How to Turn Customers Into Raving Fans with Savannah Bananas Owner Jesse Cole

22:11Jesse Cole:What are the processes? A dry cleaner? What do people not like about it? And when you start there, it's crazy because I'm very positive guy. I realized baseball to many was too low, too, too long, too slow and too boring. So we look at every single part of the game and that's why we develop banana ball. So what's crazy right now, Ed is I started writing out ideas in 2018. I've learned this, you know, how Elrod helped me a lot with this miracle morning and it's just writing every day. And I started writing 10 ideas a day and I looked at baseball and I said, what are the boring parts of baseball?

22:40Jesse Cole:I said, mound visits. No one in the world gets excited for a mound. Oh, Hope they have a lot of mound visits today. I'm hoping for at least three to four mound visits, and I'm going to get my money's worth. No one wants that. Or, like, I remember watching a major league game back in the day, the Dodgers, Yaseel Puig, if you remember Yaseel Puig. And I was watching, and he'd step out of the box and work on his batting gloves, and I started timing it. And it was taking 25 to 30 seconds in between every pitch. It was a three-minute bat, and it wasn't even in the box. Gosh. Boring. And then I was like, huh, what else?

23:10Jesse Cole:I was like, walks. This is an athletic sport. And there's a play called a walk and you just slowly jog where nothing really happens. Boring. All right. And I was like, what else? The games are over three hours. This is when I started writing this. I was like, we just need a two hour time game. And I actually was filming our fans. So people don't realize, we took videotape and pictures of our crowd every 30 minutes from when they got in for an entire season. Because you can ask surveys of people, you know, you can ask surveys. And this is why one of the reasons Steve Jobs is so against surveys.

23:37Jesse Cole:They'll say one thing, act, watch what they do. There's a difference. So we watched. At 9 o 'clock, good influx of people started leaving. Two hours in. 9.30, good luck. It was a lot more. No matter what, we could have fireworks, we could have a show. It was just around that two-hour point. So I said, we're going to make a two-hour game. And everyone said, Jesse, you can't. The average game is three hours. I go, we're going to make a two-hour game because our fans are showing it, and you want them to want more, not less. There's no one that goes to a movie and said, how was the movie? Oh, it was a great movie.

24:04Jesse Cole:I left in the middle. No one says that. when you create a customer experience a fan experience how do you always create something that they'll want more you got to build your whole experience from when they first walk in to when they leave so the friction points too long too slow too boring non-stop entertainment you get nickel and dimes all right no ticket fees no convenient fees no service fees people don't realize this all our tickets right now are 40 50 and 60 on the secondary market they're going for$300 to$1 ,000. We can sell so much more, but you don't because you want to keep having it to create fans, not to create more revenue.

24:42Jesse Cole:Long-term fans over short-term profit. It's a big difference there. And that's how we guide everything. Oh my gosh. I don't get excited that much. Well, you know, when I'm hearing business conversations, this is as good as it gets. I'm just going to tell you, go back one more thing. You said early on, you had to get attention. Yeah. She got it because the experience was so good. It exploded. Would you say that to like a local realtor or someone who's got a supplement company? You also need to somehow work on getting attention, like people knowing you exist. 100%. Everybody has a marketing plan.

25:16Jesse Cole:Who has an attention plan? There's a big difference. Attention beats marketing 1 ,000 % of the time. When you look at, we're fortunate. I think between our teams, we're over 40 million now social media followers. Every week, we try to create something on a baseball field that people have never seen before. Then we capture it and we share it. We're not out there saying, come to our baseball games. We're saying, we're going to create a remarkable moment and capture that. And that might create attention. You know, like for instance, like we had a guy show up to our tryouts many years ago and he was an average ball player.

25:49Jesse Cole:And at the end of the tryout, uh, he said, Hey, I brought my stilts. Do you want me to wear them? I go, not really. And he goes, really? I go, unless you can hit him them. He goes, I can hit them. No, I didn't know this. He had never hidden stilts in his life, but this kid, I love the guy and courageous. He's like, I'm going to do it. He puts on his stilts which he had they were like old stilts when he was a kid he had like dog collars tying around it's the most unsafe stilts you could ever have on he goes into the batter's box and i watched the first pitch he hits a line drive and everyone stopped what they were doing and they watched and i remember right after we're having a meeting with the coaches and the coaches were like all right we got our rosters and i go where's the kid on stilts they go he's not he's not good enough i go he hits on stilts and they go he can't make the team jesse i go you guys find a way to figure out this i'll be back i come back and they say all right we can make a entertainment roster spot i go we better and so now you think about this he's getting millions upon millions of views hundreds of thousands of followers because he's doing something people haven't seen before what is the normal experience do the exact opposite oh my gosh oh my gosh so okay i'm processing what you just said i'm actually thinking of one of my businesses where the these points are of inflection are that are just so, they're constraints to actually scale in it.

