He turned a broke team into a billion dollars

alright this episode is a billy of the week me and sam are so inspired by this one story this one entrepreneur i'm almost like slightly intimidated sam by the story it's like oh my god the bar has been raised of what i need to go do the person who we talked about i pray this makes it to them and i pray that they come on the pod and after listening to this you're gonna agree that we have to get them on man also the last two minutes of this podcast we need you guys to listen we left you guys a message yes alright enjoy i feel like i could rule where to i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's off on a roll this is the most inspiring business that i saw when i was looking the world to sports so there's a lot of things that made a lot of money this one not only makes a lot of money i literally in my notes wrote down in all caps this guy deserves a billion dollars and i wanna be like him i don't even think i've ever had that thought before right like you know there's a lot of people who hate billionaires there's i don't i'm not like that at all i think it's great you know create successful business but i've never heard a story and thought goddamn we need to give it's like if there was a nobel prize for business we need to give it to this guy this guy we're gonna talk about it's one of these stories that i think i know all about it and then i go in like deep dive and i'm like so much better than i thought yeah so much more to know it's also another one of those stories where i almost didn't wanna talk about it because i thought that like everyone has talked about it but it's just too good and there's more to it and than i even realized and i wanna have him on i was like should we tell the whole story but well whatever gotta do it okay here we go we're talking about savannah bananas so this is a business in baseball this story is pretty incredible so should we tell it from beginning middle to end or where where should i start here yeah let's give a let's give an origin story than where they are now okay actually i'll start with the where they are now that we'll go to the origin story so the where they are now is the most impressive metric they have a three million person waiting list to buy tickets to their events you can't buy it if you want to you basically left to win the lottery in order to go to their event now and that's kind of a you know this is a business that's probably worth close to a billion dollars i would say based on what i could tell and it's about a hundred million in revenue i think they do between seventy million and a hundred million in revenue it's my guess i don't know what that would be worth but it's definitely plausible that it will be worth a billion dollars soon if it's not already it's got more should we they have more followers on tiktok and social media that follow their their brand their team than every single professional baseball team including the yankee of the red sox and the dodgers combined all combined these guys up more more engagement so the is is a very very impressive us okay so what's the origin sword of the savannah banana so starts off with this guy jesse and jesse's he's the founder he's himself like a college baseball player he wants to go like you know it wants to make it and i think he gets on to like a college summer team or like a minor league cape cod it's called it's called cape cod summer league it's like the premier like summer league for am baseball and premier is is so generous like that's like saying we're the premier podcast of of the world like premier so there's majorly league baseball then there's like aaa aa single a then there's like another thing and then there's college summer leak under all that does me filming this from my bedroom not screen premier yes his mother's bedroom or something i don't know what's going on so so he he's playing and then basically as he moves up in competition he's bench basically he's like not good enough to play there's like better players and he realized realizes well he's sitting on the bench he's like man to swore i loved and i've you know built my life around and had so much fun doing like men when you're watching it's pretty boring i guess it's really fun for the ten guys out there but damn baseball is pretty boring to watch he said one story he goes i'm on the team and i'm supposed to be like in it and this is so boring what is going on yeah so he just has this t of this realization and anyways he gets his first job as a general manager for a college summer league team called the gaston g not not we're not even at the savannah bananas yet he's met he be he gets to manage this team now you might think well how this young kid get to be the gm of this college summer well the team averaged two hundred fans per game and had like two hundred and sixty eight dollars in the checking account so you know this team was basically on the brink and was struggling he comes on he's not even gonna get paid at the beginning and he's gonna be a manager same and so he immediately starts hustling like any entrepreneur does he starts thinking alright how are we gonna turn this around we gotta get fans to come to the game buy tickets we gotta sell some you know merge we what are we gonna do are we gonna actually get this to work and so he starts doing a bunch of things that you know he starts getting innovative so he by day he's working this job and by night he's reading books about disney and pt barn and you know the wwe and the f see an apple and then you know even things like the grateful dead and the beatles like how did they build their fan base and he starts trying things and he starts trying all kinds of fun you know hey how about a fan comes out and throws out the first pitch hey what if we what if we do this you know this this promotion where you know dollar hot does what little things like that and it starts to work so i'll fast forward through this party basically starts to turn around the gaston g turns it from a team that's about to go out of business to like you know small amount of cash flow but again this is a summer league team they're basically like you know they play thirty games it's only in the summer there's only so much they're gonna be able to do but he's you know he's doing well he's doing well with it he had like good ideas there was like a dig to china night and i read about this or listen to it on the acquired podcast and they're like so you what did you do he was like well i put a ticket to china or like a gift certificate or something like that to buy a one ticket yeah and they're were like danny would ticket he's like well no it was a one way ticket and there was no combination so no one