How Jesse Cole Turned the Savannah Bananas Into a $500 Million Business

0:00Support comes from Amazon Business, a freer team from time-consuming procurement tasks. Discover smart business buying where unmatched selections meets AI-driven tools to simplify complex processes so you can focus on what matters most. Learn more at AmazonBusiness.com. Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News.

0:30All right, welcome back to The Deal. I'm Jason Kelly alongside Alex Rodriguez. And man, this is one that we have been anticipating for a long time because we have watched this business explode. Jesse Cole joins us. He is the creator of the Savannah Bananas. Jesse, welcome to the show. So great to have you with us. Excited to be with you guys. Let's have some fun. Let's do some table setting when we start off, because even as our team and we were researching this, I want to understand, and I know Alex says too, sort of the scope and the structure of this business. Because it starts as one team, but now it's essentially a league.

1:08Help us understand what this empire looks like at this point. Well, context, 11 years ago, we started as a college summer baseball team. So one of the lowest levels of baseball. and we were in the Coastal Plain League and we had a 4 ,000-seat stadium. We only sold two tickets in our first three months. So my wife and I had to sell our house, empty out our savings account, sleeping on an airbed, and we mortgaged everything. And that's where it started. And we had to get people excited about a college summer baseball team. So we went all in, named the team the Bananas, and luckily we started selling out games there at 4 ,000-seat stadium.

1:42After about three or four years of selling out every single game, winning the championship, I was watching the fans and realizing that they would leave early. And we actually started videotape, but we had a camera every 30 minutes and watching when fans would get up, when would they leave their seat, when were they not paying attention. And I realized that the game was too long for the average fan. And so we started crafting without anyone knowing a new game called Banana Ball and eliminating all the boring parts of baseball for the average fan. So we eliminated mountain visits, no stepping out of the box, no walks, no bunting.

2:10If you bunch, you're thrown out of the game. Like we just started creating unique rules. A fan catches a foul ball, it's an out. and we said, let's just test this. So back in 2018, we did it behind closed doors. 2020, COVID hit. We did it in front of a few fans. And then we said, we're going all in on that. So 2021, we went all in with a one-city world tour, which we called it a one-city world tour. You know, we're going to start small and really big. And we did it in Mobile, in front of 3 ,500 fans. Went well, went to seven cities, then went to 33 cities, and then left the Coastal Plain League and then have added teams each year.

2:41And so now we have six teams. We'll play in front of 3.4 million fans this year. There's 4.2 million people on our wait list. Every team sells out. We just crossed over 500 straight sellouts, all going back from 2016. And we're fortunate. We got 10 football stadiums, NFL stadiums. And yeah, it's fun. We're building brands, but mostly just building it fans first. That's the name of our company. And that's where we started. So Jesse, when you say 3.4 million fans, if my memory serves me right, that's probably one major league baseball team that's drawing more. And that's probably the LA Dodgers.

3:13Maybe it's a class of one, maybe two. So the Dodgers and your team, that's a pretty good class to be involved with. I guess my question is, and I love what you're doing, because baseball is in many ways synonymous with everything that I've done in my life. And it was my first love. And I love watching baseball. I love everything about it. I guess if you were a baseball commissioner for one day, with keeping the history and the integrity of the game intact, act, how would you try to think about competing as the NFL, the NBA, NHL, Netflix, and everything else that's competing for consumers? You know, I think Major League Baseball has done a great job over the last few years.

3:52You watch what's happened. The games are faster. There's a lot more excitement. The ratings are increasing. But yeah, I mean, where we start is an obsession with the fan experience and breaking down the barriers between the player and the fan. And I think each one of our players are sharing the behind the scenes. They're sharing the excitement. And we get our fans, our players are actually in the upper deck every night. Our players get to the upper deck and they're literally high-fiving fans, taking pictures of the fans, giving roses to little girls. We celebrate more. And so we're building that world.