27:09You're just making me really think for a second. By the way, he has two books. One's called Fans First. The other is called Find Your Yellow Tux. I think that's all I need to say based on listening to him so far. I think you guys are going to want to get the books. How about this? I'm watching you. I was talking about this with John Gordon, who you know as well today. There's a little invisible thing that I think great entrepreneurs do in their businesses. And I know you'll take none of the credit, but I want you to take a little credit on this or explain it. Okay. You bring monster energy to the table.

27:39No pun intended. Like there's an energy ring. You bring an appropriate energy relative to the type of business you're in. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs go, okay, I got my scaling plan. I got my get attention plan. I got my marketing plan. We're working on the experience. And then they don't pay attention to their own personal energy. They bring to meetings, to strategy, to the client, to everything. You have that. Are you conscious of it? And how important is it? I used to not have it.

28:05Jesse Cole:I know people think no way. There was a big aha that happened for me. And I think a lot of people we talk about with our team all the time now. Everyone says, Jesse, you have so much energy. And they go, why? I go, because I do what gives me energy. And they go, what do you mean? I go, I do every day what gives me energy. And that brings more energy out of me and they go what are you talking about i go when i was running that gastonia team there was three of us running an entire team yes today i would go out and i'd sell sponsorship which i don't do anymore i don't even buy that's a whole nother mindset i don't believe people wake up and say i want to be advertised to or i want to be marketed to today so that's a whole nother mindset of friction that we're working on it's why we eliminated all the ads from our stadium in savannah which is absolutely crazy so but i yes oh yeah which is i mean we do things on convention because every decision comes from, is it fans first?

28:52Jesse Cole:And I don't think any fan comes to a stadium and says, I want to see a lot of billboards at their stadium, or I want to get announcements telling me to go here or do this or do that. They want to be entertained. So we'll throw away hundreds of millions of dollars now to do what's best for our fans. But my point was back then I was doing that. I was selling sponsorship. I was like, man, selling another sponsorship. Like, uh, why am I doing this? I'm now in the concession stand. I'm working on food. I'm operations. I'm putting up signs and doing all this. Every day I came home and I was exhausted.

29:19Jesse Cole:And then I realized, I looked back and said, what are my best days, Ben? Ooh, all right. Here's my best days. I'm coming up with ideas, coming up with new promotions. I'm creating new things. I'm sharing. I'm either, you know, out speaking to a local rotary, telling them these crazy things that we're doing, or I'm growing. I'm learning from like someone like you. And believe me, I listen to more podcasts right behind me. I have thousands of books. Every day I learned what my energy list was. It's creating, sharing, and growing. And if I do things on my energy list, I'll show up the best I ever been.

29:51Jesse Cole:Every day I'll show up. And at the end of the day, when I go with my kids, I am coming to be the best dad because I did what gave me energy all day. And as an entrepreneur, that can be really hard because you're doing a lot of different things. But once you become so good at what you do with your energy, you can start hiring people that that gives them energy. There are some people that love finances. I don't have one financial meeting a year, and it's less than two hours. for the business that we are. And you can see what we're valued at and all that stuff. That is crazy, but it doesn't give me energy.

30:18Jesse Cole:It's like what Walt Disney said, money doesn't excite me, ideas excite me. That's what fires me up. So I think how you show up is also about what you do. What you do on a daily basis, are you doing the things that give you energy? If you're not, do an energy audit. Find out how do you get someone else doing those things and do what fires you up every day. And you'll be the best version of yourself for everyone else that you interact. Are you sick of dealing with a slow computer? Most people blame their device, but the real slowdown of what I've learned is actually comes from heavy traditional antivirus programs that hog up your storage and drag everything down.