actually went but basically after the game and like got digging came out of the crowd and dig to china yeah so he does things like that that he had like a grandma beauty pageant contest he did like cute stuff like that yeah and it it actually starts to work and so he turns around the attendance and he's like i'm gonna do anything it can to make noise so he's like how do i hijack existing news stories so in baseball the time there's a big scandal around h hd h so human growth hormone and he's like okay we need to get in on the story so he's like we fired our mascot the the bear the g bear he's like for taking bg for bg bear growth hormone and he's just doing anything you can to drum up any kind of interest in this stuff and it starts short and he basically spends nearly a decade this is one thing i didn't understand i didn't actually know he spends about ten years tinkering and experimenting with these things before he ever he's like i had one media story cover me in my first ten years he's like but i got to experiment you know i got to i got to do things and along the way what happened so he ends up meeting his wife so he he ends up meeting his future wife how did he do that well he's like i need to he's like i want a network and i wanna get to know people in minor league baseball the one rung up from where he was so he decides to host a free seminar and he gets the minor league baseball people to come and he's telling them all about grandma beauty pageant and bear growth hormone and the dig to china and they're like what the hell is this guy talk about he's like hey we turned attendance from two hundred fans a game to like a few thousand people per game right like we ten next we we ten plus art our average game attendance and they're like okay well maybe this guy's not so crazy and there's a woman there from ka rip and baseball and she calls one of her employees and she's like hey i think her ramsey is emily she's like emily i just met her a future husband and she's like what she's like i just met this guy he's as crazy and passionate and like nuts about baseball as you are look you gotta meet this guy just call them talk business i do and they do and so he he ends up hiring her and for the first year they're just like you know like totally whatever that they just keep it professional whatever but eventually they end up dating he ends up proposing to her at one of the games on the field she says yes and she's as like part of the like proposal they're happy she's like oh i'm gonna play a weekend trip to savannah and we're gonna go savannah georgia we'll just have fun there and so they go from or i think they're were in south carolina they go from south carolina to georgia and while they're there she's like hey you know this is their idea of romance she's like let's go check out this minor league baseball stadium and they check it out and they're and they're just blown away they're like wow this is it's like field dreams they walk in and they're like this is an incredible place i could feel the history i can feel feels like babe ruth played here like this is incredible we gotta have a stadium like this and they approached the stadium owner and they're like hey is there any availability they're like no no we rented out to this minor league baseball team so like okay if anything ever changes they ever leave you call me and they're like alright sure buddy and sure enough like i don't know a year later or something like that the minor league baseball team goes the city and demands like we want a new stadium we need like a thirty five million dollar stadium and the mayor was like dude you're money league baseball we're not giving you a thirty five million dollar stadium and so they pack up leave and they call this guy and he comes and he basically cuts a deal to sign a twenty thousand dollar a year lease to create a team in savannah georgia alright so a lot of people will talk about how you need a million dollars and three years of experience to start a business nonsense if you listen to at least one episode on this podcast you know that it's completely not true my last company the hustle we grew it to something like seventeen dollars or eighteen million dollars in revenue i started it with like three hundred dollars my current company hampton does over ten million in revenue started it with actually no money maybe twenty nine dollars or something like that nothing and so you don't actually need investors to start a company you don't need a fancy business plan but what you do need is systems that actually work and so my old company the hustle they put together five proven business models that you could start right now today with under a thousand dollars these are models that if you do it correctly it can make money this week you can get it right now you can scan the qr code or click the link in the description now back to the show have you been to a minor league game like this i've never been to a my have you yeah i i went to i've been to the cape cod league the games that i've been to to say that like you're buying a team that's like a little ambitious like it's it's very grassroots it's it's bleach teachers you're missing the things that high school and cult high school has my kid is playing that's a pretty strong draw that's why i go go right it's why i'm going and colleges i go here it's us that's we minded league baseball doesn't have either of those advantages right yeah no it's like pretty whack it's like i mean you really have to care about baseball and like while all this is going on we've had dan from overtime on yeah and he's kind of explained that basically like basketball and football has killed it lately because they understand highlight reels and they understand action and they're doing a really good job of telling some stories baseball doesn't so over the last like fifteen years the social media has gotten popular baseball has absolutely gotten left behind a bit right and you know it's supposed be america's pastime time it's not really america's pastime time at at the moment in my opinion and like it's like so ad passed it's definitely the pass it's the it's it's a past the time for sure yeah just like push face like five times between those two words and so yeah it it's ambitious to say that he was like buying something me i think he said when he bought the team that he was like we bought it but it's really just like seller financing meaning the guy like gave it to me and i gave him a small percentage of some profits which there was basically none yeah exactly i think that was maybe the first team and this team they they kinda like it was they didn't buy an existing team they created one as part of like the coastal plain league but they