Building the Savannah Bananas (with Jesse Cole, Founder and Owner)

23:19And it's like, guys, no, we don't say we hate the name. We're excited to have fun. Like, we try to teach them to embrace it. Our first practice, we filmed, they did it with just bananas. So we did batting prize with bananas, we did throwing with bananas, we did catching with bananas. We fully embraced it and just made it fun. And are they worried about destroying their reputation? Like, they're trying to get recruited by major league teams and they're worried about the perception of being part of the joke? Maybe, but it's college summer ball. Anything kind of goes in the college summer ball, yeah.

23:45They're all playing at these top level colleges. In some way, we actually got good players, but that first night, we made six errors. So we're playing in green uniforms because we're not quite ripe and we made six errors But a few crazy things happened so we had a rain delay the first thing I said is it's a graining and everyone's They are just getting poured on and I said Nana's just go out and dance and they went on the field and dance and they were wearing white jerseys And it's pouring rain and it's banana Nana's so talk about another viral moment. That was unintentional Okay, the Nana's being the grandma dance team the banana Nana's our senior citizen dance team is dancing in white jerseys as it's raining on them during the rain delay, all right?

24:19Ridiculous. So we had the first night all you can eat. And again, that was part of our fans first model that you briefly mentioned before. We made every single ticket on -clusive. So all your burgers, hot dogs, chicken sandwiches, soda, water, popcorn dessert, everything on -clusive. It was $15 when we started. But we had no idea what we were doing. So we went through 10 ,000 pieces of meat in the first hour. I mean, it was a disaster. People were waiting like two to three hours. We ended up going through like every other type of food we had because people couldn't get it. So I assume you lost money Because people did all they can eat more than yes and no people realize you can't eat that many burgers and hot dogs And even if a burger a really high quality burgers one or two dollars and sodas are 20 30 cents a good hot dogs 80 cents We'd always act like yeah, we're losing our shirt on this theoretically You're not really but you want to make a product that people feel like they can take advantage of you I love the idea of making a product that people get so excited like I'm gonna take advantage of them I'm gonna get them like yes you go get it man you go get it It's just that mindset, but they watched, you know, the players go into the crowd and deliver roses to little girls.

25:18They watched the dancing. They watched the entertainment. And after that night, they started telling people like, we've never seen anything like this. And that changed everything. They had to experience it first. And that was kind of start playing traditional baseball at that point. But fans were coming in now and we were starting to sell out game after game after game. So it's sort of worked out of the gate. Well, it didn't work until the first gate. And then the first gate. It worked out. Is it right to say you kind of had product market fit with fans from your first game on? Yes, as soon as they experienced it.

25:49Yes, I would say right out the gate, the air bed and the grocery shop. Yes, there was not, but after six, nine months, what's they started seeing? They're like, this is something different. This is good for Savannah. Savannah's a fun city. People want to have fun. It worked out. All right, listeners. We want to thank a new friend of the show, plaid. The name is likely very familiar to you after our recent ACQ 2 episode. odds are you've used plaid before without even maybe realizing it. If you've ever linked your bank account to apps like Robinhood, Venmo or Chime, you're one of the millions of people like one in every two Americans who've already used plaid.

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27:31Listen to our recent ACQ2 episode with Plads Founder and CEO, Zach Paray, and our thanks to Plad. So what's your debt load personally look like at this snapshot in history? Oh, geez. I'm over seven figures in debt. It was tough. Because you owed money to the league. Well, money to the league, all money to start up. We had to get a place to live. I mean, it was, it was a lot of things. Money to put in, money to start, owing money for the league. Then I actually still owed Ken Silver, the owner of Gastonia. So I still had that I mean, it was it was a piles of piles of debt. So this must be a pretty wild thing that you're sitting on owing all these payments to all these different parties.

28:07And you have a thing that's really working, but it's not like super cash generative, even though it has great product market fit. What was happening merchandise was bigger than we ever imagined. So like even when we were first launched on February 25th, we did merchandise from all 50 states in different countries. Immediately now sports center, we were national. I mean, it was Yahoo's front page, which Yahoo was a big thing. you know, back then, we were everywhere. And so merchandise was selling. And it was crazy. Nationally, the brand was loved. Locally, it was not loved. Which, to be honest, it's still kind of a thing.

28:36Like, national local, there's all these different mindsets of us as we've grown and as we've developed into what we are. But, yeah, merchandise was bigger than we ever imagined. Like, our biggest day in Gastonia ever, we were doing that in hours. It was just, it wasn't even a comparison what the bananas were doing in merchandise. You created almost a lifestyle brand? And if I wear this event at his logo, it says more about me than it does about me liking baseball. That's a good point. We have people come up to us every day and say whenever they want to feel good about themselves, they wear our shirt because people will come up to him say, I love your shirt, go, Benannas, have you seen them?

29:10It creates conversation even today. Every time people wear the shirts are now the party animals and our other brands are happening that. So, yeah, I think a lifestyle brand was an accidental thing that happened. I want to spend one more minute on business model here. I mean, I remember from my youth and my family, there's four main revenue lines for minor league baseball. There's tickets, there's merchandise, and then there's food and bev and advertising. Even in those early days, and I think certainly now, you basically cut off the last two. No advertising, no sponsorship, and food and bev is included.

29:43Yeah, tickets and food and bev came together. Now again, there was auxiliary, you know, there was alcohol and some specialty items, ice cream and other, or all the ballpark basics were included. So there was a little bit of food in that, but basically that covered your cost. And then sponsorship, we had in the first few years, but it wasn't much. Our first few years, it was probably 15, 20 % of our total business. And then you ultimately cut it all off, right? Yeah, we thought two weeks before a global pandemic might as well eliminate another big source of revenue for the team. Yes, it was February 25, 2020 that we made an announcement that we don't believe anybody comes to a ballpark to be sold to, marketed to, or advertised to.

30:20And we want to give this historic ballpark back to the fans. We're creating an ad -free stadium here in Savannah. And we eliminated all the ads. And right there, hundreds of thousands of dollars, we just threw away. We actually created a fan wall. So instead of ads, fans get to sign the wall and put their name on the wall. So where there's zero revenue, but what we wanted to do was that we work for one person. And it's the fan. Like that's who we work for. And a lot of times when you have sponsors and advertisers, is they try to extract value from fans. We want to give value to fans with everything we do.

