Fans First: How Jesse Cole Turned Baseball Into An Experience

0:28This episode, you already know is fire. is truly a masterclass. Ladies and gentlemen, I present the brilliant, the amazing Mr. Jesse Cole. You're listening to Mick Unplugged, hosted by the one and only Mick Hunt. This is where purpose meets power and stories spark transformation. Mick takes you beyond the motivation and into meaning, helping you discover your because and becoming unstoppable. I'm Rudy Rush, and trust me, you're in the right place. Let's get unplugged.

1:01Jess, how you doing today, brother? So great to be with you, my friend. Man, I'm the honored one. You know, I always start my podcast by asking my guests about their because, right? That thing that's deeper than your why. You know, Simon Sinek wrote the book, Start With Why. And I do believe you start with why, but you're actually fueled by your because, right? So if I were to say, what's your why? You'd probably say your family, your kids, success. But when I say, but why, that sentence usually starts with, well, because, and I care about what happens after, well, because. So if I were to say, Jesse, man, all the things that you do, the way that you give back, the way that you've changed industry and marketing and visibility, what's your because?

1:47Well, it's a deep question, and it's what makes you feel alive. You know, what gives you energy, what fires you up. And, you know, a lot of that, if you really dig deep, I think it goes to the root of your upbringing. And, you know, for me as an only child, you know, my parents got divorced when I was a kid. My dad helped raise me. And, you know, I always wanted to feel loved. I want to feel part of something. I want to feel with people. And, you know, what we get to do every day is bring people together from all over the world, from two years old to 82 years old, see people have fun, let loose, not take themselves too seriously.

2:22to be in a world of joy. And, you know, I get to be in the middle of that every day. And, you know, I think the world that has joy, that has fun, that isn't so focused on all the things that are going wrong is a better world. And so, yes, our platform is banana ball and we get to put on a crazy show every single night. But I hope that we get to do something that is truly contagious, that joy, that fun, that togetherness, that let loose, be the best version of yourself, can continue to for people when they go home to at work to their friends, to their colleagues. And so I think because it's it's it's bringing the world together filled with joy and just having the time of our life doing it.

3:03And that's what I think about daily. And you do it better than anyone I know. And now a lot of things make sense, Jesse. It's the only child thing. Right. So, like, I told you, like, Damon, John, my mentor, he's the only child. You two are so alike that now I get it. Like, it's it's it's the only child thing. Right. Like you had to be so imaginative and creative and, you know, to get people to not not to be around you, but to to get people to want to to to continue those relationships with you. And you get home and it's you and your parents. Right. Or your parents were separated or divorced. So, like, it literally is you and you've got to be creative with what do I do or who do I talk to?

3:44man talk to us about and create attention and and like you know i wanted to you know like hey you know my dad worked so hard he was working constantly it's come home and i wanted you know hey dad let's do this let's do this and create attention and be fun and and you know when i got to be around friends it's like what can i do and it was um you know just to build make the most of every moment with people and you know i think about that and you know when i i go through a door every every day you know my mindset says bring the energy bring the fun and so it's like a trigger for me whenever i interact with people like you know i want them to feel more energized after talking with me and being with me and more fired up about what we can do and not what we can't do.

4:18And that excites me. And so, yeah, I think as an only child, obviously I was spirited to try to make the most of every moment when I had a chance to be around somebody. And I still try to do that to this day. There you go. There you go. Man, you've changed my life. You changed my businesses in so many ways because my mindset has completely shifted. One of the things that you've said And it's on my wall because I need this reminder every day is that normal gets normal results. And for me, the serial entrepreneur, the highly competitive person that I am, and I know that there are a lot of people that are listening, that are watching, that are just like us.

5:02Explain to us why normal just gets normal results and doing the unreasonable is where your focus should be. yeah well let's go back to you know when i started i was a 23 year old gm of a very small college summer baseball team in gastonia north carolina that was failing for seven years uh lowest in the league the country in attendance only a couple hundred fans coming to the games and you know it was just it was what it was and i realized that they were doing the same things every other team did you have fireworks you do a bobblehead here and there you would do the things that everyone else did well if you do what everyone else is going to do you're going to get the same results as everyone else.