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32:58Jesse Cole:there's i mean i've read so many but there's two that i can take one can be more on vision and the one is more on the business side. And so, so when you look vision and, you know, he said, it's kind of fun to do the impossible. He always imagined what the perfect experience was and worked backwards from that. And so what most people do, they think like, all right, Hey, this is a good, uh, Hey, this is a good industry band. This is good opportunity. This is something that can win right now. Well, what is the ultimate best perfect version of and work backwards? You know, when he said he's the first one to come up with sound on animation, first one to add color, he had the multi-plane camera.

33:29Jesse Cole:He said, you know what, what if I create a full length animation film in Snow White. No one ever done that. He said, but we can do it in a different level. And he said, oh, what are normal amusement parks? You know, there's the carnies, they're dirty. They all have the same rides. There's no, there's no type of theme behind all of it. And he said, well, what's the perfect one? And then he said, you know, huh? All right. What about even when I'm eating a hot dog, you know, all right, what's when I finished this, where should the trash can be based on the ride? He's like, this is the perfect experience.

33:53Jesse Cole:When I go on a ride, how long should it be? What's the way he just always imagined what the perfect experience and worked backwards from there. And it was never, ever about money. He was always obsessed with plussing the experience. That's our 11th fans first principle. We will always plus the experience. We will never settle with that's good. You know, fine is the F bomb in our organization. If you say that's fine, you're not going to be with us. Like that's not what we do. And so that was, it's the vision of the guest experience. What he called the guests. Obviously we look at fans. And then the next one from really strategic business?

34:24Jesse Cole:Control. Control. You want to see how a company is going to lose their way? They lose control. You want to see how that's going to happen? Watch a company go IPO. Yeah. Over the next three, five years. Watch when they bring in private investors. You know, watch with private equity. Watch what happens. Yeah. So here's what happened to Walt. He learned this. Like, that's why I'm so grateful when things go wrong. I am so grateful. I get fired up because Walt, He had some of the worst things that could happen. He literally created this unbelievable character. You know, the rabbit Oswald. He created this character that was it was stolen from him by mints.

35:01Jesse Cole:He lost it. And then he lost his rights to MGM. He lost those. And he's like, oh, all right. And then he built Disneyland, his crown jewel. And then he lost everything around it, all the land. He called it the neon jungle. So what did he do? I'm going to buy twenty seven thousand four hundred and forty three acres in Florida. I'm going to create my own government district, the Reedy Creek district, so I have complete control and no one can tell me what I can't do because I know what's best for my guests. And I'm going to go all in on creating it. I'm not going to have anyone else come in and try to take away and make it about money.

35:32Jesse Cole:So I'll give you an example. What do we do? We run our ticketing system. We do all of our ticketing. We go to Yankee Stadium, Fenway Park. We sell the tickets. We built our own secondary ticket marketplace at face value now as well with all tickets at face value, no ticket fees, no convenient fees. We do our own broadcast. We run our own merchandise. We do everything in-house that we can control because we want to control the guest experience, the fan experience from when they first interact until the end. And that's how you create fans. As soon as you lose a little bit of control, as soon as you have someone from the outside that wants to make a little bit more money, you lose the experience and you start losing fans.

36:07Jesse Cole:And so that I learned from Walt, and I'm obsessed with it. And it's control, not just for control's sake. It's because that's how you create the best experience for fans when you can everything from the first impression to the last impression. You I just keep going in my head like stuff I want to ask you. So I want you to go back. You're a little throwback. Maybe it's the Disney influence. I don't know. You and I both know. And I talked about this with Herjavec from Shark Tank a few weeks ago. he was on the show. And I'm like, I liked what the show's done. But I said, I think one of the huge problems that Shark Tank's created is entrepreneurs now start businesses to sell them.

36:44And as quickly as they can, they want to get investors and capital in there and take chips off the table. And that just causes you to do all kinds of stupid decisions. But what you just said that I had not thought about is the lack of control over the business. And so, you know, this Instagram, Lamborghini, exit your business, take on investors, dilute the shares, blah, blah, blah. And the other thing too, I was telling my sons and my nephews just this weekend, do you know how many entrepreneurs you guys, you've heard, they exited for 400 million. Everyone thinks they got 400 million. I'm like, you don't know their debt.

37:13You don't know how much they diluted. You don't know how much private equity came in. We had a guy come in that sold his company for$900 million and he walked with 30 is actually what he got at one of our events. So now talk to these people who maybe they are moving forward a little bit and they're tempted to bring in some capital, not because they have to have it to scale, but because they want to take some chips off the table, or that's just like the thing to do.

