Always be the challenger

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1:19Hey folks, Jeff Berman here. I am thrilled to share some of the new names who will be joining us at this year's Masters of Scale Summit. This may be our biggest stage yet. Reed Hastings, Meredith Whitaker, Van Jones, Amjad Massad, and more will be there with us October 20th through 22nd in San Francisco. If you're building something great or you want to build something great, we want you there with us too. Join us at mastersofscale.com slash apply 26.

1:51That's mastersofscale.com slash apply 26. In a few hours we get to see thousands of people that have this game on their bucket list.

2:07And they're waiting outside, they're wearing their gear. And as soon as they see us, they start jumping up and down and getting excited to high-five us. And that's not just players and cast. That's our staff. They get excited. Oh, you work for the team? And if you can find that and continue to build that and talk about what matters most, it's not about the money, it's not about the sales, it's not about the revenue, it's not even about the growth. It's about the amazing moments that you get to create every day and feel that. It's the most contagious thing in the world.

2:44This is Masters of Scale. I'm Jeff Furman, your host this week on the show, Jesse Cole. The name you may not know off the bat. But Jesse is the founder of the Savannah Bananas and Fans First Entertainment. And if you've turned on ESPN in the last year, you've seen the man in the yellow suit. That's Jesse. He's part P.T. Barnum, part Walt Disney, and he's scaling a whole new kind of sport with his fast-paced, circus-style version of professional baseball. Jesse's relentless dedication to his fans offers important insights for anyone in the business of delighting customers.

3:18Which really should be all of us. We are on location today. We are recording live at Angel Stadium, where the Savannah Bananas and the Indianapolis Clowns are playing tonight. And we are with the greatest showman on earth, Jesse Cole. Welcome to Masters of Scale. I'm excited to be with you guys. I've been a big fan of the show from when it first launched. So we've shared the episodes with so much of our teams. How many people on our team have been great? Well, we're huge fans, but you do. And we were just talking before we turned the mics and cameras on about how you all have been capturing content kind of Hoop Dream style for a long time now.

3:56We're producing a movie of the Bananas and Fans First. And we might open on you leading the crowd and singing Cold Blaze Yellow. Can you set the stage for us so you can open the show there? Well, as someone who grew up south of Boston, a huge Red Sox fan, my dad and I, we went to so many games. Back when tickets were $5, we'd sit down on the bleachers. And I was a shy, introverted kid growing up. And my dad had the opportunity to win this challenge for me to become an honorary bat boy. And so when I was five years old, I saw my first ever Red Sox game.

4:26But I was in the dugout before the game. But I was sitting by myself. And one player came over and sat down next to me. And it was Hall of Fame Alicia. And he spent 20 minutes with me, this shy, introverted, five-year-old kid. He didn't have to. And that moment changed everything for me because I saw him as this larger-than-life pitcher. I saw the Red Sox now as this larger-than-life team. And I vowed to one day play at Fenway Park. And so I put everything I can into my baseball career. I was fortunate to have professional scouts watching me on a Division I scholarship and then tore everything on my shoulder. And that ended my career.

4:57Just like that, I was done. And so that dream of playing at Fenway was over. At least I thought. Until we started in the front office on how to make baseball fun. And what people don't realize is I spent 10 years with this team in Gastonia, North Carolina, that no one knew about just trying to craft what we were doing to get people excited about coming to a baseball game before we started the Savannah Bananas. And then we started the Bananas, failed miserably, lost everything. And then after many years, made it successful, took the show on the road, and was able to sell out Fenway Park with 37,000 fans and everyone singing Yellow and lighting up the sky.

5:32And it was a moment I'll never forget. And what happened was I got some coaching jobs, but I also got this opportunity to be an intern for a college summer baseball team. And why would you want that? And I was like, well, it's right down the road. Let's just try it at the front office. And I realized immediately that in the front office, you could actually create a lot of the experience that happens for parents. And I started to get ideas of, wow, we could change this about the game. This is boring. What if we had this? What about music here? And so immediately as an intern, I started to get the idea of what it was like to work in the front office. And then I got offered a job as a general manager at 23 years old.