30:50And what do we believe we can be the best in the world at it's put on the greatest show in sports? It's not selling ads. Three, four, five years ago, everyone started going to digital. If you're an advertiser, do you want to put an ad at a stadium? Is that the best use of your $10 ,000 or $20 ,000 or whatever? And so we just try to put ourselves in our fan shoes in every way. And we just said, no, we're going to lean in all in on that. So yes, tickets and merchandise. That is 95 % of our entire business model. I'm going to foreshadow something we'll get to later in the episode around ticketing, but when we were chatting before this, you sort of have this principle that shows up in a lot of different mechanics in your business, which is no one is allowed to sit in between us and our fans, and no one is allowed to extract value out of that relationship.

31:32It is a pure product that we make for them that they pay for. You're more obsessed with that than any entrepreneur I've ever met. Well, go back to Walt Disney, control the end end experience. And he learned that with his final masterpiece, you know, Magic Kingdom. I mean, he even built his own government inside the really creek district, inside Disney world, so he could control getting permits, putting up fireworks, doing all the voting. Like that's what he learned. When he built Disneyland, it was only 190 acres or so. And literally it became, he called it the Neon Jungle. Everyone just moved around all these hotels, and he had to build a wall to keep it out so he could control the experience.

32:06And so he learned that every step of the way. I was like, well, how do we do that? If you want to create a truly great experience, you have to do it end to end. And we're still struggling with that when we go to other stadiums. That's why eventually when we build a potential banana land, you know, we would control every end experience. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Keep thinking about how this business model is going to apply to other stadiums. Pivotal moment that we haven't talked about yet. At some point, you stopped playing college, Somber League Baseball and started playing banana ball. Yeah. When was that?

32:35How did that happen? What did it look like mechanically? So we literally put ourselves in our fan shoes. So people don't realize we go undercover. So we walk up the fans, we drive park with the fans, we sit with the fans, we eat with the fans, and after every game we talk about what are the friction points of the experience. We believe that's a starting point of all innovation to create a fan for life is to eliminate all the friction. So we were doing this, and I have videos of myself coming in and had classes and walking in and experiencing it. And what I realized was people started to get my voice.

33:05So I had to be strategic on when I talked and when I didn't talk, but we noticed that I started watching and fans, even with all the entertainment. And I mean, guys, I mean, we have a promotion every half inning. And promotion, I mean, like a crazy skit, you name it, it's wild. And people were still leaving games early. And so when I started to realize that it's a fundamental problem with the game, you know, I think about like New York City hot dog stand, right? You got the great condom, it's you got the sourcrackers, you got the mustard, you got the cat, you got all the good stuff, right? That's all our entertainment.

33:33But the hot dog still needs work. And that's baseball. And so when I started watching this, I was like, all right, there's a challenge here. So around nine o 'clock fans would start leaving games. Nine, 15 more. You were like monitoring security camera footage to try to figure out when do people start leaving? We had people on our team, every 30 minutes, they would take a picture in a video of the corner of the grandstands. Every 30 minutes, this was a whole year of doing this. That night, he would send me visuals in the pictures and we have that and we started tracking on when they're leaving.

34:00But you could see literally at nine o 'clock, you would watch just a rush of people get up. It was like, they just knew nine o 'clock we're good. It's I'm watching this over and over again and I'm like all right we're putting every form of entertainment possible. We're winning championships too like we're winning games entertainment there is a problem. So then I just went to the you know the minds that we look at everything whatever's normally the exact opposite and if we were to put ourselves in our fan shoes what are all the boring parts of a baseball game? What are all the things that we could change to make it so exciting so fun that every night regardless of the entertainment people want to watch the game.

34:33So I started an an idea book in 2016, 2017, so write down 10 ideas every day. And guys, that's a lot of bad ideas. I mean, I'm talking about 70, 80 % bad ideas. You were writing down 10 ideas every day, starting in 2016. Yeah, I believe you gotta work your idea muscle. If you wanna have great ideas, you gotta work your idea muscle. And so when I realize this people that work out, they work out every day, and they get their reps in. And it gets really hard at 6, 7, 8, 9, but that's how they push through, that's how they grow, that's how they develop. So the same thing with ideas. So I just said, we gotta start writing down ideas.

35:04and I still do it to this day. But what I realized is from the idea book, I was like, all right, let's think about baseball. What are the boring rules of baseball? What are the boring parts of baseball? So let's start right and down. Mount visits. Not one fan gets excited about a mound visit. There's not one fan's like, oh, I can't wait there. I need more mound visits. Let's get some more. What are what they're talking about out there? Oh yeah, I can't wait. Oh, seven thinning. We're gonna get some more mound visits now. It's that time. It just doesn't happen. I watched the game. I'll never forget it was the Dodgers plan.

35:28Yes, seal Pueg. You know, remember, he was like a superstar for like a flash in the pan. And I watched, he'd get in the box and then he'd step out. And I was like, whoa, that was a lot of time. So then I grabbed my phone and I started timing it. And it was 25 to 35 seconds every time he stepped out. And he got a six -pitcher bat. So three minutes of the bat, he wasn't even in the batter's box. I go, there's not one fan in the world that likes watching guys step out of the box, eliminate that. And so I just kept looking. I said, walks. You're out if you step out, right? That's the banana ball rule.

35:55That's a strike. You're just a strike. Yeah, if you step out, it's a strike. And then I started keeping things. I was like, walks. I go, there's a rule or a play in sports. It's actually called a walk, which is so unethnic. It's called the walk. Like, what is wrong with us? And so I was like, what's the opposite of a walk? A sprint. And I started thinking, how can we create a sprint action? What can we do? You punish the picture, you create this. And so that's where we developed the ball for a sprint. So on the ball for literally the catcher has to throw the ball to every person in the field before it's live and the hitter can get as many bases as he wants.

36:23You know, that was turning into a double at triple. Now the defense is ridiculous. So it's hard now, but you'll see it once a game. usually someone get a double out of it. So that's where it started. And then fans first are guiding light on everything. No ticket fees, no convenient fees, no service fees, no sponsorship. And then we just kept thinking it's like, well, what's a fans first rule? Well, let's fans play the game. Let's have them be a part of the game. So if a fan catches a foul ball, it's an out. The way I learned to do this is always picture what the perfect scenario is. So what would be like the perfect scenario is a fan catch a foul ball to win the game.