37:37Jesse Cole:I'm not going to take away. I mean, everyone has their own goals, their own interests. And if you're trying to make a lot of money, you're trying to do, you know, you have your own goals. I'm not focused on the next quarter. I'm focused on the next quarter century and beyond. So it's just a different mindset. You know, I think if you look at history, you can just look at what happened. I mean, all these companies, I mean, the story of Whole Foods and John Mackey, it's just, you know it's amazing he so much heart into building whole foods and then all of a sudden you get private equity involved you got it things change and in many ways he said he was forced to he was forced to sell to amazon it's not the same it's not the same company that's that's that's to me that's a that's a tragedy um because i think founders often often start things with the right intention there's a there's a need you know i believe the world is hungry for more fun and more joy and to be brought together and that's why we bring these people together all over the world and all over the country with banana ball.

38:26Jesse Cole:And so, yeah, I think, again, why are you starting something? You know, you go to the root of everything. You know, I was a, I was an only child, parents got divorced, and I was just always trying to look for, you know, joy in people and being around people and just fun. And, and I always wanted to feel that. And I always had a little chip on my shoulder, you know, I always wanted to, you know, still a guy that wants to make his dad proud. But, you know, I feel something, you know, when you at the end of a day, Is it your great day because you sold something or is it because of how you made people feel or the impact of your product?

39:00Jesse Cole:And so, again, I think it's intention on everything. But, yeah, I just if you look at the history of just go back through the history, there's very few companies. Costco is one. But think about Costco, what they did. He said, I'm going to keep that dollar 50 hot dog value bill no matter what. We've heard the story. They stay true to who they are. And there's only a very small handful of those companies that stay true to who they are. And so, yeah, in the scheme of things, that's us. My wife and I, we own 100 % of this team. You know, we're not, we get, you know, and we've been valued at well over a billion dollars now.

39:30Jesse Cole:And it's like, I don't care. I want to create a billion fans. I could care less about the dollar valuation. I want to make sure all our people are taken care of. And if you look at our players, our cast and staff and everyone, it's at a high level. Take care of them, but make sure we do what drives us, what fires us up. And that's making people feel something. You wait three, four years on a list to come to our game. We want you to have the best night of your life. And we want to spread to your friends, to your neighbors, to your family that joy that fires us up if you do that everything else takes care of itself are you a psycho like are you uh like i mean like competitively too like i see the kind guy who's all about other people but you and i both know we we know what it takes to win and typically one of those little things in there for the great ones is there's a level of dog in them that you can't measure by looking at them they got this heart of a champion thing whether they're competitive with other people or they're competitive, what their capacity or potential is like, take us in your personality a little bit.

40:25Jesse Cole:Extremely competitive, extremely competitive, but not against anyone else. I don't even think about our competitors. I'm extremely competitive against ourselves on how do we get better every single day? So here's an example. We're playing at Neyland Stadium, University of Tennessee, 101 ,000. And we put on a great show. It was a great game and a show. I I mean, there was trick plays. I mean, 30 trick plays. It went down to the wire. Home runs, walk-offs, all big dance elements. It was a great show. And I'm on top of the world. I'm having time. I was in the upper deck for two innings because we always want to make sure we win the upper deck.

40:57Jesse Cole:So our cast and our characters, our players, we're all around. But I started hearing rumblings during the game, like the sound wasn't working in the upper deck. And we were like, and they're like, yeah, it's an old same. It doesn't work. I wasn't. I got home. And so, you know, we finished the show. We stayed until the last fan, signed autographs. We do have a whole show. I mean, it goes late. We have our fans first talk 1 a.m. I get home in the hotel 132 and I start seeing the comments and the messages and the emails. Hundreds of people disappointed because they couldn't hear. I was devastated.

41:31Jesse Cole:I didn't sleep that night. The next day I sent a personal video to every single fan that messaged me every comment. I gave them a refund and a credit. I was devastated. and I went to our team and we said, what are we going to do? How can this not happen? We lost control. We didn't control the sound at the stadium. And so when you look at that, I look at that as a great moment in the scheme of things because we're not going to let that happen again. And you have to go through those moments. You've got to get through the messy to get to the great. People don't realize our first major league stadium in 2024, we played at Houston.