6:04Outside of a legendary baseball front office man, when there was a year of yours, Bill Beck, who did lots of the best, wonderful things back in the 50s. But minor league and call them summer league is where we've seen at least some experimentation in baseball. What did you try? What worked? What didn't work? Share that part of the journey. I was 23 years old. It was two months into my job as a general manager. I wasn't able to pay myself. There was no money. There was $268 in the bank account when we started. And there was no money. The team had lost over $100,000 the previous year. Wow. So I had saved money, you know, in college.

6:36I had a scholarship. So I was living off that. And it was two months in and went to the VET conference. What other VET conference? So the VET conference is Mike Vack and he brings together minor league operators and they talk about ideas. It's all about ideas. So my mind started just seeing like, we got to think a different way. I started reading about PT Barnum and Walt Disney. And I said, you know, let's do the things that are just a little bit different. You know, you have beauty pageants. But what if we had a grandma beauty pageant? And so we actually got grandmas from a senior citizen home and had a grandma beauty pageant, which did not go exactly as we planned. But it was, it was, what happened? Well, I mean, Gertrude stole the show.

7:07She was 87 years old. Well, first of all, they showed up late because I, you know, I should have expected that. The first question we did, Gertrude, if you could be on the cover of one magazine, what would it be and why? And she goes, of course, playboy. And I was like, this is a part of a live crowd. She's 87 years old. No one should be thinking about that. And that's how it opened. So we did that. I mean, we had flatulence fun nights with whoopie cushion giveaways. We had salute underwear nights. You know, we had garbage can nachos, which we still do in Savannah, like which five orders of nachos, three hamburgers, three hot dogs. It's heart-stoppingly delicious.

7:37Still can't get a cardiologist to sponsor it. But all these things, we started thinking about how do we do things there. And that's where the experimentation lab started in Gaston. It's one thing to say, I'm going to take the blinders off. Yeah. It's something to actually generate the ideas for the Grandma Beauty Contest or whatever else it may be. We had nothing to lose. So people realize they always put so much weight on failure. They put so much weight on an idea. When we first started, you do something who cares. It might not go right. So we just kept doing all these different ideas. And so now we've developed kind of a system on how we generate our best ideas.

8:08You know, we follow a Saturday Night Live model. We generate ideas on a Tuesday all day idea sessions. And we have a table read and we start doing rehearsals. And we go through all that to have a brand new show every week. And I think when you take out the weight of that and just say, we're going to try things, you find out a lot more gold. And you find gold because you're doing more. You learn more by the more you do. And so Henry Ford says, you learn by doing. And so we're just constantly doing things. Well, so back in the day, the first 10 years of Gastonia, there was no one covering us. There was no social media. We were just testing things. And you watch how the fans react.

8:39And you try it again. There's so many people right now who are working at companies. It could be massive, you know, fortune 50 companies who are at relatively early stage startups who've had a plan. And whether it's because of AI, you know, other exogenous forces, external forces are coming in and forcing them to have to think different. When you talk to these folks, when they come to you, what are you saying to them about how to inject that let's f***ing go of it, you know, into a process so that you take away that fear of failure and actually give yourself freedom to inspire them? Yeah, we had a plan.

9:09We were a college summer baseball team. And then the plan changed because we watched what our fans were doing. We watched as fans were leaving games early. No matter how much entertainment we had, no matter how much dancing, celebrations, crazy moments, surprises, our plan was to be a baseball team. Why were they leaving early? Because the game was too long. It's too slow. It's too boring for me both. It's a late night. You're taking your kids home. No one wants a three or four hour show. And so you saw that. We literally videotaped and we're taking pictures and watching every 30 minutes. But no one told us that, hey, we want a faster show, but they act.

9:42And so we had a plan. Everyone's so focused often on their current customers. We love our fans more than anything. I would put us up against any company in Longhom. She would love our fates. But we're also thinking about our future fates. Where are our fans in a lot in three to five years? And you can see little things that they react. What time did they show up? When did they leave? How did they react to the thing when we do our original music? When we put things on social media, we put millions of things on social media. You can respond right away. It's not, oh, the algorithm likes it. No, do your fans like it? And if your fans like it, they will tell you that. And so I think the reality is it's not about what are our plans.