36:54And then he's rushed on the field. He or she's doing the media interviews, that's what I pictured. And so he said, if that were to happen, would it be amazing? And we said, yeah. And so, one, two years ago, 15 -year -old kid caught a line drive in front of his sister's head, caught it. We rushed him on the field. He's running up and down. He's on the front page of the paper the next day. I was like, it happened. We did it. It's so those little things. But then also the time, the two -hour time limit. Everyone was telling me, Jesse, you got to do two -and -a -half. You know, games were three hours and 12 minutes in a major league baseball.

37:23Go to two -and -a -half and I go, no, two. You want people to want more. You don't go to a movie in the middle of the movie and say, that was a great movie. I left in the middle. Also, I mean, this is a family thing, right? People are bringing their kids. You don't want your kids up till 10 o 'clock? Like, that's miserable. You gotta get them home, you gotta get them to bed. 100%. I want people to want more and not a great comedian or anything. You're not gonna like, oh, it's awesome. I just want to get out early though. Like, you don't do that, but baseball games it happens all the time. And then the last thing I said, well, what's really bad on a game that people don't want to come to?

37:53It's a blowout. You know if teams up by eight runs, 10 runs, they're not gonna play. So I said, well, how do you change the scoring? And this is where my dad came into play. Me and my dad were as close as we could be. We talk all the time. I said, dad, what could we do with scoring? And he started. He's a big golfer. He's like, well, what about match player? Something what if we did something and we start talking about what about every inning? What if every inning counts for a point? And so even if a team scores seven runs, they can only get one point and it'll never ever be a blowout because you can only get one point in inning.

38:18It capes the game more competitive 100 % and so but the challenge was the first year a Team could do have four points in the seventh inning and the game was over Because you win the eighth and ninth you could only get two more points You need to come back mechanic. I was writing and writing and writing and writing and I called our coaches I go I got it they go what I go the last inning every run counts as a point So no matter what the last inning the ninth inning if you score three or four runs you can still come back and win and it always comes down to the last inning. Every game in Banana Ball always comes down to the last inning and being close.

38:51So you destroy the blowout problem without eliminating the comeback mechanic that naturally exists in baseball? Correct. And then we threw in one more final one on there. We said, well, what about getting your best hitter the opportunity to hit in the ninth inning, no matter what? Oh, the Golden Battle. The Golden Battle Rule. So your best hitter against your best pitcher, that's action. And so how do you make it the ninth inning? Again, you talk about TV, a lot of your podcasts, you know, you talk about the TV rights, how big it is. That's a whole lot of story I word it on YouTube, but how do you get people to want to watch to the end?

39:22Now you have the ninth inning coming down to everything. A fan can catch a foul ball to win a game. You have a golden batter who can come up, and the fans can even challenge a play. So literally we have a fan challenge role. If a fans don't like a call, they can literally challenge the role. So we built this and with 11 rules. Again, 11's a big number for us. The 11th letter, the alphabet is K, the symbol of potassium. We have 11 rules in banana ball. We have 11 fans, first principles. We count down from 11. Every game, 11's really big to us. There's a little symbol there as well. So there you go.

39:52Taylor Swift has 13. Banana ball has 11. There you go. And I'll start a cousin of a banana. Okay, so you kind of have this idea that baseball can be more fun and that the bananas should play a variant of baseball. What does it look like to leave a league? And you need someone to play. And then tell your fan base you thought we were wacky before Well people don't realize is we tested this in 2018 We didn't leave the league until 2022 So in 2018 we went to a small division two college Well first we went to wafered my school because my coach was like yeah, Jesse will give it a shot in practice And then we got rained out so people say rain out is a good block I guess so our first ever been animal game got rained out So then I went to lander because one of my other assistant coaches was there He's like, Jesse will give it a shot.

40:39And so we told the guys, we didn't have a name for the game yet. We were calling it like Speed Ball or Show Ball. We were messing around. And we played the game with them. And there was behind closed doors, except some of the girlfriends were there like watching and doing homework. And this was great because we played nine innings in 99 minutes. And the girlfriends were up on the edge of their seat watching. Instead of doing their homework, they're like, we've never watched practice or scrimmage. We just come here to get the outside and do our homework. And we played nine innings, 99 minutes. And the guys said it was the most fun they've heard playing baseball.

41:06ball. And so that was in 2018 with college guys' lander. It wasn't until 2020 we played one in front of fans. So you were work shopping for two years. Work shopping, playing regular conventional baseball. And then we did it 2020 again, COVID year. We were one of the few teams that we in Georgia. We had like a thousand people and they watched it. The first player, the second play was a ball for Sprint Home Run. It just, no one knew what to do. Like it was just chaos. It was fast. It was like an hour and 45 hour and 50. It was exciting. and we're like, all right, there's something here. Tested again, then 2021, we're like, let's just keep the Coastal Plain League team, the college summer team, but let's just do a one -city world tour.

41:43So I always believe in, start small, but think big. Start small, think big. So we announced the one -city world tour. Now, again, here's a little inside the business. So again, goes back to demand. And that's part of our flywheel. So we got live events, drives content, content drives traffic, traffic drives demand, demand forces you to do more live events. That all goes together. So if you push on the demand button, that will push live events, live events always drives content, content drives outrageous traffic. Because the only way you can make revenue is live events. You don't do live events, you're not.

42:15Live events is everything. Yeah, that drives everything. I mean, obviously merchandise online is a bigger business than we ever in Tisbeen. That's downstream of live events and people seeing the game. Exactly. So we announced the one city world tour. And the idea was, no one wanted us. No one knew what Banana Ball was. But could we get one city to want us? And so we announced this and we said, We're gonna go to one city and I'll never forget the city of mobile They were like interested and again mobile was never on the radar But the mayor had read my first book and he was a fan of what we're doing and he goes What what will it take and I go what do you mean what it'll take?