42:09Jesse Cole:Our ticket system completely shut down. There's a lot of reasons, but let's just say it shut down. And it was brutal. You better believe that the next game, we had Fort Knox behind it, and we were ready to go at Fenway Park. It didn't go down. Our first game on ESPN, primetime television, the transmission went out. We literally missed transmission our first time on primetime television. It went out. Every single time we do something big for the first time, we will have challenges. we'll have adversity. But what gets you up the next day? What fires you up to get to the next at bat? And so when we have those challenges, when we do things that haven't been done before, I mean, we now sell out cruise ships.

42:49Jesse Cole:We don't know how to do a cruise ship, entertain for five straight days. And there's things that go wrong. But if you have the mindset, we're going to compete ourselves. We got to do and then learn. It's the people that are afraid to actually go out and do something. There's the one, those people that don't accomplish things. And so that competitiveness drives me every day. What are we going to do next that's never been done before and how we get through that adversity and challenge to get to that next at bat because you get to the next at bat watch out because here we come i love you bro why has uh traditional sports not taken elements of what you're doing and juiced their own experience like i mean i know mlb they've shortened the at bats and all that but like i'm just curious as to your thoughts about it's just outside the picture, but like, usually imitation is the highest form of flattery.

43:37Like you're packing places out. And like, for example, why are like these USFLs or these secondary football? Like why, what are they thinking? Like there's a model. Why do you think traditional MLB or NFL is not doing more of it? And especially these other startup sports that are trying to be in the lane of their other sport, but not be like them. Why aren't they copying you or adding elements of it?

44:03Jesse Cole:Hard. It's really hard. You know what the easy way to grow a business? You increase prices. You start selling more sponsorship. You get bigger TV rights. You increase your costs. You increase the prices on parking and concessions. You know what the hard way is? To keep prices the same like we do every year, keep prices the same and try to drive a business. It's hard. It's hard at a seven o 'clock show to open the plaza with a rope drop at two o 'clock and have all your players greeting the fans as they walk in from two to three o 'clock it's hard to put an hour and a half show from three to four thirty with all of our cast all our performances our djs our live bands it's hard to have the entire team march out and meet every fan at four thirty before you open the plaza it's hard to have a two and a half hour pre-game show with over a hundred different skits and promotions before the game starts it's hard than to have a two-hour show where you're doing 10 to 15 things you've never done in front of a live crowd every single night.

44:58Jesse Cole:It's hard then to have a post-game plaza party for over an hour with all new entertainment as fans are leaving. And then it's hard to stay till the last fan leaves and sign autographs. It's extremely hard. That's why it's... Bro, masterclass. By the way, some of you are, 90 % were through with this interview and you still don't even know what we're talking about. And so what I mean by is a league, go just check out the Banana Baseball Championship League, get on the ticket list. You will have, guys, you can already tell, by the way, for no other reason than to support a great American entrepreneur and his family and his team.

45:31But for your own family to have the experience of your life, it's just, you've all seen some clip on Instagram, right? Of the guys dancing on the mound or doing a backflip when they throw a guy out at first, that's these guys. And that's like a millimeter of 1 % of what they do. You said earlier, fine. It's not okay. I got a couple more questions for you. And I've loved this, bro, by the way, anything I can ever do for you. I mean, I would love to support you. Not that you need it, but I'm here to support you. Um, your treasure, but you know, okay. I know people, there's some people listening and go, I already kind of checked those boxes.

46:02Like we're really good on the customer experience, man. We got it. Fans first. Yeah, we got it. Check the box. Yeah. Bring your energy. Got it. Uh, you know, uh, be competitive. Got it. And I don't think they get that there's levels to this game. So you have come up with a recipe and a formula that is working from that two hour before the game to shaking the last hand at 1.30, right? Having said that, here's my hallucination. I think you're constantly still looking at the process to innovate and make it better. And I think the average entrepreneur is like, we got it. Whereas you are constantly reevaluating.

46:36Listen, everyone, most people reevaluate when it's not working. Great entrepreneurs, which is my suspicion of what Jesse's going to say, They're evaluating and tweaking when it is working. Would you agree with me that that's the difference?