5:42And so, you know, you got to do what others won't do. And when you do what others won't do, you're going to do things that may fail. And so I've just been, you know, I think I learned that first concept from Alan Fadden. He wrote the book, Innovation on Demand. Really brilliant man, very creative. And yeah, it's whatever's normal, do the exact opposite. And, you know, he shared the story of how he sold his book. You know, most people would have your book in a regular bookstore, you know, or with thousands of different books, or you'd have it on Amazon. He's like, I bought an entire retail store in Minneapolis, and I made it a one book bookstore for my own book.

6:19And he literally had his book in different sections, business, history, self-help, and he got so much attention. And I heard that story. It was very formative for me because he was 23. He went in a different direction. And so when I thought about building, you know, a banana ball and starting with first our team in Gastonia and then the bananas. I was like, we got to do things on the field that people never seen before. And so like the first thing that we said was like, well, everyone expects players to play. What if they actually danced? And so, yeah, it was hard getting the players to dance.

6:46They didn't want to dance in the beginning, but players in the middle of a game dancing, people are like, that's a little bit different. And I saw the reaction to that. And people started talking about, oh, you guys have the players that dance, right? And oh yeah, you guys did the grandma beauty pageant, right? Oh, you guys did flatulence fun night. Oh, you guys did, and all these crazy things. That's what they talked about. No one goes home and gets excited. It's like, oh, I had the most normal day today. You want to talk about it? No, no one gets excited about normal. No one gets excited about professional.

7:13They get excited about memorable. They get excited about remarkable. So every day I'm chasing those moments and trying to create those moments for everyone we interact with. And I think that is so important to everyone that's a leader, that's an entrepreneur, that's listening. It doesn't matter your industry. And that's what I learned from Jesse. It's creating those moments that people remember, because we've all heard Maya Angelou's quote, right? People don't remember the things that you say. They remember how you make them feel. And I think that is so important. And you've mastered that. So for the person that's watching or listening and they're like, OK, how do I do that within my business that might have a corporate feel or maybe a retail feel?

7:54And in my team, can't get up and dance or at least they think. Everybody can dance. Even if you can't dance, you can dance. I'll tell you that. I've seen that with hundreds of players. But yes, I know exactly what you're saying. So I can only go by the framework of what we use. And the framework that we started with was we looked at all the friction points and experience for every customer that we interact with. I learned this from Walt Disney. I mean, Walt Disney put himself in his guest shoes. He said, whenever I go on a ride, I'm always asking what's wrong with this thing and how can we improve?

8:21And so, if you look at your industry, you look at what you do and you look at, what are all those friction points? What are all those frustration points for the customer? And then you look at what are all the normal ways of doing things? And so, you know, even to start a list, this is the normal way of doing a podcast. This is the conventional way of selling this. This is the normal way of doing an invoice. This is the normal way of doing voicemail. This is the normal way of doing an email signature. This is the normal way of whatever it is. Those are micro little ones. And then say, well, what would be something that would be remarkable?

8:53fans first is the name of our company. You know, that's the spirit of how we do everything. But there's three words that we talk about regularly. And it's you wouldn't believe. And it's how do we get our customers, our fans, our team members, everyone we interact with to say you wouldn't believe you wouldn't believe what they did today. And so whatever you're doing, how do you create some you wouldn't believe moments? The only way you do that is you look at what are the normal and say, all right, well, what would be something that would be a little bit crazy or a little bit different, a little bit wilder, a little bit more remarkable, a little bit more fun.

9:24Whatever that word that fits into your brand. Ours is fun. So we look at fun with everything. How do you make it more fun? How do you make baseball fun? How do you make every moment of our social media fun? Those are the things that we look at. So I think it's just a framework. And every day, you got to take time coming up with ideas. If you just say, oh, I'm going to change it. Like you got to work your idea muscle. Are you working your idea muscle and actually coming up with ideas on things you can do differently in your job, in your industry? If you're not doing it, good luck. You're going to get out of shape.