42:47Go on go on and he goes well, you know I know it's COVID and there's challenges. You know is there some form of investment? I go what are you thinking? It's so a throughout a small number and they got tourism involved and they just invested a little bit in it and and we sold all the tickets. And it's a 3 ,500 CDM. Yeah, it could have been five, but because of COVID, we were only allowed to do 3 ,500 each night with some spreading out. So we said we need to do two nights. So we did 3 ,500 each night, sold them out, and that started the business model. Now, the sound went out. I had our announcer try to sing the national anthem because the anthem singer got caught in traffic.

43:23He couldn't make it because all the traffic. So when he went to sing the national anthem, I go, shark, let's lead everybody. We're back together here. Let's all sing the national anthem and he goes a one a two a one two three four take me out to the I go Shark national anthem please so that's our first one city world tour started with a start of taking out to the ball game Into the national anthem and at that time we were broadcasting ourselves too We were putting it up for you on Facebook I think because we were trying to learn how to broadcast a game as well So a lot of things didn't go well, but fans showed up and they stayed and they were into it and they were fired up and we're like, those two games proved, let's extend this a little more.

44:01And so that's when we said, all right, 2022, let's do seven cities. See where that is versus the Coastal Plain League team. And then we saw the success, and we said, 2022, we have to leave and go all in. And seven cities, what type of ballpark do you play in those seven cities? Everything we do is a test for the future years. So we tested major league spring training homes. So we're like, could this help us get relationships with major league teams? Do it right, do it well, show that we can sell it out, get a good perk cap for them all of that. So we did West Palm Beach, and so we worked with them home into Astros and the Nationals.

44:32And if you look last year, two of our first, the first stadium ever into was Houston. We did the Riquid before Major League did. So we did the old ballpark in Birmingham, and the old 8 ,000 seat, oldest ballpark in America to create a story. So we did a few different places, but again, just found places that were interested in us, that were willing to say, hey, we wanna give you a shot. It was anybody that was willing, and then we had to prove our concept. So after we proved, sold out all seven of those, was then it started opening up pretty heavily. Was Major League Baseball starting to take notice because everyone who's a baseball fan who's listening to this will say, wait a minute, some of this stuff kind of started to show up in Major League Baseball a few years later.

45:09Like the pitch clock. Is that at all motivated by the success of the bananas? No, I mean, I appreciate that. And I do hear that Major League Baseball has a lot of smart executives and smart people on them. And it just takes time because they got to work with so many parties, the union, the owners, the commissioners, the office, there's so many parties it takes time. The Major League Baseball Games are three hours and 12 minutes. Something had to happen. I may have seen it, but I think they knew they had to make the games faster. I think when you see more of the celebrating and when you start to see some trick plays coming into the game, I think that's coming player focused.

45:37I think people are starting to see that. That's the part of the game. That's how you get kids excited to play as you show them having fun. Like that's why we played as kids. Okay, on the player side, as you're transitioning to Banana Ball and you know, already becoming more popular, I pick it like how his player recruitment evolved. I assume you have a lot of people who want to play for you, but to play for the bananas or the party animals or your other teams, you need to be multi -talented. You can't just be a good baseball player, right? So yes, at first it was very hard to recruit players. So during this time before the 2022 tour, we convinced ESPN to do a series, the banana land, to do like a five episode series.

46:14It helped because we had Eric Burns, a former major leagueer, he's like, he's like, I'll give it a shot, I'll coach the guy. So we had a kind of a character to coach and we had like only 50 players show up for a tryout for like two teams Literally most guys are gonna make the team if you show up because it's weird You're playing in the middle of the spring. It's only seven weekends. It was really hard And you had some guys who played pro ball you had some guys who played college and some guys who played high school There were no trick plays back then like that didn't exist It was just can you have fun can you dance or will you wear costumes?

46:44They were in costumes are you willing to not take yourself to seriously and so that first try out was episode one, I think of Benana Land and one of the big things that happened was a young kid showed up. He was an average ball player, had him played since high school at Anna Tryout. He wasn't going to make it. He just wasn't good enough. And he came up to me and said, Hey, I got stilts. You want me to wear them? And I said, No, not really, unless you can hit in them. And he goes, I can hit in them. Yes, sir. I go, All right, getting in the batter's box. Let's see what you got. And I didn't know this.

47:12He had never hit in stilts ever. He actually had worn stilts since he was like 12 years old. But his mother saw the tryout, signed him up and said, you gotta go to this and they said they want you to be different and do things people have never seen before in a baseball field because that was my whole thing. I wanna see things I never seen before. He gets in the batter's box and he starts actually hitting the ball and hitting line drives and everyone stops what they're doing. Like it is just shock, disbelief, they're blown away. I mean it is special. I'll never forget right afterwards all the coaches got together and they said, we can't take him.

47:44I go, guys, he hits on stilts. What do you mean you can't take them? They go well, he just can't play at this level. We don't have a roster spot I go make a roster spot for him I don't care what you call it call it the entertainment player I go I'm gonna walk out you guys figured out and I walked out I came back in 20 minutes They said okay. We'll create this entertainment roster spot and then still became like the first big viral thing with what we're doing And so we started seeing those people show up and then after that we started in more more better players and and showing them, hey, you gotta be entertained, you gotta start doing trick plays, you gotta show that.

48:16And so each year, now we have first rounders, second rounders, third rounders. I mean, we have pro guys who just didn't make it, but they're right on that cusp, and that's who's now joined a lot of the banana ball teams. The social media flywheel is helping here too, right? Like, people are just like, you're becoming bigger on social players, you're becoming bigger on social, people are seeing opportunity, hey, I like, if I'm talented, I should come do this. 100 % every night it was, what can we show tonight that people I've never seen on baseball field before. And so every night we were trying to come up with things.

48:44So people didn't realize we spent time the week before coming up with all the ideas. So we followed SNL. We started the SNL live model of pitching, table reads, writing. We followed their model. And so we would come up with these ideas. We'd go into the games with 10, 15 ideas of things we want to do in the game. And if all we got to do is capture them. You got to rehearse them, you got to nail capture them and put it out. That was our whole model. And immediately starting to get a million followers, two million, and now 25, 26, 27, it just keeps growing. It's insane. And it's an interesting insight that most baseball players don't have a second great skill and they don't necessarily have the most charisma.