46:49Jesse Cole:And do you do that? Yeah, we have an LCP. So every single night, learn, change plus. Every night, wow. Every single night we meet with our departments. So, you know, like we have, and I shared this, you know, I learned this from Bezos. You know, his shareholder letters, I think are a masterclass on how he thought about Amazon, which is just very fascinating about long-term thinking, customer service. So I said, I'm just gonna, we're not a public company. We have no obligation to share all our numbers, what we're doing, who we are. But I did it in 2026. I'm going to continue it every year. I have a video out and I wrote all the things.

47:20Jesse Cole:And, you know, I share, hey, you know, it's there's a world where all of our fans have to be served merchandise within 10 to 15 minutes. It is almost impossible right now because at one of our games, you know, we could have, say, a major league stadium. We're having 15 to 20 ,000 people, people buying merchandise all within a couple hours. It's impossible. But that is our what are we going to do? How are we going to add this stand? What do we do here? How do we add this? What do we get this over here? We just keep looking at every option. Our show, which is our biggest differentiator. You know, sports are always focused on the competitive.

47:49Jesse Cole:We are competitive. You never know who's going to win. Like, it's a league. But our show is our differentiator. We look at every single music block. What comes in? What's the promotion? What's the sound? What's the blocking? What's the timing? How do we come off from the inning? How do we go right into it? How is there no dead air any moment? And so learn, change, plus. So we'll have, at the end of the night, we have reports sent from our show. We also merchandise. They'll send one. The broadcast is unbelievable because that's an area which we haven't spent much time on, but we're investing$13 million this year in our own broadcast so we can control it.

48:18Jesse Cole:They sent a whole detail, learn, change, plus on how to get better. And it's that mindset of you're constantly improving, continuous improvement that we know we're never going to have a perfect show. But each day we get a little bit closer. And I think that's that obsessiveness that drives us. And we get fired up and we just hit one more thing. One more thing. We got a little bit better tonight, and it's a little bit of better show. And that's our goal. I want a fan who came to a show two years ago and say, oh, my goodness, it's not even close. This is 100 times better. Because if you look at history, Ed, we learned a lot of the Globetrotters.

48:49Jesse Cole:I have a lot of respect that they're going 100 years. But they've also kept the show pretty similar. And they said, you know what? It's, hey, we're going to do the here comes the confetti. Here comes the slow motion. That scares the crap out of me. And, you know, people don't realize the Globetrotters, the 1940s and 50s, they were the most popular sports team in the world. And it wasn't even close. They sold 75 ,000 tickets in Berlin. They were selling out Madison Square Garden multiple times. Will Chamberlain chose to play for them before going for the Lakers. They even beat the Lakers in a game with George Mikan.

49:19Jesse Cole:And then something happened. They said, you know what? Oh, this is good. Let's just replicate that. Let's just make another Globe Charters team and another Globe Charters team. And we know what a good show is and do the same show over and over and over again. That lesson sits on me every single day. Especially when someone says you're like the Globe Charters. I go, 100 years is great. I have so much respect. That's amazing. Not many companies make it a hundred years. I don't want to be the globetrotters. I want to be doing things in 10, 20, 30, a hundred years. You never imagined in sports. You never imagined from an event.

49:46Jesse Cole:And that's the innovation that drives me and drives our organization. Yeah, you're going to do it. By the way, my book's called The Power of One More. So I love that it's one more, one more, one more. I love that. By the way, now he's fired up. He's like going side to side. You know, the other thing a great entrepreneur does, and people think, oh, you're helping him promote what he does charitably. It's not. I believe that great entrepreneurs, great people are wired to give back immediately. and it's something I evaluate in my friends that if you've had God's blessings and great grace in your life you know what are you doing outside of the business but connected to it that shows that you're giving back because I think that indicates humility which means you're going to have some longevity never mind the fact that just doing something good is important and And so you and your wife and the company have Bananas Foster, which is just the best name for a charity.

50:41Just tell us what you and Emily are doing with it, because I'm actually really interested in helping, too. So what do you guys do? Thank you.

50:49Jesse Cole:So my wife, she's the heart of this company. You know, as I'm constantly focusing on innovating, she's constantly thinking about our people. And every day she thinks about our people. And she grew up in a very close family. And in 2020, she shared with me, she goes, Jesse, do you know there's 400, thousand kids in the U S who don't have a permanent home. And I go, what are you talking about? She goes, foster care, foster care. I go, she goes, Jesse, we got to do something. And we had our two-year-old son at that point, she said, Jesse, we got to do something. And so she shared with me and said, let's get licensed.