10:14It's you need to put more things out there and share with the world and find out what they like and what they don't like. Companies are afraid of doing that because they're afraid of the perception of what people will think. I don't care the point what people think. We're going to fail every day. We do silly and crazy promotions. Every day, baseball traditionals criticize us. We're not for that. Who are you for? If you're trying to grow a business, you're trying to create customers, you put more out there and see if they like it. Don't do surveys. Just actually go do it. And that's what Walt Disney believed in. And that's what we try to do as well. You could easily be the most successful front office person in summer college baseball,

10:49Miami baseball, or maybe in Major League baseball. You could have been. That's a path that was available to you. Why isn't that the path you ended up being? The greatest creators create things that they love. Often someone that's a creator, they're in a system and they're in a cog and they're creating someone else's dreams and with their vision, someone on board members. I realized that someone who played the game and loves playing, watching, it just was never truly exciting for me. And I realized that if I stayed into this box that they put you, these are the rules of the game. This is how you have to play.

11:19These are the rules that leave. You better not break the rules or you're going to get fined. If you can get out of that box and just create things that get you excited and you believe if you get excited about it and you love it, that other fans and other customers will get excited about it. It's the world I wanted to live. And I just believe that something was out there that not your traditional baseball fans would love, that a family would love, that young people would love, that people just want to go have fun and not take themselves too seriously. There's the conventional world of sports, which we play a little bit in that world, but we

11:50can't control whether your team wins or loses. But what we can control is the show. And if we build the rules, we make the rules of the game, we make the rules of the show, people can leave and have a great time every single night. That's what we're trying to do. So a lot of entrepreneurs would have built their deck. They would have gone around and pitched this idea for a new concept and raised a bunch of money or tried to and go from there. That's not what you start doing. Same more. One City World Tour. Start small, dream big. We had this idea. We had this full leap. We played banana ball and we did it behind closed doors.

12:23We played nine innings in 99 minutes. And the players said it was the most fun they've ever played. And I watched it. You couldn't take your eyes. So how do you make that happen? I called my two college coaches and said, I got a crazy idea. Can we do this behind closed doors? They said, sure, Jesse, we'll give it a shot. And we got fired up. And we said, all right, well, let's test. And it didn't work right away. No. What happened? It never works right away. It always starts as chaos when you first get it. But then we said, all right, well, is there something here? There's some match. Do you not want to take your eyes? I didn't want to blink. So I was like, what's going to happen? Yeah. And so when you just said, how do you make it with people?

12:53You can't take your eyes. You can't leave your seat. Or you may miss something you've never seen before in baseball. You didn't raise outside capital. You're not like an independently wealthy guy spending a trust fund down or something. You save a few bucks with a scholarship. How are you even sustaining this while you're trying to get enough traction or product market fit? And most businesses, a lot of businesses aren't, hey, you got to start this. We need to raise capital. Right. Or we got to have advertisers, sponsors. We got to get all this. Well, what we were fortunate with College Summer Baseball, we started a model where if we could sell the tickets and get people excited enough to come, we learned how to be successful

13:26by just selling tickets. Everyone's like, oh, I don't know if we can do that golf event because we lost our sponsor. Well, then the event's not good. Right. If people don't want to pay to come see it, we had to make a product that people wanted to pay and come see in College Summer Baseball. We were selling out every night, 4,000 seats. Right. Yeah. Now, this is after only selling two tickets in our first three months, running out of money. My wife and I have a cellar house, empty out of savings accounts, sleeping on an airbed with nothing. But we got them to see the show and we saw dancing players. We saw fun moments. We saw banana babies, banana bands, all that. People were like, this is something we've never seen before.

13:57So that started, you know, small $3 million business for making money and it's fine. Was there a moment where your wife looked at each other and said, this isn't going to work? Was there a moment where you lost faith or you just weren't sure you were going to get there? We wouldn't let ourselves go there. We couldn't. We were a million dollars plus in debt. We just got married. We have to go on. There's no other option. So what's the inflection point then when you've sold that house, you're sleeping on the air mattress, have to be some moments your wife and you were looking at each other and deep breath. We didn't sleep at all. Yeah. We didn't sleep at all.