49:18But you need a couple of rosters full. And as your notoriety grows, it's pretty easy for you to feel the team of all talented baseball players who all have crazy other skills. It's not like you need every baseball player to have that. You just need a couple of rosters full. It's you're the average of the five people you surround yourself with. So think about these guys every day they're surrounding themselves by people that are entertainers that are doing it at high level not just the baseball But these guys have millions of followers on social media. You know, they have more followers than most major league players And so they're seeing how to create content how to do this and we have a dance instructor a choreographed dance instructor He's our dancing first -based coach Macy who's been with us many years You know he works with the guys daily and I've watched guys who when they showed up couldn't dance They'll go out to country bars and line -mancing and they'll take over the whole dance floor It is unbelievable to see because again, it's just like working your idea muscle.

50:08They've been working every day. Every rehearsal, they're learning dance moves, new dance moves, that night that they have to perform, and then the next night a whole other dance. So think about that, and so they're learning all this trick plays, dancing, social content, how to play banana ball, how to be fans first and go up to the crowd and deliver roses and do things every day. It's a different track. They're not just trying to be the best baseball player, they're trying to be the greatest entertainer. Most fans first, it's just a different thing we're teaching. And so at this point had you created the party animals yet to create the the opponent for the bananas?

50:40Yeah, the party animals 2020 so we had to have another team for the in place so in 2020 those first few games They they started but they were just the secondary brand they were just quote unquote the underdog or even the villain at that point But then they took off so in 2023 They actually won the tour that's when people call us the globe charters I'm like guys the bananas don't win every game In fact, this year in 2025, the party almost have been dominating. I mean, they have the first round picks. They hit home runs. They're just unbelievable. And so they started creating a falling. And what was wildest, now they have over five, six million followers.

51:13They have more followers than every major league baseball team on TikTok. It's crazy. So we tested last year their own tour. They sold it out. And now they have 21 game tour, sold it out. They have 500 ,000 people on their way list because they've created their own identity of fun entertainment. They're the greatest partying sports. And they're wearing like crop top like baseball uniforms. They're their own form of sacrilege. Yes, they definitely go against the grain in many ways and it's fun to watch. You know as you think about this The Yankees when they have success you have people start turning against them and we've started seeing more hate towards the bananas Recently as we've got bigger, but now you have this other team or you have the firefighters or the tailgators or teams five teams six So we're trying to build this ecosystem of banana ball because we believe the game is truly entertaining take away all the dancing and entertainment It's an awesome game to watch and we believe in it.

52:01Has anybody else ever blended entertainment and like actual sport like this? Sport is entertainment. That's the whole thesis of all the episodes we've done on acquired. But like it is a competitive sport that you guys are playing at a high level. Yeah, so obviously the easiest is to look at it's WWE. But WWE scripts the outcomes. So that's where the biggest difference is. But I wrote this in the 2022. I wrote a vision for 2026 and I wrote a three -page thing I shared with our team and I talked about the home globe trotters And I said guys right now that's the comparison we see and we have a runway So to the globe trotters in the 1940s the globe trotters played in front of 75 ,000 people in Berlin The NBA was booking the globe trotters to play so they would actually get fans to stay for the NBA game Will Chamberlain chose the globe trotters before going into the NBA The Globetrotters beat the Lakers with George Miken.

52:57The Globetrotters were playing competitive games all over. They were the biggest team in sports. Barnon, they were biggest team in sports. They arguably even bigger than the Yankees. They were huge. And then something happened. I don't think most people know that. No, they don't. They went happen. They did something. Abe Sabrstein, very unique owner, great promoter. He said, ah, well, we can do this all over the world. Why don't we just make another Globetrotters team and then make another Globetrotters team. And then we have three Harlem Globetrotters playing everywhere. and let's script it so we can control the outcomes and make it a great show every night.

53:27Like the traveling shows of like Broadway, you have a Broadway hit and then you do a second cast and that goes on the, yeah, yeah, 100%. And they dominated for years. The 40s, the 50s, they were rolling in it, dominating because it was still a new thing. And then the NBA started to take some of the fun things from the Globetrotters. Like through the legs, the entertainment of the game made it more fun and they got the higher level ball players because of the competitiveness. The Globetrotters were no longer competitive. And then the Globetrotters, hey, 100 years, I will always say a ton of respect.

53:55They are still in business, 100 years, very few businesses can do that. But not many people are wearing Globetrotter jerseys anymore because the relevance is not there. So what I wrote in that piece, that three page piece was, what if the Globetrotters created their own league in the 1940s? Would there be an NBA or would the Globetrotter league be the most entertaining competitive league in sports? And so I said we ever run away, but why don't we disrupt ourselves before we have to? Because that's what we did when the Coast of Plain League, when we were playing College Summer Ball. We had won back -to -back championships, we had no costs, you couldn't pay the players back then.

54:29It was a great business model. That's right, college summer leagues, you actually can't pay the players because it's NCAA players. Can't pay the players. Great business model if you're selling tickets, great business model. We disrupted that to do something that no one was asking us for. And we went to it. And then now no one was asking us for a leak, but we said what if we did it now and learn. And instead of everyone else who starts a leak, think about any leak that started over the last 30 years. Generally, if they start the leak, they get a TV rights deal, they get sponsorship, and they say, let's hope the fans come.

54:59But we got our money. This is IPL, yeah. We got our money. IPL does a great job, but some of the other ones that have started more recently in the last 10, 15 years. But even IPL, like the whole thing was the TV rights leak. The TV rights and the Jersey sponsorships, they knew they were gonna get fans, because the fans were so started for cricket, really. So our mindset is why don't we create the fans first? If the bananas are 18 million on social media, the party almost have over five. The firefighters we just launched 12 months ago have over a million. The tailgators we just launched, they're growing like crazy.

55:24If you create the fans first, then focus on everything else. Could you have a more sustainable league in the future? And that was the mindset. All right, here's an interesting, you have an opinion on this, I'm sure, because you have taken a side. All big successful sports leagues, every team is owned by a different owner, is it better or worse for the game and for the competition of the league that you own all the teams? We think about that regularly. So a single entity, will there be the storylines? Everyone cares about story. That's where this is going to drive. We got the entertainment I believe in the game, but it's going to come down the storylines.