9:53And I mean by you're going to get out of shape, you're not going to be able to come up with a lot of good ideas. And so that's what we think about. So a follow-up question to that, because I love that. And it takes a team to be able to do those things, right? Because I know how wild and crazy Jesse probably gets in these team meetings where you talk about ideas. And I'm sure now your team has evolved to, they're coming up with some of these crazy cool ideas. How do you keep them aligned in that fan-first moment, that fan-first mantra? How often do you talk about it? You know, I think you can put some things on your wall and say, this is who we are.

10:27This is what we stand for. But how often do you actually talk about it? How often do you live by it? How often when something goes wrong and it's easy not to do what's best for fans and do what's best for your business, do you actually live by those values and show your team this is who you are? Here's an example. Last year, we, by mistake, sent an email out to our fans. It was supposed to go out just to 4 ,000 because there were only a handful of tickets left in Savannah for a chance to buy tickets, the last few tickets in Savannah. Instead of 4 ,000, we sent it out to 44 ,000. We offered them all the opportunity to get tickets with time slots.

11:03So I remember I'm flying. I'm going out to give a speech when this is happening. and I land Twitter, Facebook, emails, everyone's messaging me. How dare you? You said you were going to do this. You weren't going to do this. Literally, our time slot was nine o 'clock and there were no tickets available. It was Armageddon internally. Like it was Armageddon. So immediately, myself and Jared, our president, who's been with us since day one, we get on the phone, we say, what are we going to do? And so immediately apologize. That's the first step right now. And again, that's, you know, that's table stakes.

11:34Some people don't do it. But the first thing, so we wrote, I was like, Jared, I want to do this. He's like, no, I want to do it. I'm like, okay. So Jared wrote an amazing apology letter. And we said, that's not enough. Apologies is one thing, that's not enough. So are you going to really stand by it? So what are we going to do? We said, we're going to take care of all these people with tickets for this coming tour. What does that equal? $6 million loss for the company. Over 100 ,000 plus tickets. that we took care of for people. And so what we did is after we offered that to them, they had their opportunity to come to any game they want, Fenway Park, Yankee Stadium, anywhere.

12:15And we have a demand of over 4.2 million people on our lottery list. So this is just basically throwing away 6 million. But we said, we're going to do it. We got everyone on our team on a Zoom and we immediately said, turn your cameras on. This is why we're doing this. And then what happened, those first few games that people had tickets, they weren't showing up at the high rate that we usually get. We get 95 % redemption, but because they were free tickets for them, it was down to like 75%. And I was like, that's unacceptable. We have millions of people that want to go to our games. So we start messaging them off.

12:45So finally we said, we will buy back your tickets so we can sell them. Buy back tickets they never even paid for. So now we're offering free money to these people. Literally, you know,$200,$300 to get back their tickets so we can give them to people that are going to come to the game. do you stand by your values? Six million dollar loss, pretty big hit. You go back three, four, five years ago. That's more revenue than total company brought in. Right. But it's fans first. And that's what we're going to do. And that's how we're going to make those decisions. So give examples, give stories, share how you do it.

13:17And if you got to do it every single day, and that makes the impact. Love it, brother. Love it. And you just said something about stories. And I tell people all the time, like there's there's three storytellers I know that are great, Like Nick Nanton, Damon John's an amazing storyteller and Jesse Cole. Right. So how what role does storytelling play in the way that you connect with your fans, your employees and sometimes even your critics? Yeah. So I think we think more about storytelling first, interestingly, with our biggest fans, which are our team members. Right. And so we talked about how do we keep fans first in front of people?

13:55So when we go on the tour, now we have six teams. We have three tours going all over the country. The first day we show up and we do the unscalable to do the scalable. It doesn't make sense to travel with 150 to 200 people to every city. That is millions of dollars. But again, we want to have that high touch. Even at a football stand with 100 ,000 fans, we want to have high touch. When we get there, the first thing we do is we have a fans first talk. And that myself, Jared, some of our leaders, we share stories, examples of some fans first moment that happened, whether we had to a young fan, whether it was a proposal, whether it was a moment of fan, their first bucket list trip in four years, what we did.

14:31and we share that. What we did in the upper deck, you know, the Mananas or our cast, what we did there. We share those examples and those stories. And then the next night after our final game, we actually have another fans first chat where we recognize our team and we give shout outs about those moments. Then a couple of days later, we get back in the office on Tuesday. We start, we talk about the fans first principles and more fans first stories. We're getting three touch points and then more because of our other teams and other tour of these examples, these stories, who we are. And that's what we talk about.