14:27We'd walk the streets just thinking. And we just kept saying, get to that first show. Get to that first show. It's like my dad, you know, if I was this, get to your next to bat. And forget about what happened in the last to bat. Get to your next to bat. And that's why I said, and then swing hard in case you hit it. And so we said, we're going to get to that opening night and we're going to swing hard. But then and then went out and danced in the pouring rain because it was a rain delay. And we had the players doing dances and people were like, what am I watching? But it created attention. They were saying they saw some. So from that point, we started selling out every day. Wow. So the business became set at a 4,000 seat stadium.

14:58So we already had a little bit of a cushion to say, hey, we can experiment. Let's go take this on the road. We had a Penske truck that we just packed all our stuff in. We didn't know how to set up merchandise. We didn't know logistics. We didn't know how to do sound systems at other stadiums. We didn't know anything. But we said, can we get enough people excited to come see it? And we sold it out. We failed measurably the first night. Sound went out. The anthem singer didn't show up. But enough good happened. That's the next day, it's on a great show. And I knew right there. We had a surprise fireworks show. We had the fans stayed an hour plus after the game.

15:28They didn't want to leave. Which normally games, you want to leave. And I said, this is it. And so the next year, we go to seven cities, then 33, then major league stadiums, then football stadiums. You just keep expanding after you start doing it.

15:40Still ahead, more with Jesse Cole on how he uses social media to supercharge growth. When you've built substantial wealth through your business, it's often tied up in a single equity position. The upside is real, but so is the risk. And knowing when to act isn't always obvious. Creative Planning works with business owners to build a strategy around concentrated equity. When to diversify, how to manage tax risk, and how to protect what you've spent years building.

16:17Creative Planning, where wealth works together. Learn more at creativeplanning.com slash mastersofscale. Hey listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show. Because every Friday, we release a second Rapid Response exclusively in the Rapid Response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely. From Ford's CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from the Devil Wears Prada.

16:48It takes about 10 seconds to find. Just search Rapid Response wherever you listen to podcasts. And hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode. I hope to see you there.

17:01Humans will never be more intelligent than AI. There's going to be two types of companies. Those are great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't. How do we build a future that is human-centered? I'm Rana Elkayubi, and on my podcast, Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone. Every week, I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future,

17:33and we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives. Find Pioneers of AI wherever you tune in.

17:44Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find this conversation and more on our YouTube channel. And be sure to check out the link in the show notes to subscribe to our newsletter.

17:58It strikes me that 20 years ago, this would have been a heck of a lot harder to do, in part because you just didn't have the range of social media. And it's so hard to often take that in-real-life experience so special and translate it on social and digital. What was that? Well, we spend $0 on marketing. We invest in the experience. So most people, I think, when they think about marketing, it's like, you've got to go promote something to get people to want to buy something or take on a service. What we think about is, how do you make your experience so remarkable that you capture that and just share that?

18:30So, but P.T. Barnum, one of the greatest promoters of all time, he said, something terrible happens without promotion. Nothing. And so I think without social media, they've been a great challenge. But yes, now social media, we can amplify, but you still have to create something truly remarkable. And that's what we try to do every night. You've referenced P.T. Barnum. You've referenced Walt Disney. There are elements of Vince McMahon and WWE here. There are elements of Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead. Yeah. When you're looking at these folks who've innovated and created these extraordinary fan-friendly experiences,

19:00how are you determining what's going to work for you, what to draw from them? When you're researching, you're reading about these folks, saying that as folks, what are you looking to latch on to? You start with the best in their industry. So the Grateful Dead, they were the most fan-friendly band of theirs. They let the fans record every single night. You know, they create a newsletter for them. They were speaking directly with them. They brought in their own sound because they wanted to be better. Like, they were obsessed with communicating directly with the fans. They started selling their own tickets, their fans, the fan clubs, all of that. So we said, all right, how do we do that? So we have 40,000 hate club members that get access to all of our tickets, furnishing special meeting rates.