owed the league like a few hundred thousand dollars to to like start this expansion team basically but he had a little reputation from the g right he a he had something which is why he was able to convince the stadium to give him the lease and the the league to give him a team but now he's gotta make it happen and so he starts and it doesn't start well i think in the first few months he said he sold literally two tickets and he's like it was awful like we couldn't give away the tickets and so he he tried to like hosted a fan event and he i promoted he's knocking on doors he going on radio and he's trying to promote this fan event for the new team of savannah it was called like the savannah minor new league baseball team that was not called the savannah bananas yet he's like so few people showed up to our fan event that the conference center they like didn't even charge me for the food they felt so bad like they felt so bad how poorly the event to went and basically these guys run out of money so they're like they're on the brink guys being the husband wife and his wife sorry the and his wife they're they're running out of money and his wife is like alright let's sell the house and he's like what and she's like yeah let's do it we are all in and so they sell their house they move into a garage that's kinda turned into a studio apartment they sleep on a twin air mattress and he's like dude we were sleeping in socks every night he's like you know nobody sleeps in socks we had to sleep mattress twin air mattress at a twin mattress they use all their savings they they just try to keep the team alive and he's like i dude i kept going because he's like i would read books and he's like walt disney went bankrupt with his like i forgot i it's gonna like laugh mat or whatever his thing was called he's like pt barn and i'm struggled like this is just our struggle era like this is our struggle season like where you will do this we gotta coin that term this is our struggle season yeah exactly the pain cave he's in the pain cave and he's decides he's like okay first thing we need to do is we need to come up with a team name and so they do he's like alright we're gonna go to the community because he's trying to get the community on their side community didn't didn't rely really like them they had lost their mind a league baseball team and instead they had this like college like this like this other team that was like you know the savannah baseball team and so he's trying to get them on board and so he has like a naming contest and a sixty two year old nurse submits the name and it was mostly names like the pirates and like just like standard baseball team names right like nothing out of the ordinary the sixty two year old nurse submits bananas and he's like savannah bananas i like it everyone's like no you can't do that he's like he's like and we have he's like we have the the bananas that's our dance team it's a it's a bunch of grandma bananas exactly and then we have male chew the man bananas and he starts coming up with all these ideas about like how he's gonna use this and he ends up like i think he it goes to a design agency did you hear this part like there's a lot of this by the ways from the acquired podcast that did great job with sitting down with him so shout out to our to our friends at acquired podcast but one of things he talked about is like he they were skim on everything right sleeping on the air mattress but he's like the brand is gonna really matter for this and so he goes to an agency they quote him twelve thousand dollars he's like cool me and my wife live off forty dollars a week right now so i don't have i have a thousand i don't definitely don't have twelve of those thousands like i don't really know what i'm gonna do here and so they're like dude we can't do just make us simple logo we'll just do it ourselves he's like no like this is gonna be the logo that we print on everything like i gotta find a way to do this he hands ends up paying for it he gets the logo and he's like so proud of it which is kind of amazing because now you know years later simple days they do like tens of millions like twenty thirty million a year and just merged sales right like the brand is totally taken off is it the same logo i don't know if it's exact same or if they like touched it up but the the core of if it's this the same so anyway he starts doing and and he starts basically coming up with all these different ways to to make baseball less boring right so like what does he actually do so he's like alright he studies at the end to end experience of an event so he's like first of all when you buy the ticket you see the ticket price is whatever eighty dollars but then when you check out it's like ninety eight and because all these fees and taxes or whatever so savannah bananas here's what we do it's a flat twenty five dollar ticket and we pay your taxes so you will it's twenty five dollars and you pay twenty five dollars so that and they pay out millions of dollars a year just paying the the sales tax for their fans which is like kind of amazing but it says something like about what they represent and you know i think their company name is even called like fan first in you know llc a fan first entertainment or something like that and that became the north star he's got this quote where he was like i read that like in order to get big muscles you gotta like you know flex your muscle and work out every day and i needed ideas and so i had this thing where i was like i think he said starting in two thousand sixteen right when the savannah banana got going like i'm gonna write down ten new ideas every single day because it's easy to do five or three a day but once you get to six seven eight nine ten you really have to start working hard and i needed to flex that muscle every day because i needed really good ideas all the time to figure out how to make this great and i think around this time when he's doing me give you the exact quote on that so he goes i started an idea book in twenty sixteen at ten ideas a day a lot of bad ideas seventy eighty percent terrible but you gotta work your idea muscle and by the way this is everybody says the same thing wait go listen to the mister beast podcast we did he's like every day i would wake up and it would come up with twenty thirty forty youtube video ideas he's like i just realized that the idea of what the video is about is the most important thing so i'm gonna think of more ideas i'm gonna open up a dictionary at the source go to a random page whatever word i pick i'm gonna a brainstorm and on the podcast we did with him we pulled up a random more generator and we started pulling up or putting random words and he started