4:18And so, again, it's do things every night people have never seen in front of a live crowd. In baseball, that happens with great moments, but you're hoping something happens. We script unbelievable walk-ups, crazy dancing celebrations. The players are doing trick plays every night. They're working on backflip catches and doing aerial catches and doing things that people have never seen before. I challenge each one of our players to bring something new so you can never take your eyes off it. So, you know, again, I never want to say, I think major league baseball has done a great job, but I think, how do you break down the barriers between the player and fans?

4:47I think the way the world is going right now, um, people are hungry for human connection. And so how can a player connect with fans more? You know, my dad, when I played and now it's probably, you know, you're probably told this way when you hit a home run, act like you've done it before. You know, that's what I was told. I, I agree with that a hundred percent back in the day, but now you want kids to be excited about playing. You know, if you look at you, 600 ,000 less kids are playing Little League Baseball than five, six years ago. You look at what's happening, the game is changing. And because kids are getting entertained every single day at their fingertips.

5:19So when you hit a home run, you get a big strikeout, celebrate not against the other team, but celebrate for your team, celebrate for the fans, go big. You're seeing Major League Baseball do more of this in the dugouts, which is great. But man, I love what's going to happen with the World Baseball Classic. You're seeing emotion, you're seeing electricity and people are watching. We celebrate everything in Banana Ball, and the fans want to celebrate with us. You know, one of the things that I think is pretty true, and you really nailed it, Jesse, is this whole, you know, almost like stoic approach that baseball players have had to some extent.

5:53And how do you find the right players? How do you encourage them to sort of buy into this vision, especially because if you grow up playing baseball at a high level, as you said, that's not your natural, that's your default, I guess. So how do you find the right players? Well, we have two different goals. Major League Baseball, the goal is to win. Every team has to win. Our goal is to create the greatest show and greatest experience for fans every single night. Our mission, fans first, entertain always. And we're very clear with all of our players. Our players do audition videos. And now we're having, I mean, we just saw Jackie Bradley Jr., an all-star World Series gym.

6:26He's playing full-time with us. We've had numerous MVPs, Cy Younger winners, even Hall of Famers play with us. They want to have fun. We learned this when we were playing traditional baseball. We had six years in a regular league and our players just had fun every day. We won three of the six championships with all the dancing, with all the celebrations, with all the hijinks. We just won because we were having fun. And so again, we're very clear. Now we've had thousands of players reach out to us. I mean, we're fortunate. You know, we're paying guys two, three times what minor leaguers are playing.

6:54Their average six, six figure pay and only playing a hundred less games, literally playing a hundred less games and getting paid that. But it's not about the money. They're playing in front of sold out crowd every single night and they get to have fun. And that's what's really cool. Major leaguers that join us for one night, they come out and they said, I never got to have a great farewell. And I get to get a sold out crowd giving me a standing ovation. I get to come up and have fun one more time. That's what's one of the coolest moments. Our guys want to do new things every night fans have never seen.

7:19And they keep challenging each other. And that's what's fun about it.

7:27Support comes from Amazon Business. Procurement shouldn't be a guessing game. Whether you're running a small business or managing a large organization, Amazon Business offers smart purchasing experiences designed to meet your unique needs, streamline your buying process, save time and money, and gain valuable insights to make smarter decisions. Empower your team to buy with confidence. Learn more at amazonbusiness.com.

7:58I don't even know what to ask you because I can ask you a hundred different questions And my mind is racing because this is all I've done, you know, since I was born, basically. My dad played baseball. I played baseball. My Dominican background, even though I was born in New York City, it's synonymous with baseball. It's like a religion. But I agree with you on WBC, watching Tatis, Acuna, Judge, showing their personalities. These are great looking kids, very marketable, and it's exciting. You talked about what doesn't work. What are some of the things over the last five years that you've seen?