19:34That could be well over 100,000, but we're still learning of it every year and slowly growing it. I spent a couple of years at the NFL, ran the digital media group. Yes. There is perhaps no organization more zealous about controlling its rights. 100%. The National Football League. Yeah. They have built a pretty darn good business doing it. Yeah. You guys with the fan first approach, you'll do an ESPN deal. You do a CW deal. You'll keep the rights to stream games on YouTube for free globally. When you're balancing that driving revenue and creating that fan experience, because you're still a business, right?

20:05I mean, we're a healthy business. So how are you striking that balance? Is it always fan first? Are there moments where you go, boy, if ESPN's going to 10x the dollars they're going to give us, I'm not going to live stream every game? Is that even a discussion? No. Fans first always. We started this company to be fans first. That's who we are. That's what we stand for. It's our mission. It's our values. And as soon as you deter away from that, you're in trouble and you'll be glorious in the short of it. And then every day you'll just lose a few fans. Two, three, four, five, and 10, and hundreds, and thousands.

20:38That's my fear. There's a different mindset when you're in a challenger brand than when you're at the top. Yeah, but you should always be a challenger. Well, so that's exactly where I'm going. How do you maintain that challenger brand mindset as you're getting up there? I'm scared every day. I'm scared every day that what we've worked so hard on when we first started in sleeping on the air bed, that we can lose fans. I'm scared that this company builds from nothing. And now it's, I guess you could call it productive paranoia. And I have that every day that our show has to get a little bit better. Our experience has to get a little bit better.

21:09Our entertainment has to get a little bit better. Our emotional experience has to get a little better. Our ticket experience has to get a little bit better. So some people would say, oh, that sounds not healthy. To me, it fires me out. It excites me. I love looking back at where we were last year and where we are this year and knowing that we're only 1% of the way where we can be. I know that and I believe that because we're inventing a lot of it as we go. It's going to be messed. It's hard. Every night we do a new show, it's hard. We have six teams now. It's extremely hard trying to have that level. And I don't think most people realize this is because the bananas are becoming a phenomenon. You can't go on social without seeing you guys. Phenomenal.

21:39But you're now a 16 lead. You've got a season. You've got an end of season tournament, right? So have you been worried about diluting the brand by expanding into these other teams? 100%. That's a huge fear. So you have to make every single show so distinct and so unique and so different. We've invested millions in each show. So like the Party Animals, which people don't realize, they have more followers than every Major League Baseball team on TikTok. Really? But they're selling on Major League stadiums without the bananas. Like 170,000 people joined the list to go see them in Detroit. Based on those numbers, we could sell out eight straight nights without the bananas.

22:11Yeah. The Clowns, our newest team, which obviously paying tribute to the Major League team with what they did is unbelievable. I mean, we're bringing Broadway type centers, a brass band that's unbelievable. We have acts we haven't shared yet, but from Cirque du Soleil. I want people every night to see the shows and be like, I've never seen that on a baseball belt. And it's very hard because they're all just getting started. Can they build that brand on their own? Or how do you think about integrating them with the bananas? They're creating fans every night. The local beach coconuts are, their merchandise is right up there at number two, because that brand is so fun that when they start playing at the end of the game, everyone's chanting

22:42local beach and coconuts. And so they can build off each other, but you have to make it distinct. You have to make it, they think, oh, it's just not one of the bananas teams. We're in trouble. That's a huge fear of mine is we got to continue to come up with new ideas. The Dodgers have a home game tonight. I chatted right before we sat down. The very cheapest seat in the stadium is 80 bucks. You guys have kept a very low fixed ticket price. How do you? Our goal is very simple. It's to create fans. Your goal is to make money. We could charge a lot more. And we've been told to do that by every consultant. You could be making this.