55:58So you got to create coaches, the Deon Sanders effect. You know, you got to create coaches that are the heroes in the villains, yeah, storyline, in the sense that they're going to be the one and talking, they're their one, gonna be doing all this, getting people fired up. And so we think about that. And there's a few other ideas. Obviously there's some things that, primarily, getting the information, that's very interesting on Korean storylines, which we may look into. You gotta create that. So I think it will be hard, but we'll be able to control the experience, the end to end better, and not let another owner do something that might not be truly fans first.

56:30Because every other owner would say, TV rights, sponsorship, we're gonna charge ticket fees. What do you mean? We're going to charge taxes for our fans. Why are you paying all the taxes? Like that is crazy. We pay all the taxes on every merchandise item, every ticket item. That is crazy. They would do it for short -term revenue, but we're focused on long -term fans over short -term profits. It's a big difference. The other thing that your model benefits from is you can never have an owner of a really successful team who then wants to lock in their advantage. You economically don't care which of these teams becomes the most successful.

57:05As long as the game stays competitive, each team is occurring about your fans. It's fun to watch in competitive on the field. You're more invested in the sport than any given team, which is different than other sports leagues. I mean, can each team upscale? For instance, can the party animal start selling out majorly stadiums? And my thought would be yes. Could each team start selling out? Could not just the bananas go to Mexico or go to Australia or go to Japan and sell out? And so you start building that where it creates more excitement and demand. and it's not just one team. So, okay, catch us up.

57:37You're selling out football stadiums now. What did the next few years look like? Well, that's been hard just so you know. I bet. So at first, we weren't sure we could do major league stadiums. Major league stadiums all then have exclusive ticket deals. This is what we foreshadowed earlier. We built our own ticket platform. And by exclusive ticket deals, you mean like ticket master or another platform have the exclusive rights to all events. Ticket master, tickets .com, see, they have all these every single event they have. And so we weren't sure we were able to do this. We had to find a way in and basically say, we're not competing, every ticket sold in advance, you can still sell some of the premium suites on yours.

58:12We're gonna sell it. So we found a few that said, we'll do it. Find that right precedent, we found that right precedent. And then we said, all right, well, if something happened where we couldn't work with Major League Baseball anymore, what else do we have to grab onto? And no one's really looking at football stadiums at all. And I've always learned from Sam Walton, go where others won't go. So, Kmart and Sears were obsessed with going to the cities where everyone was. And Sam goes, no, we're going to go to these suburbs where no one is right now and we're going to build it such a great experience.

58:40Obviously, Ikea has followed that model and so on and so. And so, go where there's won't go. We can go to every city in the country, small cities, big cities, but it's not just baseball stadiums. We said, what if we experimented with going to a football stadium? With banana ball, could it be a great show? We got one that was like all in and they said a deal for us. That was a great deal, a great precedent. And we said, let's do it. You build the field, take care of the netting, we sell all the tickets, there's no rent, let's find a deal that works out, you'll make all the food and beverage, et cetera.

59:08And so that's one of the things we don't really know, is we don't pay rent anywhere we go, but they make huge money on food and pev in some of the premium tickets. And teams are now using the ability for their fan base or customer base to have access to banana tickets as a like selling point, right? And think about this, so we went to Clemson, 60 % 50 ,000 people came from outside of the state of South Carolina to Clemson. Talk about economic impact. And so we're seeing that everywhere we go. So cities, tourism now want to invest because when we come in, people are coming in for this bucket list trip because there's 3 million people on the wait list.

59:44If you get a chance to go, we're fortunate people are coming. You're the era's tour of sports. Well, I would never, she's the best there is. So we said, could it work at a football stadium? and we went to Clemson, 81 ,000 fans, 190 feet down the field line. There were 11 home runs. But the game was played in the hour and 43 minutes, and it was one of the most exciting banana ball games we've ever had. And I was like, heck yes. And since then, we've heard from every stadium over 100 ,000. Is the left field outfield wall like ridiculously far? Oh yes, one's like 350 down the line, and one is like 200 down the line.

1:00:22and then we have a 50 foot net. Oh, it's crazy. I mean, it's laughable. Because in the old days, when they had municipal stadiums, they would sort of accommodate where you could push out one of the walls for baseball and... Yep. No, we can't move anything at football stadiums. No, it's just, hey, here's the field. Let's put the field in. Here's a giant net and let's do it. And again, we found a partner, netting pros, that would say, hey, we'll supply the net, we'll do some partnerships. That was a unique partnership that we were able to make work and it worked. And then we did Nissan and Tennessee and we're doing two with the Panther Stadium in Charlotte.

1:00:53So now we have a lot of opportunities looking in the future. Your business requires way less risk and way less operating capital, and it's much more asset light than traditional sports businesses because you have this advantage, like this leverage, where you can say, look, people really, really, really want to see the bananas. They can't see them in their city. I bet I can lure close to 100 ,000 people into this stadium to have a unique amazing experience. You should give me the stadium for free. And people go, sure. They're not using it. You know, you're looking at these assets where you often call the circus PT Barnum 146 years of touring and now they went out for a few years now they're back.

1:01:29You know, touring model can work if you minimize your expenses, but we travel with 200 plus people. So when you talk about minimizing expenses, comparison, the globe trotters travel with 30. We travel with 200 to 220. We do the whole broadcast, both teams, all the entertainment. We hire three to 400 locally, nanoscanners, people in banana costumes, scanning your tickets, we hire people to do merchandise. It's very big operation. It costs each person that travels. 35 to 40 thousand dollars a year and just travel expenses for each person. So if you're traveling with 200 people, that's a huge expense.

1:02:05But we believe in doing the unscable to make sure they feel our presence there. From everything, our entertainment, our cast, I mean, we travel with a whole cast. I mean, your name and our dancers, our bands, everything. And so that's worth it for us. There's different models. We spend more here. We spend less here. But also we pay the players dramatically more than minor league baseball. Not even close. Yeah, average minor league player is making, not even average league. There's caps on this stuff. I remember it from my family, like minor league players, you get a signing bonus when you get drafted.