coming up with video ideas on the spot he's like i've been doing this since i was twelve dude this is awesome and i think what i didn't realize was around this time when it got going it was a real baseball team so they're they're still playing normal baseball but then he was like okay what all is boring about this he's like can you believe that this is supposed to be an athletic sport and you can walk someone like they just get to like walk like they could walk to base that's ridiculous or he was like he said i brought my stopwatch and i timed how long it took a pitch to like get to you know the picture to like get going and then for a strike or hit to happen and i noticed that the the the batteries can step out of the box ridiculous that took twenty seven seconds every time and like starts like nailing the experience down perfectly because it's sort of like when you own a baseball team you're like oh no it ain't broke we're not gonna fix it like just don't worry about any of that nonsense he was like no no it's all broken everything is broken just figured actually the the more accurate thing is it's broke but that's always that's the way we've always done it exactly it's very drives like ninety percent of the world right now yeah broke it's the way we've always done things so he comes up with all these crazy ideas and didn't realize all of the rules but it was something like file balls caught by fans count as being out walks are or or or the fourth ball is you still have to sprint and i think you can get called out games are and the defense has to they throw the ball amongst all the all the defenders have to basically touch the ball in order in between a walk you know what i mean that's great if you put you're ejected because there's nothing wimp beer than a bun and then he also says games have to be capped at two hours and on that podcast he was like everyone said it had to be two and a half hours it had to be this and was like no but children need to be home at bed by this time and it's gonna be a family event therefore it has to be a strict two hours and he called the whole thing i didn't realize they had a name it's called bin banana and so yeah first it was like now they have that kind of their own format of a game basically and now they're have their own league and all the so it definitely elevated over time but yeah he did he did all those six he also would do things like they he has a team his team would basically i started off with he would watch security footage after the game so he's like oh i could use the cameras in the stadium and i can see when people leave i could see when they get bored i could see when they go to the i can see how long the concessions take and so he started furiously watching security footage to understand the fan experience and now today he has a team that basically they take a snapshot of every all the bleach every like i forgot like what interval like every ten minutes fifteen minutes or something like that in orders so we could see when people get bored when they get disengaged when they leave and he uses that then he reversed years okay what's going on in the game right now and how do i like do that better not to use mister mitsubishi again but he did remember when we were sitting there he was showing us the same thing about his videos he's like here's the retention curve and like see this dip and we're like yeah so what makes a was a little wiggle he's like no no that dip is like three million people stopped watching the video he's like the dip this dip this is horror he's like this is the worst thing in the world is this dip it was like what is that that's the ad read because he's like so we need to make our ad read as entertaining as the content and the takeaway that i had with mister beast then as well as when i have with this guy is you say to yourself when i get big i'll worry about that stuff it's the other way it's the other way around you were you worry about that stuff and then you get big yeah there there's a you you remember like the steve jobs quote about like what his his product strategy basically and he used to say everything had to be insanely great if you've talked to people who worked with steve jobs they say he used to always say this phrase insanely great and normally when people hear insanely great hell yeah i'm gonna do that because they're focused on the word great and nobody can disagree with yeah who doesn't want great i want great you want great we all want great fantastic it's the insane part that's the part nobody wants to do that's the price tag when you go look at the thing it's like are you willing to be like kind of insane about the level of details right steve jobs basically saying we're not shipping the macintosh because the inside casing of the machine is not finished and they're like steve nobody's ever gonna see the inside he's like but we saw it you know like so we're not shipping this until that's finished she's like it's a little insane right you you you're gonna try to do insane things you know when when they're were doing the iphone i remember there's like all these stories about the touch keyboard so they were like steve like we'll put a little keyboard on there like the blackberry and he's like no we're not doing the keyboard they're like well but steve you know blah like you know we could do this digital keyboard but it's not so great and he's like no we need to make it and it needs to be saying the great and they thought like we don't even know if this is technically possible we're not just we're not trying to be lazy here but he's like that's what we're doing so you gotta figure it out that's the job and you know it's the insane part of insanely great that actually matters listen up the old playbook is slowing you down ai broke the funnel loop marketing fixes it it's a new era for marketers ai is capturing search traffic channels are fragmented and generating leads feels less predictable than ever before hubspot loop marketing playbook will guide you through this unprecedented disruption it's the system your marketing teams should use to move faster connect deeper and grow smarter the modern growth playbook for the ai era built by hubspot design for today's marketer get the loop marketing playbook at hubspot dot com slash loop dash marketing to find out more and leave your competition behind alright back to the pod fly had to takeaways from reading about the skype but the that's the first one which is so i i mean i run a business you run businesses and the hard part is whether to be a dictator or like an elected official like do you just tell people this is what we are doing get on board or do you delegate and say let's surface some of the best ideas and we'll