23:13The average ticket price in the secondary market is over $200. For us, it's 40, 50, and $60 with no ticket fees, no convenience fees. We pay your taxes. It's a little game. If you're a public company, they would say there's $100 million right there. It's hard what you shouldn't charge. Yeah. No interest to us. We even built a secondary market to deter the whole secondary market. Yep. And it's all face value, which just costs us money. Yeah. We're literally doing, developing, putting all the money into it, taking all the fees. That's all on us. Just so our fans need to think of at the price that we believe is best. The other thing that I imagine a private equity investor down to get in your business

23:46would say is, okay, fine, Jesse, do it that way, have it your way, but let's go use the ticketing platform for everyone else. Is that part of the place? Well, yeah. If you follow, I guess, if you look at what Amazon did, I mean, it's great. Bezos and the group built something that could handle their infrastructure and say, wow, a lot of people could use that as well. AWS. 100% AWS, which is the most profitable part of their business, billions of dollars. Yeah. I think there's a world where our ticketing platform that we have built and our secondary marketplace could be used. But right now, we got to get to a point where it is so great for our fans.

24:17It is almost that perfect for our fans that we want to put it out to everyone else. And that's going to be a long way. Again, our goals aren't to make a lot of money. Our goals are to create the best experience. I get that. And also, the more money you make, especially if you're not charging fans for it, the more you can offer it, right? Yeah. I mean, obviously, we're investing a lot more in our show, millions of dollars. Our broadcast, we invest $13 million this year, which we're not getting that. Like, it's free on YouTube. So that's part of our ethos. We will invest more. Again, under Bezos, they continue to invest for the long game. We're learning how to do a broadcast at a high level.

24:48We have 16 full-time truck drivers that are driving our trucks around the country with all of our equipment and merchandise. We didn't know how to do a trucking logistics company, but we have to now because we're in 75 stadiums, all in 45 states, and soon we'll be international. We have no idea how to do that. You're building a fan experience. All of a sudden, you're building technology, a techie platform. You're building a logistics company with the trucking. When a new challenge like that comes up, how are you, what to do? Well, it depends on what part of the business. So like, you know, I think we learned this again. You look at Walt Disney and Roy Disney. Walt was focused on all the creative and Roy was focused on all the operation, how you pay for it.

25:21We have an amazing president who's been with us since day one. Jerry Gordon, he is gung-ho on the operations and figuring it out. He always finds a way. You know, his mindset is, we'll figure it out. We don't know, but we'll figure it out. And it's going to be messy. It'll cost us a little bit more as we figure it out. And eventually we'll get it. I'm focused on how do we create the show? What's our next step? What's our next event that's going to be larger than life? What's our original music that we're creating? What's the next media thing we're doing? I spend all my time there. He spends all his time focused on how do we actually take care of our fans and make this happen. We work very well together.

25:51There are a lot of leaders running consumer business in who would love to have a little bit of your sis. Brian Morlap was my boss at the NFL. He's now running the PGA Tour. Brian calls and says, Jesse, one note, should I be doing different?

26:08At the PGA Tour? Yeah. I'd break the rules. Let fans have fun. Let golfers have fun. People want to connect with the athletes. They want to connect in a way it's okay to celebrate. It's okay to have fun. Why don't the golfers come through high-fiving all the fans? Or why don't they actually have some entrances? Why isn't there an entrance music as a golfer comes out? Why does it have to always be quiet? Again, there's obviously movies and have Gilmore and all talking about that. And there's a world now where I think people are looking for entertainment nonstop. We have seen amazing golf shots.

26:40We have seen home runs. We have seen touchdowns. It doesn't take away from the sport. It's amazing to watch. But you haven't seen the athletes have as much fun. Yeah. And whether you're a golfer, whether you're a footballer, it's like football channel that said, hey, we're going to have touchdowns. At least we're all good. Celebrate. Have fun. You know, that's good. And that's become a part of our society now. That didn't hurt the game. It added to the game. So why don't you embrace that? If you're in golf, it's like embrace those moments. Let's just do this one tournament.

27:11We're going to have music pumping. We're going to have live bands. We're going to have entrances. We're going to have certain walk-ups. We're going to have celebrities doing singing. It is going to be the most fun golf tournament in the world. Just test it for once. Golf purists will hit it. But you might draw a whole new audience that you'd be surprised. And they'd come out at the time of their life. Let me go to the other end of the spectrum. Reid Hoffman is a co-founder of LinkedIn. A lot of his people have not known where the party happens. If you're giving one product note to LinkedIn right now, what are you asking them to do or change to make it more fun, more content friendly?

