Forward Progress With Jesse Cole: Origins of Banana Ball

0:01Hey, it's Thursday, which means we're coming at you with a short feel good story from a past guest. Hope you enjoyed the clip. This week, Jesse Cole. So it was a trip that the two of you took as a couple early on to Savannah that understandably altered the course of your life. Explain what went on there. We went down there and I said, Emma, you know, there's a game. We just finished our season. I'm like, well, we've got to go to the game. We've got to see the stadium. And so we went to the minor league game, the Savannah Sand Nats, and we walked in a beautiful Saturday night. And there was literally less than 200 people in the stadium.

0:43And it was that moment I looked around. I was like, this, you know, majestic old stadium, but it had character. And for me, coming from, you know, a high school Legion Park to a minor league stadium, even though it's a hundred year ballpark, I was blown away. And so it was then that I told the commissioner of the league of this team ever leaves, we're going to come here and we want this market. And so it was that point that weekend that we saw a different vision of what it could be. And we're so fortunate that within a few months, the team asked for a brand new stadium. The city said no. And they said, we're out of here.

1:12And I convinced the city to let us come to Savannah. OK. And so explain what was involved with that. So it was a lot of work. We're a college summer baseball team. Yeah. Savannah had minor league professional baseball for 90 years. And we're a college summer baseball team. And I'm trying to convince the city to go from professional to college summer baseball. And I knew the only way we could do it wasn't any marketing plan wasn't any attention plan You got to get them to feel it and experience it So I convinced them to come come to Gastonia and see a game this coming year and they came to a game sold out crowd They watched the dancing they watched the fun they watched all of it and they said this is crazy I don't know if this is work, but we should give it a shot That's when we got the keys in October of 2015 and you get the keys and what happens from there?

1:58you have this big vision of you're walking into this majestic stadium what it's going to be like this is yours you get to run the ship here this is it and we walk in and uh the phone lines were cut the internet lines were cut everything was taken out of the ballpark there wasn't anything left it was a disaster zone and why was that well i think it was a series of things i think the former team wasn't too happy and so they uh they took everything and you know they weren't happy with the situation and i think they had a lot of the equipment and they just said we're taking everything and good luck guys start from scratch so we literally had nothing and so all we could do was just say hey we got to get as many meetings as possible we got to get on the community we got to try to start this thing from scratch and that's when it got really hard how so we got thrown out of offices i mean literally i mean we weren't even we weren't and i wasn't even wearing the yellow tuxley i was too scared to wear at that point i was dressing up like trying to be a professional yeah and uh there was just no interest i mean we couldn't convince anybody to buy tickets.

2:57January 15th, 2016 was the phone call. And at 4.45 p.m., I got the call that we overdrafted our account and we were missing payroll. And literally, pay was happening that day. So I immediately transferred the few dollars I had in my account, put it in there to cover payroll. And we didn't know what to do. And that's when Emily turned to me and said, Jess, we have to sell our house. We need to get money to be able to fund this. We have nothing left and so we put the house in the market and said let's let's go let's go all in what was the moment during that period that most tested your resolve or determination to stick with it i think it was that it was it was the doubters every meeting people selling us they're not going to work with us every single one even we went to a point where we said hey we need a food and bev company to run our food and Bev.

3:50And we literally said, Hey, we'll give you all the food and Bev. It'll be a great situation. And we, it was the conference center. And we went over there and we had an event to, and only a hundred people showed up to announce that, Hey, we're the new team. Only a hundred people showed up and they had tons of food. And it was like, they had crab cakes and they had all this food. And it was like a really nice spread. They didn't even bill us because they felt so bad and they said they're not going to work with us. At that point, I'm like, they're not even letting us pay for something. They don't want to work with us.

4:21No one wants to work with us. To me, that was like a test to resolve. It was like, okay, let's do this. It fired me up because I was like, if everyone's doubting, boy, this is going to be a great story if we make this successful. And there was never a point where you questioned yourself or? There was no opportunity to. I mean, it's very simple. We were an outrageous amount of debt. We had bought this expansion team. We owed hundreds of thousands of dollars for the team. We owed tons of money for just keeping the business going. There was no option. We had three 22-year-olds straight out of college that literally, they took this job.

4:59Their family questioned them. All their parents said, why are you taking this job? We had a 24-year-old president left a minor league team. We had a responsibility. Tell about the inability to sleep during that period and the walks on like around the island. Yeah, so we had to get a dump to live in because we couldn't afford anything. And so we found a place that was on the market for years and went down to basically they were giving it away. So we got it for nothing. And we got an airbed because we didn't have a bed. And so Emily got a twin airbed, which is hilarious because you could have gone to at least a queen.

5:33So we got a twin airbed. were grocery shopping with just$30 a week. So literally a$20 bill and a$10 bill for 42 meals. That was going on for months. And yeah, we didn't sleep at all. I mean, you couldn't sleep on the airbed. And it was, I mean, there were nights, like I said, there was one night Emily recalls vividly, and I'll never forget, a cockroach was right on, they call them palmetto bugs down in Savannah, but it looked like a cockroach was right on my nose and she woke up yelling because it was on in the middle of the night. We were sleeping with our socks. It was so gross. You don't sleep with your socks.

6:03Like, you've got to be a real lunatic to sleep with your socks. Sorry. And so we were sleeping with our socks because it was so gross that when we got up, the whole place was just disgusting. And so, yes, in the middle of the night, like we just say, we can't sleep. So we just walk around. We just go outside and just walk and just say, what are we going to do? And there were many nights we just walked and we had nothing to say. We were just thinking and we didn't know what to do. How long did that go on for? You know, probably months, probably two, three, four months. We had to get to that first game.

6:31That first game was we just had that circled. Get to the first game so we can show these people what we can do. How did profit first that book impact you? Yeah Yeah, Mike Michalowicz has become a good friend and that when I first read that book The chapter that stood out more you need to enjoy saving more than you enjoyed spending and I remember I had a Cell phone charger that was literally hanging on by a wire. It was falling. It was falling apart And I was like we need to get one like no one more day one more day one more day We'd say it over and over again. How do we save money for one more day, one more day?

7:04And we took that into our company. We said, do we need to get it? No, let's not buy it. And every single thing we would try not to buy. I mean, literally, I would get suits traded for me. I'd like the cleaning and washing. I would get our printing traded for free. I was trying to get everything for free and no cost because we didn't have any money. There was no money coming in. And so that profit first, and then the mindset is you put money into different buckets so you can save them. But it was the saving mindset that really changed everything for me. How hard were you working then? As soon as you wake up, you're thinking about it.

7:34As soon as you go to bed, you're thinking about it. And then you wake up in the middle of the night, you're thinking about it. So you could think about the amount of hours that is. Theoretically, you're working nonstop because there's only one way to get out of this. You've got to think your way out of it. You've got to actually act your way out of it. And that's what we had to do. We'll be back with another positive story from a past interview next Thursday. And we'll pull it from our highest performing clips according to our digital community. Head over to youtube.com slash Graham Bensinger to join us.

8:02Thanks again for listening.