kinda of figure out what to do and this guy does not seem like he takes the first row he seems like he has a vision and he says this is what we're doing how wonderful is this let's do it and oftentimes when you have a company i will say ideas and people shit on it and they'll say here's all of the reasons why we can't do it and you know the phrase like look do you just want a yes man or what and i'm like yeah i do i want a yes man i just that's all i i want a yes man and that's what this guy kinda like dude have you heard some of his other stories like there's there's this guy jesse he's got so many like layers and layers of little stories like for example i think at the game i've actually never been to a game but i think at the game they have like the eleven rules and he's like we did he's like what he said we picked eleven because k which is stands for strike out and potassium which is what is in a banana that's the eleventh letter in the alphabet like there's like all these like weird symbolism if i told the employee that they'd be like dude can you just like leave my office it let me like design this logo yeah dude i feel you when you're like you have an idea that's like a little either it's just i can't prove that this is right like nobody can prove it's an un uncomfortable thing or it seems like a little much right and you know may maybe it's maybe it's even something that's serious like maybe we should be focusing on the sirius things and this is like this is extra in some way but you're convinced that later you know you feel like this will be cool if we do it this will be special if we do it will be unique if we do it and the amount of energy that it takes to kinda like bring people on board is so hard that you know what i did i basically changed my criteria of who i hire i realized i could not change myself to turn that switch off and i can't change like the process where i'm like no i will just like magically change people's minds it's like i so i basically changed my criteria for hiring where i you know i i used to have the buffet thing which is like energy intelligence integrity like those are the three things you want and i just added the fourth one which is like are you down and i'm basically like are you just down where if we just have an idea you're down to do it that doesn't mean you say yes to every idea that's not what that means it just means like look sometimes there's no evidence sometimes this is extra sometimes this is unproven sometimes this sounds bad but like we gotta try and have some faith that like we're gonna figure it out as we go like sometimes this sounds way out of our league and we're punching way above our weight but like why not they wait why not try this and so like so and which is you've met ben ben is like the most down guy in the world i don't know if you've met diego but diego the same way where it's like there's probably more skilled people than them about the like certain tasks sure but i know they're down which means i can bring a fragile new idea like a newborn around them and they know how to raise that baby they're not gonna be like what is this right like because those ideas are so fragile that if you know the other people on your team are not down what happens is it's not that they even shoot your ideas down it's that you censor yourself you're like i'm not even gonna bring it up right like there's a part of you sub sure that just doesn't even bring the ideas to the table it doesn't have the conviction to say it because you kinda know where they're at right it's like a friend it's easily offended you're like i'm just not even gonna bring bring this up because i kinda know where this goes it's hard to convince people to do stuff just because so at a company like pretty i mean obviously in tech where you're like show me the data and i'm like there is no data brother it's just soul like alright like it it just feels like the right thing to do and it's hard to convince people to do that and and in fact we should have this guy cole come on the pod and really just talk about management that would be actually quite interesting well how do you was gonna ask you did a pod with the guy from the on what's unreasonable what is it going it's gonna be yeah so it seems gu it's gonna be such a good podcast this guy will he started he was a chef but he was most famous for owning eleven madison avenue which eleven madison avenue yes it's called it was awarded the best restaurant in the world but then he was famous because of two things one he wrote the book on reasonable hospitality and two that book in inspired one of the best episodes from the tv show the bear where the kinda of dummy cousin goes to this restaurant to learn how to be a good restaurant frontier and he starts by like polishing the forks and the next step is like doing the the second lowest job and then the one up one up and they just sweat the details on everything and will was amazing and we had this whole podcast is gonna be out i think in two weeks or so and this whole podcast was about how can tech companies do that and so his story was he started by over hearing a tourist at his restaurant say you know this this trip was amazing i got was famous food but i didn't get to do one thing i just wanted to get a new york street hotdog dog and will the owner overheard that and he ran outside and he bought a three dollar hotdog dog and he chopped it up in a really pretty way and put a pretty garnish and he served it to the tourists and they were like mine blown and he was like that emotion that is what we are doing from now on and so he gave he had a budget at his company at his restaurant to do crazy stuff and so instead of coming in and giving children's cra he would give them an etch a sketch or and he would have like the etch a sketch waiting at the table for them just all these little small details that people normally forget to do and he would just sweat the details on them and that's the idea of upon unreasonable hospitality which is good to go above and beyond your customers which is exactly what savannah bananas is all about our friend george mac has this great phrase which is they only remember your weird and i i love that because you basically what he was what he means by that is look if you just do the expected norms you it's it's like table stakes things you get literally zero credit for that if you don't do them you get docked but if you do them you didn't get any points on the board yet it's still love love right like you have not actually done anything until you've done something weird now weird can be really good it can be just it's has to be out of the ordinary and that's all people will remember about you so whether you're building a