27:45It's tough because it's very easy to just go and do whatever else is doing. You see this every, you know, TikTok takes this for Instagram, Instagram takes this, it's very easy. I wouldn't try to do what everyone else is doing. I would lean in on what makes them different. And love is better than life, as I've heard many times. You know, get a million, two million, five million, ten million to love you, as opposed to hundreds of millions. Like, you can't count it like me. If someone is about to graduate college, it's coming up to you and saying, Jesse, like, what do I do? The entry-level jobs are disappearing. I'm really not sure what to do. What's the piece of advice that you're giving?

28:15Do what gives you energy. Biggest game changer for me happened. About six years in my professional journey, I was with the Gastonia Grizzlies and I was doing everything. I was doing hiring, I was doing sales, I was doing food and bev, I was doing operations. And every day I was... And then I realized that what were my best days? What did I do during my... I was coming up with ideas. I was creating, I was sharing, I was on a podcast, I was talking about what we're doing. I was growing, I was learning from some of the best of the best. And so I created my original list. And I said, these are the three things, these buckets, creating, sharing, and growing.

28:47If I do that every day, everything else takes care of itself. You know, people always ask me, keep you up at night. To me, that's the wrong function. It's what gets you up in the hole. And so for someone that's graduating high school, graduating college, what gets you fired up? What gets you excited to do that you could do for hours? Time just flies by. You know, often people are watching the clock into jobs. What is it that you don't even realize? Like at the ballpark, it's 12 hours go by. I'm like, oh my goodness, it's showtime. Yeah. Because we're doing things that we love around people that we love to do it. That's the difference. And so what I just think about that, it's one of those things every day

29:19that you get truly excited to. Not necessarily your passion, but what gives you energy? What makes you want to do a little bit more and a little bit more? Because the truly great people are the ones that work on their craft more than anyone else. They do things that no one else will do because they love it. And that's what drives them. I have to tell you, I mean, anyone who's watched your listing is, your energy is infectious, your enthusiasm is infectious. But here's the thing that has struck me, being here. Same thing for your team, the people who work around you. And I don't mean just the players of the field. I mean, Taylor, who works in the area, there's a spirit which you don't feel

29:52at most places. And I hope you see it. I hope you feel it. It's also important to offer that feedback. It's just, there's an energy that you don't get those places. It's joy. Yeah. Yeah. It's joy. And I think the world needs more of that. And when you have people throughout our whole company that were doing it for the right reasons, because it brings joy, because we get to feel it. In a few hours, we get to see thousands of people that had this game on the bucket list and they're waiting outside. They're wearing their gear. And as soon as they see us, they start jumping up and down and getting excited to high five us.

30:23And that's not just players and cast. That's our staff. They get excited. Oh, you work for the team? That. And if you can find Matt and continue to build that and talk about what matters most, it's not about the money. It's not about the sales. It's not about the revenue. It's not even about the growth. It's about the amazing moments that you get to create every day and feel that. It's the most contagious thing in the world. And so that gives me energy. And I hope it gives all of our team energy, because every day we get to do special things and bring joy.

30:51Well, I'm confident that we're watching listening and taking joy away from this. Thanks for being with me. Thanks again to the man in the yellow suit, Jesse Cole, for joining us. Not everyone is bold enough to create something as wacky and wild and just wonderful as the Savannah Bananas. But the lessons from Jesse's scale journey are essential for all of us. The one that struck me most watching his team rehearse for a show.

31:22Joy. It's contagious. It's good for business. And Lord knows we need more of it. I'm Jeff Berman. Thank you for listening.

31:43I'm Jeff Berman. Mixing and Mastering by the Audio Boys, Aaron Bestinelli and Brian Pugh. Original music by the legendary Ryan Holiday. Our head of podcast is Lee Tal Mollad. Visit mastersofscale.com to find the transcript for this episode and to subscribe to our newsletter.

32:17And be sure to check out our YouTube channel.