15:01We never talk about revenue. In fact, I have one financial meeting a year. It's less than two hours. Like, that's it. I don't go into, I don't go into our account. I don't have any. It's, it's a mandatory thing for me. I was like, all right, Jesse, here's where I'm at. Great. All right. We go create fans now and have fun. But like, that's, I spend all our time talking fans first, talking ideas and talking creating. So we share stories with our team on those fans moments. And then, yeah, obviously we share stories with our fans and social media, but our goal is just to entertain them. It's to bring joy.

15:26It's to bring fun. And yes, we do some storytelling, but mostly it's who we are. We are what we stand for internally with our team first. Absolutely. Absolutely. I would say as a as a fan of you. Personally. One of the things that I appreciate is the fact that you're always reinventing concepts, thoughts, ideas. And I tell leaders and entrepreneurs this all the time, like a lot of people think reinvention means a complete 180 or a complete change. Like sometimes reinvention is like, I don't like the way this one thing is doing. Let me reinvent how that one thing is going. And when I watch all the things that you've done over the last several years, I see that that's also your mindset, too.

16:11Like you don't have to change everything, but you do reinvent in different ways. Talk to us about the importance of being able to what this is the term of Mick and Mick only to micro reinvent so that you're not changing scale of everything that you're doing. Yeah. So it's a clear direction. You know, what can you be the best in the world at? Todd Graves, the founder of Raising Canes, said, do one thing and do it better than anyone else. Yeah. So for us, we believe we can create the greatest show in sports. We believe no one will put the energy and effort into combining show elements and music and characters and dance and fun with the competitiveness of Banana Ball in one world and make it all happen together.

16:51And so we spend a lot of our time thinking about our shows in every moment. From what people don't realize is that, hey, the game may start, the show may start at seven o 'clock, or the game may start at seven o 'clock. The show actually starts at two o 'clock. Or now with the Texas Tailgaters, the greatest pregame in sports, they're actually in the parking lot on their home games. So the whole team is actually out in the parking lot greeting fans, interacting, playing games. They're grilling. We grill tons of hot dogs and burgers just for fans for free out in the tailgate. So when fans are first pulling up in the parking lot, the Tailgaters send the town.

17:24And then literally at two o 'clock, we do a rope drop. and we have a big opening where everyone gets in. Then the players are signing autographs at Major League Stades right when we open. Then we have a full show out there from literally 3 to 4.30 with a big March opening. Then from 4.30 till 7, we have about 72 different promotions, skits, dances, songs that happened before the game. Then we go from 7 to 9, we have a full show. Then from 9 to 10, we have a post-game pause and party with the cast. And then we sign autographs to the last families. So that's what we believe we can be the best in the world at.

17:51So we spend all of our time, so much of our time thinking about reinventing there, are creating? How do we make the show a little better? There's a boring moment here. It's why we changed the rules of banana ball and eliminated mound visits because no one in the world gets excited about a mound visit. No one's like, I can't wait to hopefully have three or four mound visits today. I love when the coach slowly walks out to the mound. Boy, that's my favorite moment. So again, you got to look at those friction points. You got to eliminate them. And then you got to listen to your fans, not what they tell you, but how they act.

18:18The way we develop banana ball is we watched fans literally with a camera setup. Every 30 minutes we were watching when our fans got up and left in our stadium for a whole season. And we realized they were leaving early at nine o 'clock. We realized they were getting out of seats. That's why we made it a two-hour game. And now we watch our fans getting scammed constantly on Facebook with these fake people acting like us and trying to sell fake tickets. And we watch it and it fires us up more than you ever know. And so, yes, we developed our own secondary ticket market. We're face value tickets, which is going to cost us more money than we even know to try to figure it out.