personal brand or a product or yours the savannah bananas and you say we pay your sales tax that's weird that's memorable that's something i'm talking about it it was a decision he made ten years ago to do that it is a decision that cost money but how much did it build in goodwill and brand how much did it show not tell that hey we actually give a shit about our fans because every single sports team will say fans are the most important thing we really care about our fans as they gauge the shit out of them right like the actions of the words go in two different directions and just by doing something weird like a statement that was made by let's say like paying the the sales tax for the fan or you know being like hey this you pay this one ticket price and then it's all you can eat concessions when you come in right like doing things that were remarkable worth worthy of mark is is what gets you the credit it's so you're got you only remembered for doing what's weird did you peel put pick anything else up from that guy will the like did it give you an idea of something to do in your totally well he did a couple he said let me tell you two he said one thing that was amazing he said i forgot the exact quote but it was something like every mistake is an amazing opportunity to blow someone away because he was like people will remember the mistake mistake that you make and then they will remember you going above and beyond to fix it but then when he talked about the customer experience i had this idea and we're implementing at this at hampton so at hampton the way it works is you apply to join and three days later we'll review your application and invite you if you on paper if you are in one of our cities and you have the revenue threshold we will send you an email and say you can sign up to interview with one of our folks to see if you're any good or or a good fit and so we have this idea what if everyone who applied on hampton which is dozens and hundreds of people a day sometimes what if within ten minutes we phone call them and say i just saw your application come through here's the process i just wanna let you know we see you and this isn't just some form that no one pays attention to i see you i'm gonna take great care like handle you may not get in but like i'm here and i pay attention and so that's an an an example of what it inspired me to do but the idea that will had that really inspired me with how you train your staff he was like i just have to train my staff like crazy to care about this stuff and he's like basically i'm like a prop where like i have to repeat the same phrases over and over and over and over again to get them to bind to these ideas and so this is where the idea it's so funny you said insanely great that's the exact same thing with unreasonable hospitality he was like everyone likes hospitality right but the unreasonable part is the hard part and so that was actually really cool that was actually really wise of you to catch that insane part that's actually the the brilliance with him it was unreasonable and so this is like the part that we're actually describing here with cole which is like it's easy to say these crazy ideas is actually hard to be wacky enough to like follow through on all of them yeah dan porter who's who's probably our closest friend who does this who's like i actually done this and he did it with it time when he was on the pod last time i don't think he were there but he said a very simple thing he goes if your strategy is something that everybody agrees with it's not a strategy so he's like you nobody's anybody's like you know we're gonna have great customer service he's like cool you and a hundred other companies in your space would all agree that's a good strategy so he's like it's therefore not a strategy at all he's like you have to have something that people would disagree with so he's like example for overtime in the first year we replied i think to a million comments on social he's like that's a strategy that people would disagree with some people would say that's a waste of the time right like people would say like that's not worth and he's like i was doing it myself the founder the ceo like that is a strategy you could disagree with you could say that's stupid that's foolish and he's like it doesn't have to be that it is super it just has to be not something that everybody already agrees is is the thing to do and so you know same thing unreasonable which is like yeah we all agree that we should have great hospitality how many people would agree that we should be listening for when the guy says man i'm my flights out tonight and i haven't tried the new york hotdog dogs because i really wanted one to then be like leave the kitchen go get a hotdog from a street vendor come in break the food code cut it up turn you know serve it on a dish that that's the part that others it wouldn't even think of let alone and and you know definitely wouldn't institutional wise as like part of their core strategy to do things like that and we'll we'll give a really tactical bit that i i would be curious that you're ko opinion the c was founder of savannah bananas i was like okay so walk me through the profitable the profitability of this like it sounds like just like cole is that his name soon as jesse jesse jesse cole jesse cole sorry oh you're oh you're doing the last name thing got it not on purpose i wasn't try to be that cool jesse his name's jesse jesse cool he had two last names or two first names will said something i was like well how much of your money do you spend on this he was like well i basically allocate five percent so if i'm a twenty margin business i'm willing to go down to a fifteen percent margin business i'm gonna use that five percent to do wacky stuff and i anticipate that it will take most companies six to twelve months to make that money back and for it to prove to be profitable and so i'd be curious what this guy says did it take twelve months to become like some of these weird norms that he was trying to create within his organization did it take twelve months for the customers to catch on and for that story to get out to people and then to start coming back via more tickets i mean how do you measure show ship because this guy this guy's pure show and if anyone listens to podcast you know what me and sam we are we appreciate good show and that's what literally this guy is he's like a modern day pt barn so where are they now so they're at like what a hundred million in revenue and they're like i i live in manhattan and they're they're one of their buses drove by yesterday give you a sense of what's going on so yeah the revenues let's call it like our estimate somewhere between seventy million and