it right now, but we’re working on it. In Savannah, everyone can get fed within five minutes. Those are the metrics I focus on. I have one meeting a year about the finances. Our finance director and Jared Orton, our president, share where we are, and Emily and I just say, “Great, where are we re-investing?”
We are very healthy. All the estimates people have are dramatically low. I pay attention to how many fans we are serving merchandise to and how quickly we are getting it out. We have a 100,000-square-foot warehouse now. When we do a 24-hour shirt, we go through 30,000 orders. I know that metric this year versus last year.
The SNL Production Model [00:48:30]
Shaan Puri: This business sounds so hard to run. You have the production, personnel issues, merch supply chain, traveling with hundreds of people, and social media. You’re playing the game on extreme hard mode.
Jesse Cole: It’s way harder than I thought. The principle is: don’t do the same show ever again. Every show has to be brand new. The logistics are impossible. We hired someone from the military to help us because we have trucks all over the country. When we go to a football stadium, we need 12 to 14 trucks.
We said, “Who’s been sustaining creativity at a very high level for a long time?” Saturday Night Live. I bought every book on SNL. We watched a documentary on a week behind the scenes. They come in Monday, pitch ideas, have a table read, get the props, and do a show at 8:00 p.m. in front of a live audience to see what hits. Then they put the new ones in at 11:30 p.m. and cut everything else. We do the same thing.
Tuesday is our “OTT” (Over The Top) session. Everyone comes with ideas. You have to fill out a form by midnight. At 10:00 a.m. we review them. By 4:00 p.m. on Tuesday, we have a table read. Then we start getting the props. We do rehearsals in front of our “VIBs” (Very Important Bananas). We watch if they are taking video or if they are into it. Then we put it into the show.
Shaan Puri: What’s your talent strategy? Do you use recruiters or do you find people in TikTok comments?
Jesse Cole: We have 4.2 million people on our waitlist for tickets, and there are 12,700 on our waitlist to work with us. I believe in attracting over recruiting. If you are vocal about who you are, you attract people. 80% of our staff started as interns. I’m working with Cirque du Soleil right now on bringing on some cast at a higher level. I’m working with people from WWE and UFC. But a lot of it is just attracting young, hungry talent.
The Future of Banana Ball [00:53:15]
Shaan Puri: Ari Emanuel says people are working less and they want to go out and have experiences. My prediction is that there’s going to be a second wind that pushes you even further up this mountain. Are you feeling that?
Jesse Cole: I’m fascinated by the cruise industry because they’re creating their own worlds. We’re doing our own cruise to see if we can put on a show for five days with no Banana Ball. I’m fascinated by the youth game. We did a test with a youth tournament in Cleveland that sold out with kids from 48 states. We’re going to build the sport that way. We’re going to do a tour movie. I’m inspired by what Taylor Swift has done. We’re creating original music. We have a music partnership with a well-known group to create original music for us. If we keep making our show better, everything will take care of itself.
Shaan Puri: If we saw you when you were 12 years old, what would we have seen?
Jesse Cole: I was a shy kid. I didn’t have a lot of friends. I had my friends through baseball. Anytime I was around my baseball team, I would try to create attention because it was my time around people my age. Now, being around 100,000 people and staying until the last fan leaves to sign autographs is something I keep pushing for. We used iMovie to create videos back then. I learned how to make videos that people were interested in. I was creative, but I was alone.
Winning the Upper Deck: The Russell Wilson Story [00:57:45]
Sam Parr: Jesse does these talks on his Instagram where he gives the players a talk before the game. He has the staff sit in the worst seats in the outfield so they understand they have to make it great for everyone. You tell these stories that make playing silly baseball seem like you’re doing God’s work. Did you have to learn how to story-tell like this?
Jesse Cole: Every week we have a new talk. It is one of the most stressful things for me. I could speak in front of a Fortune 50 company, but I’m more nervous speaking to our 150 people because I know our words mean so much to them. I have a lens as a “friction fighter.” Wherever I go, I see friction. The other lens is that I see stories in everything.
One story I haven’t shared in forever was about Russell Wilson. He played for me in Gastonia. The first night, I had all the players come down from the roof to high-five the fans. I was up on the roof announcing the starting lineup. I saw all the players on the field except for Russell Wilson. I went down into the grandstand and saw he was way out in the left-field grandstand. He was high-fiving every single kid in the stadium. He was 22 years old and he knew what mattered. It was high-fiving every fan more than getting out on the field.
We’re doing something so much bigger than just putting on a show. It’s how we make people feel. Put yourself as that seven-year-old kid who just wanted an autograph or a high-five. We can provide that every single day.
Shaan Puri: Jesse, there’s a quote you remind me of: “Light yourself on fire with passion, and people will come from miles to watch you burn.” I feel like that’s what you’ve done. You’ve lit yourself on fire with passion for something none of us realized we wanted, and now millions of people want to come watch you burn.
Jesse Cole: I want you guys to see a show. I’m so impressed by how much you’ve known. You have to see it from the beginning to the end and watch what goes into it.
Shaan Puri: Well, God bless you. Thank you so much. This has been a lot of fun.
Jesse Cole: Thank you guys. Seriously, I really appreciate you all.
Shaan Puri: All right, that’s it. That’s a pod.