1:02:35But then your salary is like, if you're lucky, poverty line, you know, if you're lucky, yeah. They increased it like triple A's like 35 ,000 and you help out that are there. but like, you know, we have numerous players and most players in the future are six figures plus. And so you get paid well and they play half the games. We only play on Friday, Saturdays and Sundays, maybe a Thursday, no Monday, Tuesday, Wednesdays. So we try to put our money into our people into the experience and not put the money in things like a rent or something that we can't actually make a huge impact with. All right.

1:03:04So I'm dense. Help me understand this. You're paying your players like three times as much. What's the top line that supports that? that, whereas all the profitability come from that allows you to invest in your players more. Because you don't have sponsorships. So you sell 2 .2 million tickets. Ticket prices are between $35 and $60. So major league stadiums, football stadiums, $60 for the lower bowl, $50 for the middle, $40 for the top. And then merchandise, we're very fortunate. That is our model. So we can serve 15 to 20 ,000 people per game of merchandise. And if football stadiums, they can be even more.

1:03:37So like at a major league stadium, you can look at 15 ,000 people. which is 40 % 50 % are buying merch, not just for themselves, but potentially they buy multiple items. I mean, you've seen the numbers on the masters, obviously what they do in four days, we're not like that, but it's a big part of our business. And we keep our prices low, a $30 shirt is $30, with no tax and no extra fees. So what did you say the tier price things are for football stadiums? 40, 50 and 60. Like, I got, go to an NFL game. Like, you're not getting a $40 ticket anyway. Yeah, and a 60 dollar ticket is $60. And so what's the challenge for us in the next fans first thing we got to figure out is the secondary market People look at us.

1:04:14I hear every day your tickets the most expensive in the world I that probably makes you crazy There's memes of me behind bars guys and saying Jesse Cole should be put in jail for his particular pricing The secondary market how much do you think stub hub vivid seed sea cake invest to be the top tier on Google? I bet you it's millions of dollars and so even though you have your own ticketing platform or you still can't totally control second dairy market? No, because it's speculative. So what'll happen on October 9th? We do a world tour draft, which is one of my favorite events. So most teams, they do a schedule release.

1:04:45We actually make it into a live event. So we had fans flying from 38 states to find out where we're gonna play. And we make it a huge big event, very Steve Jobs, MacWorld. I wanna make it big. We announced the new teams. That night, there are no tickets available, except on all those secondary websites, there's thousands of fake tickets, speculative tickets that are being sold for hundreds and hundreds of dollars. That night our lottery list opens. Two million people will join the lottery list in 48 hours. But everyone else who just searched Savannah, man and his tickets are banana ball tickets.

1:05:14They see all those and then they're buying fake tickets. Oh, so they're not even real tickets. They're speculative. Every night we have people flying to town, show up in that morning. They got their tickets. They said, sorry, these weren't real tickets. They brought their whole family. And so every night we have to figure out how to take care of them fans first, whether it's standing room or do something every single night. So we're gonna figure out how to solve this problem. We got some ideas. So average ticket price on the secondary market's 300 plus dollars. So that's what we could charge tickets for, but we don't.

1:05:42That's a big problem we're trying to solve. Is it just because those websites allow you to list tickets without verifying that you actually have the tickets? Correct. We've actually seen this for our upcoming radio city show. I logged on to Secondary, a non -ticket master secondary site, and I looked at a seat, and it was very expensive and I thought, huh, I know for a fact there is gonna be a camera in that seat. That seat is actually not available. I sure hope no one pays $1 ,000 for that seat. There you go. There you go. So again, it's part of the model. We're gonna get there. It just takes time.

1:06:14Yeah, so okay, tell us about broadcast. Like, what is your broadcast and meteorite strategy? So again, put yourself in the fan shoes. What do people hate about broadcast? Commercials. Nobody likes commercials. So how could we create an ad -free experience? What else do people hate? Paywalls. Where's the game on? I don't know peacock HBO. I don't know God bless it. I understand the NFL NASCAR like I have so much respect and admiration They are maximizing every opportunity and they're learning from it. It's great For us I'm putting myself in our fan shoes. It's like what if we keep every game for free on YouTube every single game now There was very little money on YouTube.

1:06:48I mean we're talking hundreds at all. There's a game very very little But for the fans makes it easy and so I believed that at some point we could have games on and national networks, but only if it was on our terms. And so the first few years, talking to all these groups, they're like, no, it's exclusive. We've never done it that way. I go, well, we'll only do it if it's not exclusive. And they go, we're offering you this much money. I go, it doesn't matter. We're good. Our business is not built on that. We're profitable and successful and healthy based on tickets and merchandise. So I said, no.

1:07:20You've never taken equity capital and you've never raised debt. This is a debt -free business is that you operate. It's my wife and I, we have the team. So we just kept saying no. And finally, they were like, we can't ignore you guys anymore. That was actually how I got the phone call from the National Baseball Hall of Fame aside. They said, we can't ignore the bananas anymore. We have to put you guys in the pool of fame. I was like, this wasn't how I expected to get that call, but it was fun fact, they guys. They have the original idea book, where I wrote the rules. I called Show Ball back then.

1:07:51And it's got even the Golden Battle, which we'd introduced to last year, but a lot of the original rules are in there and it's got some really cool things. But anyways, ESPN and some of these others said, we can't ignore you. And I said, guys, we have to keep it. We have to keep it on YouTube. They said, we've never done it like that. I go, well, and they said, all right, I guess we can make the exception. And they made the exception. So they're paying you for broadcast rights that they're gonna put on their apps and ecosystems. They're gonna run ads against or they're gonna monetize, however, they're gonna monetize.

1:08:20And you are broadcasting the exact same games ad free on YouTube. So every game is on YouTube. So all the promotions, the in -between, the half -time shows that we do, you can watch on YouTube, or you can watch on ESPN, and they'll just be some commercials filled in it. So we are able to hold our ground, and now we have the same thing with TNT, and some others were about to announce it's been a long process. And we still spend millions dollars on a broadcast. Like, the broadcast itself right now is not making money. We're investing $5 million plus just this year alone, building control rooms. We have multiple tours going on, so it's not covering itself yet, but it will, and it's best for fans.