a hundred million i believe that the company is probably worth five hundred million to a billion they own one hundred percent of it if you just take their low so last year two million people came to their games two million fans so it's it basically doubled went five hundred k one million two million this year should be you know over three million if you just take the lowest possible ticket price they could have twenty five dollars which their normal tickets are thirty five to forty you know but but if you just take the the lowest ticket price twenty five bucks two million that's fifty million in just ticket sales then you have tens of millions in merch they have a three million person waiting list they are now doing a world tour so it's been up till now just like kind of a a north america thing big but they've been you know they went from like these minor leagues stadiums to doing the biggest ballpark in the country i mean in a two day span they did a hundred fifty thousand people watching their games like it's insane what's going on like we talked about savannah two years ago or three years ago it wasn't this and and you know he started this thing i think think he started with the gaston g or whatever like in two thousand and eight or something like that like guess it's been a long time that this guy's been doing this which is why i had an all caps this guy deserves a billion dollars you do you do you do it what he did you deserve a billion dollars it's very inspirational because he definitely has like that everyday guy type of vibe i kinda get emotional like reading about a story i'm like i like i'm i'm on your team i don't care what you do i'm i'm bought to you yeah and then the husband and wife bit is really great like i'm all in on this guy yeah he's amazing my last company the hustle the year we sold i was thirty one years old and we were gonna do about eighteen million dollars in revenue i frankly didn't have a lot of peers i didn't know a lot of people who were ambitious like me and this meant that i was making decisions that could cost me maybe five ten even more millions of dollars worth the money i was making them all by myself this all changed however when i got a group of peers and that's by the way how this podcast sort of started sean was in my group and we met every month it sort of became a personal board of directors and it frankly changed my life and that's why i started my company hampton join hampton dot com the entire idea is that we make core groups just like this just like the one that i had of other entrepreneurs who have been there done that and we give you guys a time and a place to sit down and have these very honest confidential conversations we can share business ideas you could talk about hiring you could talk about all these decisions that you typically have to make all by yourself the biggest risk in my opinion is not failing you're you're gonna be fine your business is probably gonna work it's that in ten years you look back and you think damn i blew it i blew this opportunity because i was making decisions by myself i was making decisions out of fear and i did not grow i did not maximize the opportunity i'm telling you it can save you ten years of headache and of heartache and you could make better decisions so much faster and the best part is that with hampton these core groups that we make we make them in real life in your city we're in atlanta austin boston chicago dallas denver london la miami new york s f toronto and vancouver so if you're running an internet company that does at least three million dollars year revenue or you've raised at least three million dollars in funding or you've sold the for at least ten million dollars go to join hampton dot com this is my company sam from m i review every single person who applies so again join han dot com i have a question though do you think that this is gonna be like wwf e w f where it becomes like a sustained thing where it lasts forever or is this gonna be like a harlem globe charters where like ic the s gets tired i think both i think it is harlem globe otter not wwe but i don't think it needs to end so you know because like i take my kids to all kinds of like we took my kids to monster jam last weekend can you explain monster jam to all of our foreign listeners please this is by the way this is amazing because this is normally the type of thing you're explaining to me oh yeah please do it alright so what is monster jam monster jam is basically the best day ever for any little boy that loves like hot wheels and trucks which is from my count at my son's school like fifty percent of all young boys love cars and trucks and so what you know you're normally at home playing with these like little like two inch hot wheels cars right or maybe a remote control car and then suddenly your parents take you to the oakland coli and you walk in and it's literally a circle of like it's a dirt like that's like a pitcher mound it's just a dirt mound in the middle of the arena there's nothing else there there's not like this it's just one dirt mound and then they have like these characters like the w they have these like eight or ten trucks that will kinda come out and there's na don he's the shark one and all of the kids are doing the shark shark yeah but literally we win the thing for a halloween ones yeah mike son has like a grave digger thing and i mean grave digger like the their undertake so he's like they're like star you know star star thing and they basically the trucks come out and they're you know like like two times the size of a hammer i would say like maybe three times i don't is not it's not that big it's like you know big but not that big and they basically do tricks and trucks like that can only do so many tricks it's like they went on their back wheels they went on their front wheels do do bad snow yeah like they try to do like a flip and then half time they crashed out then the they're like a crew comes out like with fire ex and like toes the truck away and now you know you're not gonna see grave digger for the rest of the show but they have like then they have like guys come out on like dirt bikes and do tricks which are way cooler coolers as well so it's this two hour family event you get your kids you know us like a what's it call like a snow cone popcorn and they get to see crazy trucks and they're sitting there with the ear mu on because it's too loud and then they leave and you buy the merch or you buy them a car and they're like super happy and you're out four hundred dollars okay so that's that's what monster jam is dude a grave grave digger when he goes it rattle your soul that's how loud it is like it's not just a loudness it's a it's a feeling dude