8:27okay, these are two or three things that fans that love and is worth double down, double clicking on? Well, the framework we use is the gold standard. And so our gold standard is something that is amazing for the live crowd and also amazing for the digital crowd. Everything we're thinking about, we have, geez, numerous people and our video team is expansive and we travel. Again, this is crazy. We travel with 200 plus people to every single city we go to. And we're spending$20 million dollars just on traveling people because we invest in those high touch again going back to the human touch and so you know what we look for and the things that we're looking for are big moments um you know every one of our teams now have singers and have dancers and have live music so they all have skills they all have dancing you know we have choreographers we have people that can do things um that are really special tumbling acrobatics so again it's just a different thing than baseball in the sense like i was like as a player you know i do think there's a world where at some point a guy's going to do a trick play like we do and the people are going to go nuts I think it's going to happen I think you know if they miss it they're in trouble because I know what would happen with the coaches and everyone else and they get more criticism than ever but when a guy does a backflip catch or catches I mean we had a guy do a bare hand backflip catch D.R.

9:39Menos in a game at a major league stadium it's unbelievable I mean now Jackie Bradley's catching balls running behind his back like this it's fun to watch and so you know the things that don't work you know are every day we have promotions that we just test things and it's just a silly promotion you know whether it's the living pinata or whether it's a you know messy baby or we did a soulmate promotion with people singing on their wife's feet in souls it was just weird it just didn't work like there's things love at first bite with people eating hot dogs like lady and the tramp and then they end up making out it's just weird to watch i think some of the best moments that we have and in my experience almost 25 years in the big leagues there's some of the great strikeout calls by the umpires because they're great they have some great personalities and they all have their own particular style but when a guy is super emphatic and strikes somebody out those are big moments but i can see a moment where uh naked gun type where you get a strike three you play michael jackson music and they start doing the moonwalk and you almost those kind of things would be awesome so actually we have a dancing umpire that's got hundreds of thousands of followers he can twerk like no one should ever twerk.

10:47I mean, he'll be cleaning the plate and then he'll start just like full on the ground, like doing some weird gyrations while he's cleaning the plate. And he's built hundreds of thousands of followers. And then we have a ninja umpire who does every call at first base by doing a full like tuck, somersault, jump, flip. I can't even name the things he's doing. And then he calls the outs. And so the framework, again, we look at every potential boring part of the game. Why do the umpires have to be boring? You know, we were in Texas this past week and we dressed them up as Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders, and they did the thunderstruck kick when they came out.

11:16You have to not take yourself too seriously. Literally the owner of all this, wears a yellow tuxedo. All right. It's about fun. Then everyone's open to experimenting. And yes, the umpires are great. We look at bat boys. How do you make bat boys more exciting? Water boys. We look at every moment around the ballpark to make it more fun. And that's where we have a lot of opportunity to come up with creative ideas. You know, a lot of business people listening to this, be like, well, I want to experiment more. I want to do this. Like, what are the processes that you essentially set up in order to sort of ensure that the best ideas, you know, get tried out, that everybody feels like they can bring this to the table?

11:56How do you build an organization that really does this and like get nitty gritty with us on this? So to give you an example, we did not have processes at first. We said, well, what if the pitcher does a dance before he throws? Let's try it. Oh, this works. All right, let's develop a 3-2-2. Third inning, second batter, second pitch, a brand new dance, brand new choreography. All right, now we're doing that every game. So we followed Saturday Night Live, to give you an example. I said, if you look at the companies out there that have sustained creativity for many, many years, it's less than a handful.

12:29And so, all right, what's the most comparable to us? Saturday Night Live. Every Saturday night, they're doing a brand new show. So how do they do it? Great documentary. Our whole creative team watched it Monday. They do a whole pitch session. They share all the ideas. Tuesday, they start writing. Wednesday, they have a table read. Thursday, Friday, they start doing rehearsals. Then they do a rehearsal in front of a live crowd at 8 o 'clock. They see how it goes. Then at 1130, they do the best of the best. That's what we do. Tuesday's our creative day. All day today, we've been doing OTT sessions.

12:54Every group, every team, broadcast, our entertainment team, our promo team, our creative team, our players, we do all the ideas. Now we get it ready. We go through the best of the best. We set up a table read. We get our props. We do rehearsals. We go to the stadium. We do rehearsals for hours beforehand. Then we practice in front of our backstage group that comes in before everyone else so we can see how they respond to it. And then we put it in the show. And then we do an LCP on how to get better. That's just what has worked for us. You know, I think there's just a better framework. It's if you want to be creative, look at the friction parts, look at the friction points and the customer point of view and just start doing the exact opposite.