18:51But you reinvent by watching your fans and figure out what is best. What can you be the best in the world at? And who do you, what do you stand for? We stand for fans first and we entertain always. And that's what we do. Freaking love it, brother. Like that just got me energized right there. Like I almost got out of my seat and gave you an amen. Like that's how strong that was, but that, that's the truth. And, you know, you talk about the, the early stages of, of banana ball and, and, and where it has come to today. what were some of those initial challenges that you had to overcome when you when you started the greatest show on earth yeah and that's the right word challenges you know challenges i've heard before people say problems now it's a challenge we overcome challenges the greatest people you know to appreciate someone's success you got to understand their setbacks everyone that's successful has had setbacks and so yeah we had we started two tickets in our first few months people didn't understand so we have the lowest level college summer baseball when we started Yeah, I got the phone call on January 15th, 2016.

19:46Felt ready to celebrate the 10th anniversary. I don't know what I'll do then. But on that day, 10 years ago, almost, I got the call that we overdrafted our account and we were out of money. And we had to sell our house. We emptied our savings account. We were sleeping on an airbed. We failed because we were just talking. We were talking about who we are. People hadn't felt it yet. They need to experience it. Now, we hadn't had a game yet, but we should have found a way. We should have found a way to bring a show to someone's office or bring a show to someone to show them what it could be like.

20:12We didn't do that. so we fail you know first night all you can eat we did something no stadium's ever done every single ticket all inclusive that's crazy but again you start with fans first we made every ticket all your burgers hot dogs chicken sandwich soda water popcorn dessert all night free or the food free 15 total for the ticket crazy three hour wait the first night they went through 10 000 pieces of meat it was we didn't expect that all right it was crazy and so you know we first came on espn the transmission went out. Literally for 10 minutes, the anchors are like, yep, the bananas can't handle us.

20:44Embarrassing. The next night, we figured it out. Our ticket system shut down. Our first major league stadium literally shut down. Next day, we figure it out. And so we have failed every step of the way. But we don't give up and we keep playing the game and we show up and get better every single day. And the only way you can be great is if you're willing to get through the messy to get to the great. And we go through messy every single day. When you do things people have never done before, it is going to be hard. It's going to be extremely hard. And that's what we do when we try to overcome it every single step of the way.

21:14And so, yeah, we're fortunate. It's been messy. It's been hard. And it's getting harder every day because we're doing bigger challenges. But I love that challenge because it's fun for our team to figure out how to do it. When did you know early on in life, or maybe it was later, that this was you? Not maybe the bananas but doing the the uncommon doing the unreasonable when did you realize that that was jesse cole you're the average of they say the five people you surround yourself with i surround myself with walt disney pt barnum bezos jobs wwe grateful dead circus la saturday night live i'm looking around because there's hundreds of books i have here and so i when i read about Walt Disney and what he did and what he accomplished and the challenge and the adversity and how he just doubted every step of the way from animation to long form animation to the theme park to Epcot, all of it.

22:08And he said, no, I believe, I believe in it. It's kind of fun to do the impossible. So when I get inspired by that and I see there is a way, there is a path, it's hard. That's, I got so inspired by that, that that's who I want to be every day, do someone that does the hard things. And so, yeah, it's, and, you know, chase your energy, chase your moments. And so for me, the energy, you know, I have an energy list. I'm creating, sharing and growing. I'm full energy, man. If I'm doing operations and other financial numbers or spreadsheets, I'm depleted. So do what gives you energy. And if you're surrounding yourself with people that inspire you and you can learn from them, then follow in those footsteps and find your own thing.

22:47And that that's what I look for every day. I love it. I love it. For the for the business leader that's listening right now, what's one small but radical shift that they can make right now to start creating super fans? In the back of our Fans First playbook, we first had a Fans First playbook, it said, be patient in what you want for yourself, but be impatient in how much you give to others. What people don't know about our first six, seven, eight, nine years, we called every single fan that bought a ticket and thanked them. Every person that bought merchandise, we called and thanked them. It's unscalable now as we serve millions of fans.

23:29We went out of our way just to thank people. I started the thank you experiment in 2018, started writing thank you letters every single day. Now I do videos. Very simple thing. I pull out here and do a video and just do a send a video instead of an email or a text. How can you thank people? How can you spread gratitude? It's unbelievably contagious. When you spread gratitude, amazing things come back your way. So a lot of times we think about how hard it is. Well, think about the people that have helped you along the way or just people who have been there. And so today, do you want to create fans?