51:16Jesse Cole:So in the middle of COVID, we got licensed. We had a two and a half year old girl join us and going through some challenges and adversity. And, you know, the goal in foster care is always reunification, get the kids back to their family. And with her case, Canada that that wasn't an option. And then about a little less than a year later, a girl, a six-day-old baby who was in the NICU battling everything, we got the call and she joined us. And again, reunification wasn't the perfect scenario there. And so those two girls joined our family and amazing girls and watching their journey has been one of the most rewarding things I've ever experienced.

51:50Jesse Cole:But as we did that and Emily said, Jesse, we experienced it for two or three years foster care, the challenges with DSS, the challenges with everything. They're low-staffed And just not many families are, I mean, we have families in our community that have bringing in 10 kids at once because no one else wants to do it. She said, Jesse, we got to do something. And I was like, well, what is our big goal and what we do with Banana Ball? It's bring people together. Well, what's more powerful than bringing a family together? And so we thought about this. And I remember we were walking, having a long walk.

52:16Jesse Cole:And I share with her. I go, well, what if it's called Bananas Foster? And she goes, well, that's a good name. I go, what are we going to do? And I said, well, again, start with whatever's normal, do the exact opposite. How do most nonprofits start? They talk about all the bad. All right. And then they share that. What about honoring the good? And so going the opposite way. So we said, what if how many people out there do actually know these hero foster families that are doing everything they can for years with no accolades, no recognition? And it's extremely hard. How do we honor them? So so we said, well, what if at every game we find a foster family in that community that's really made a huge difference?

52:54Jesse Cole:and we tell their story. We bring them out on the field. We have all the players go out to them, give them flowers and have a moment. And can you imagine the whole stadium standing to give a standing ovation to this family for what they did and recognizing them. And by doing that every single night, do you think that will get some more families that are interested in being a part of that? And so three years ago, we started doing it and it is every single game. We have six teams, multiple all around the country. Every game in the middle of the game, we honor a family. Maybe they've had 150 kids through their home.

53:25Jesse Cole:They've helped 10 families reunite. They've adopted 12 kids. They're part of the foster care system, all this. And I watch people not being told to stand, just stand and give them huge standing ovations. And I told Emily, I said, Emily, this is going to be a long journey. 400 ,000 kids without a permanent home. But think about this. We only sold two tickets when we started the Savannah Bananas. And now we have a wait list approaching 5 million for tickets. What if in 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years, there's a wait list in this country of families that want to become foster families? And that's the vision.

53:58Oh, you're special. You're special. I just got to tell you, it's like, I don't know if I've ever done a better podcast. By the way, how many of you raise your hand and think Jesse and I should buy the Red Sox together? Come on. At some point, what can we do together? Bro, thank you for teaching us today. and it makes me feel good that you exist and I want to support your business. I want to support your mission. I want to support your cause. Um, and I really admire you, really admire you bro. And, uh, I introduced you as a, uh, one of the great American entrepreneurs and, um, I mean it. And you actually made me even feel stronger about that after having a great conversation with you.

54:41Here's the only thing I ask of you about every 18 months, 24 months, I'd like you to just come back on. Love to love to.

54:47Jesse Cole:I mean this, I look up to you and what you've done and showing up constantly over and over again for so many years. And that's, that's the difference. So I appreciate you. And this was, this was truly one of the most enjoyable conversations I've ever had. So thank you. Yeah, bro. So awesome. Everybody you need, if you have anybody in your life who is inclined to start a business or is currently involved in one in any way, they need to listen to this last hour. And I also think you should go get both of his books. And, um, this is the real stuff today. I'm actually, I'm, I never get to the end of the show where I'm actually a bit emotional just because I'm really grateful that you exist, bro.

55:23I've said this twice now because I want entrepreneurs to do it the right way and to do it ethically and to give back and to bring an energy and an innovation. How about that guys? What does everybody else do and do the exact opposite? Like just so good, bro. So anything else you want to send them to direct them to where they can get more info on you or the company or anything.

55:42Jesse Cole:No, I mean, we're out there. Like I said, we try to keep every game free on YouTube. We keep all our stuff out there. We just believe in sharing and bringing joy to the world. However, we're very easy to connect with. Let's put it that way. God bless you, everybody. Share this episode. Max out.

55:59This is the Ed Myron Show.

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