13:25Yeah. And so we look at all the boring parts, the challenging parts, all the things that fans hate. And we do the opposite. And then we start creating from there. Jess, as I'm hearing you talk, I guess my question is, Savannah is in Georgia. Let's talk about Jason's home team, the Atlanta Braves, who are one of the best run franchises in sports. Iconic fan base, historic franchise, on the field, A plus, and they have a great history. And they also have a great business that generate a tremendous amount of revenue through the team co and through the real estate co, which what they built there is really incredible.

14:00If you own that team today with your wife, how do you make that? Usually you go from good to great. How do you make it from great to elite? It's hard for me to answer that question because I would never own it. And here's, I will never, Emily and I own 100 % of this team. We've got shareholders, investors that reach out to us regularly. And the answer is always no. Because what they want is they would like to have control and they want a return of investment. What Walt Disney learned better than anyone else, you got to control. You got to control everything if you want to have a great experience.

14:27Shareholders, investors would come to us and say, you need to charge the ticket price that you could get, which is$200,$300. You shouldn't just keep everything at$40,$50, and$60. You should have ticket fees. You should not pay your fans' taxes. Would you pay all your fans' taxes? A$30 shirt is$30. You should have tons of sponsorship. No, we eliminated all of our ads at our stadium. No, you should go for the maximum TV rights. No, we keep all of our games free on YouTube. They would say all of this. And so when you look at a major league team like the Braves, they do a tremendous job. But they've been with Liberty Media where they have to release all their numbers.

15:03They have a spinoff now. They got to release everything and they got to respond to shareholders on why are they doing everything. The only person that I worked for and Emily works for and our entire staff works for is the fan. And every day we got to fight for the fan to create a better experience for them. And that includes doing things that don't make sense financially. So I can't even go into a conversation of owning a major league team. I have no interest. Zero. Because everyone that's involved with that is talking about how do you drive more revenue? How do you drive more sales? How do you drive more wins?

15:31For me, it's how do you create a better experience to drive more fans? That is everything. That drives it all for us. So I wouldn't ever own a team because of responding to shareholders. Unless you own 100 % of the break. Yes, you own 100 % of the team, but you also have that players union, the commissioner. We own the league. We own everything. And so it's like, that makes the difference. You still have to work for someone. We just work for the fans. Good point.

15:57Get the news you need in just 15 minutes. Start your day with Bloomberg Daybreak, the podcast with a global view on the stories that matter. I'm Nathan Hager. And I'm Karen Moscow. Join us each morning for curated stories on current events, politics, business and foreign relations. Plus one conversation on the day's biggest developments, all in just 15 minutes. Subscribe to Bloomberg Daybreak for a precise, thoughtful take on the stories that matter. Listen to Bloomberg Daybreak each morning on Apple, Spotify or anywhere you listen.

16:34And so is that the plan forever then, Jesse, like asking the natural follow up? I mean, it's like, where does this go from here? I know people are knocking on your door. I know that a big media, whether it's media companies, whether it's other sports leagues, whether it's just billionaire investors who love what you're doing, like what what's the what's the five, 10, 20, 50 year plan for this company? Five years ago, we just started Bananaball. So I could never expect we'd run a three point four million fans with over four million people on the wait list. So and playing football stadiums in front of one hundred thousand fans.

17:06That's crazy. I mean, we we sold out a cruise ship last month. And so the long goal, the long game for us is I believe we're going to create one billion fans and happens one fan at a time. We're getting a lot of interest and excitement about the youth banana ball and bringing the walk ups, the trick plays, the fun, the dancing, all that. A ton of interest. I'm hearing from all over the country. We started doing that. We had a tournament with fans from 48 states, kids from 48 states come in that sold out immediately. So we'll dabble in that and then we'll do some international. we might create a banana land experience in the future where, you know, the first ever sports and entertainment world where people can, you know, meet the characters, music, live, everything.