1:08:52Does the broadcast partner take your media feeds or do they bring in their own duplicative cameras and crews and control rooms? Here's a funny story. So our first game on ESPN, this was 2022 and this was, when we were still working on it, they brought in a crew from the outside. All right, this wasn't ESPN, but they brought in a crew to help do it. And the first hitter struck out in 10 seconds. So three pitches in 10 seconds. The guy directing is sweating bolts. He goes, I can't do this. This is too fast. I can't, because they're used to a baseball game. Stepping out of the box, adjust the batting gloves, you know.

1:09:24Do that. So we had an intern, a seasonal person, step in and start leading that show. And now we're like, we just got to do this in -house. And so now we've built it all, BTV, we've built it all in -house. Whoa. And so when it's broadcast on these partners, it's using the output of your control room. It's our entire team. But, but guys, we have failed every step of the way. That's not how the NFL works. No, most places they have, I mean, some, I think UFC does their own, I think some do their own, but a lot of times it's all hired out. It's just too expensive. It doesn't make sense. Yeah, Fox and CBS are coming in and doing the NFL.

1:09:58It's astronomical, but people don't realize this. Our first game on Primetime ESPN, not ESPN 2 last year. The transmission went out for the first 10 minutes. So the ESPN anchors were like... Go to YouTube. Well, looks like the bananas can't handle us right now. And we finally got back on. And it was buffering and we were struggling. And my point is we failed every step of the way. Just people don't remember the failures because we move on to the next at bat. Our first shipment of T -shirts guys had too many ends in bananas. We misspelled our own name with our first shipment of T -shirts. Our first major league game, our ticket system got hacked.

1:10:33And so literally our ticket system in Houston got hacked. It wasn't working the whole night. I was like, we're done. We're never doing a major league game again. It got hacked. Cyber attack. People on the ground, sighted was crazy. But like we have failed every step of the way, but we're willing to get to the next at bat. And I think that's where it's like all this. We don't know how to do all this. We're learning it. So what's the vision for broadcast going forward? No. Again, in the vision that I wrote in 2022, it was like, well, how do you create a broadcast that again, is must watch. It's not just the game.

1:11:01Could every player be mic'd up? You have your favorite player that you can be tuned in. What are these other things that can make the game so interesting? Because right now, I believe people are bigger fans of individuals than they are teams. It's becoming that way, because as individuals, Jackson Olson's got a couple million followers, KJ, Jackson, Coach Rack. It's like, how do I get a full access of watching him? And there's these different ways. So we need to learn how to do that. That's going to take a couple years. All these ways of looking at it, we just want to control it so we can learn faster.

1:11:28And that's the model. You are leaving money on the table and profit dollars on the table everywhere. Yeah, CFO's hit us. And I get the sense you are aware of this and love this because there's two ways to say at one, it's for the fans, it's your North Star. All of that is true. But two, man, does this build sort of a stored potential energy into banana ball as a sport, into these teams, into the relationship with the fan into NPS, you're charging up a massive battery right now in the profit dollars you choose not to collect. I mean, I think that's part of it. I mean, what's so great is to see our fans defend us When any people get after us, I tell our team, don't write back.

1:12:11Let our fans defend us. Let our fans back us up. Because that's powerful. And what we've been doing behind closed doors as well, we haven't promoted it. We have a K club. Again, K symbol of potassium. We have thousands of members, thousands. We haven't released numbers yet, but it's growing. We don't advertise or promote it. But it's your way to guarantee tickets to any game and your part of this community on Facebook. And they talk and they share everything and we do special things for them. We get to have special beat ups and all this. We're building this loyal bigger than any season ticket holder base, you know, in the country.

1:12:43And now it's all over the country, this K club group. They pay $59 a year and they get complete access and they can get any ticket they want in a game. And it's all part of this. There's so many elements, even before you said the membership thing, I was going to say there's so many elements of Costco here where you are minimally value extractive. It's the idea of shared economy scaled or scaled shared economies where you're passing as much as possible onto the fans and trying to build this durable relationship that they're super big fans of and we've shared that Costco episode from you guys with our whole staff and just the fact that they were even Literally processing their own they went all the way in to control it to keep that hot dog at a dollar 50 and keep the chickens at their price They went all the way and so they'll be a point where we do that with merchandise nice, we're already doing it with TV, tickets, we're already doing it, but we need to figure out the secondary market.

1:13:32So you'll play the long game. If the company is healthy enough, me and Emily don't need, we're not in an air bet anymore. We have a real bet, we're happy, okay? We don't need any, we don't have to appease any shareholders, we don't need to appease any investors. So if we have minimal profits every year, but we're doing things for the long game, it's gonna win in the end and that's what we believe in. I don't even need to ask you the question. I like, I know that you're doing this for the rest of your life. I can't imagine you doing anything else with your days. is you're not looking to exit or like maximize short -term profits.

1:13:59So like, why wouldn't you operate this way? I want this for my grandkids. I want to create something that we love. It's all about chasing moments, guys. You bring people together, like there's nothing like it. When you see after a game, thousands of people singing stand by me, which out of all things, it's wild. They feel like they're a part of something. It's those moments that I'm chasing, that energy. And so why would you ever give it up? So we're gonna keep building and each team has their own moments that they're creating. I mean, seeing a football stadium, 80 ,000 people, and everyone's got their flashlights on their phone, and everyone's singing yellow.

1:14:29Look at the stars, look how they shine for you. It sounds kumbaya, I get it. But every night I get goosebumps. And when I was at Fenway Park, which I grew up south of Boston, a dream to pitch at Fenway, and I looked around 38 ,000 people at Fenway, all singing yellow. I was like, there's nowhere else in the world I'd rather be. I think that's what our fans feel like. Well, you do pitch at Fenway now. Just a different definition of pitch. Yeah, different way. You PT Barnum pitch it. That's a bad way. Well, Jesse, I know we got to let you go. David and I cannot wait. He's going to come up to Seattle for the teamable park.

1:15:00Game games. I don't know how many you're doing here in December. I can't wait. It's got to be fun. We'll get you guys there early so you can see the full show because we start early. I mean, it's entertained always. There's like a parade and starts like 2 p .m., right? 2 p .m. and yeah, it's just you'll get your steps in. It'll be worth it though. I'm amazing. I can't wait. All right, everyone. Jesse Cole, listeners, we'll see you next time. and we'll see you next time.