17:41And so there's a big picture that we're going to. And so tell us about your audience, Jesse. I mean, I had an interesting experience with my eight year old daughter. We're going on vacation in a few weeks and we're flying into Savannah. And she was asking me, she's like, are we flying into it? We're going to South Carolina. And she said, are we flying to Atlanta? And I said, no, we're flying to Savannah. and she goes, Savannah Bananas? I mean, just like that. So that's like her, you know, and I said, wait, how did you know about, did you hear me talking about Savannah Bananas? She's like, no, we watched it on TV last summer and, you know, remember, and they were doing all the crazy stuff.

18:16If you're reaching Alice Kelly, like who's, you know, much more interested in K-pop demon hunters, although she does dabble in baseball, as Alex knows, tell us about the demos because I know it's something that Alex thinks about when it comes to baseball all the time. Who is the audience here? Well, one of the things I'm glad you said that, I mean, attention beats marketing 1000 % of the time. So we spend all our time thinking on ways to create attention and get people. So whether you're two or 82 years old, we're thinking about that. And so, yeah, I mean, this past year, you think about how it's grown.

18:45I mean, we had, we sold 1.9 million merchandise items just this past year. And now we have two more, two more teams, and that's going to probably close to double this year. And so when you look at how we're getting out and what our demographic is, it is people that want to come and have fun. When we look at our YouTube, which again, every game is for free. And again, we have non-exclusive deals with ESPN and TNT and CW. Every game's free. So we're having a wide range of audience. But young female, we do very well in the young female, 18 to 34. You know, a little bit affluent is what we're seeing.

19:17But, you know, I mean, it's it's I don't try to target a certain demographic. I'm trying to just create something that we would love. And we're finding out that our fans of all ages are loving it. And so when it comes to the media side, you mentioned non-exclusive deals. How do those negotiations go if you want to keep it free on YouTube? Sure. I mean, we're leaving millions of dollars on the table. I mean, millions. And there's some of the biggest networks in the country that said, yeah, we just can't do it. And we also had some in the past that said they'd never done it, and now they do do it.

19:45And so it's, yeah, again, the goal is how do you keep things for free for fans? And then also, how can you hit a wider demographic? I mean, on ESPN last year, we averaged over half a million viewers and we were an exhibition league then. We're not even a league. We weren't even a league last year. We had games that were getting over a million people watching. And again, just an exhibition back there. And now we're seeing even our reruns last year. We're getting 700 ,000 people watching on ESPN plus our YouTube audience. So it's hitting a different demographic than actual just sports fans. But now when you have Jackie Bradley Jr.

20:15and a lot of these guys that are double A, triple A, they're throwing 94, 95 miles an hour can play. It's also people show up. That's the biggest surprise. They're like, these guys can actually play. They're shocked. This isn't, you know, and so again, I'm not focused on the baseball audience. I'm focused on the young audience, the people that want to have fun. But it just happens to age up to grandparents as well. And so when you think about the sort of the next turn of this, what what's getting in your way? You know, what what what are the things that I mean, I hate the like, what is it? Keep what keeps you up at night?

20:48First of all, I'm pretty sure you don't sleep. So I think that's that's irrelevant. But, you know, what are the what are the threats to this business? You know, is it people just sort of fall out of love with it? Like, what do you what do you worry about? Yeah. So that question, what keeps you up at night? And I think the better question is what gets you up in the morning? And I get up every morning at four or five o 'clock. You see this guy's right here every day. This is my idea book. And so I've been doing this for eight years. I write down 10 plus ideas. Our whole team's writing down ideas.

21:15And so the biggest thing, oh, it's a fad. It'll be gone in 15 minutes. I use that. That's a little chip on my shoulder. You know, every day it's a fad. Okay, well, wait till we do this new thing. Wait till we do this new thing. And so as soon as we become comfortable with doing things that are fine or doing things that are just okay, when we're not plussing the experience, we're not pushing into unknowns that we've never done before, like testing cruise ships or football stadiums, or just in the next year, people will hear about where we're going to play and the ideas of that. Doing the things that no one's ever done before, that's what keeps pushing it.