that's how life runs on too it's so loud to you the kid you feel it you've it's like a train when it goes by you like you feel the rattle it's amazing and i'm just googling it so i'm just you know it's great as salt but i think it says sells four million tickets a year there's no way is that true yeah i believe that i believe that i mean it there was probably ten thousand people at the event i was at and you know they're doing that they were there for three days and then they go to the next eighty and it's just a traveling circus of monster j mo trucks so i don't see any reason why the traveling circus of of banana can't be a sustained thing so i do think what it is the category is more like harlem globe charters it's a family show you're gonna come you're gonna have a great two or three hours you're gonna be entertained you're gonna laugh you're gonna have the dances it's gonna be some catchy things in your you're gonna remember a few of the characters and then you're gonna go home and like you're not gonna you're not it's not something you're gonna tune into you know three nights a week like the nba that's fine it doesn't need to be that it's an amazing live touring show man so the guy who owns monster jam he also owns the barn bin and bailey circus and he's on forbes as being worth three or four billion dollars who is he his name it's called fe entertainment so fell owns ring brothers barn bailey circus they own the monster jam they own monster energy super cross and they own sesame street live and the owner's name kenneth fell and it's just a huge three thousand person company according to wikipedia yeah unbelievable and this is also stuff that's like super ai proof right like live out of home entertainment it's only gonna go like up you know you what i mean like because people are always crave something that's different than what they have in abundance which is like digital online entertainment and so and you know and then these are these things are scarce like there's not that many and especially if you could do the what wwe done or what you know moshe moshe anderson amazon where you start to like become fans of certain whether it's players teams characters in the show that's you know that's always gonna be you know entertaining anything by the way his father started ring brothers circus and his son kenneth eventually took it over and that's now they're the ones monster just imagine like it's like the family business the family business is like we run monster gen we're we we started the ring brothers circus it's like the dinner table like what's going on it's so much better than what we do can you like or the baseball like i so i i wanna the coal family the owners of savannah banana i'd imagine they have children now i wonder how awesome that is to see your parents do a job like that yeah it's also tough i mean you're on the road like all the time it's live far it's it's messy right you don't get to just like push a button and like we send the we sent the newsletter to three million people like i pushed the button and like the ads are running all night and then the what i ran the hustle we called the send button on like sale through or whatever we said we're gonna click the money button you guys ready we're gonna click the money button click the money button and leave just call the money button because i know every time i hit send there was at one point we're were making like thirty or forty grand a day i was like alright click the money button boom right and this guy does not have a money button he has a a money bus where he has to get in the bus for two weeks yeah exactly yeah it's a little different a lot more money probably than one i made but yeah it's a money boss alright we we ended up spending the whole upset on this van but that's cool i think we just call it that alright is that it is that the pod then yeah i think we should all go and just brainstorm ideas for the craziest marketing things we could do at our business now i think we should all go write down twenty totally out of the box ideas and do that every day for the next sixty days until you have like you know three three ideas that are gonna be like you know attention getting and unreasonable in some way and i here's alright so we did a thing called the the gentleman's agreement by the way where people would click like on our youtube page if they've ever watched more than one video of ours and that was that was the way of paying it forward i have a i have a request sean for our listeners you and i have well this we'll do it we'll do a two part one the first is if you have a connection to jesse cole i want him on the pod we want him on the pod i don't have any connections to him do you no yeah so i would love to get him on the pod if you get if you could help us get him on the pod we will that that's that's you fulfilling the gentleman's agreement and we will thank you but i think we gotta do a second one now with spotify right yes so people don't know this because you know you're busy you have lives and you eat food and you sleep but we doubled on spotify last month spotify is growing like crazy as a podcasting platform and it used to be like five percent of our streams then it became ten percent of our streams fifteen percent it's like twenty five thirty percent of our streams now it is growing it is exploding we added our video to spotify so if you have spotify you can watch the podcast there there's comments there we're replying to comments that we're really investing in spotify we think spotify kind of amazing for this and we would love to grow more on spotify and so if you like to listen to spotify if you listen to music on spotify if you got a spotify account get on there it just type my first million and click follow it's just a follow button it's totally free nothing else but you will have reserved your space in the gentleman's hall fame which we are creating and here's what we'll do the gentleman's all fame i know where that seems is going and i a gentleman all of fame it's gonna in my head when i think of a gentle little bit tall fame it's a little bit different at a bunch of nerds clicking a button on their spotify hurting a gentleman's club you might say gentleman's club it's i i thought it was gonna look a little different that does a bunch of deck beard i can like on spotify but also leave a comment on spotify for this episode and we'll actually reply to all of them so long as it's not like five thousand so as long as it's less than five thousand we'll reply to every single comment even if it's just like what's up oh just say hold on would jesse cole say as long as it's less than five thousand were you listening to the podcast sir what kind of what kind of not not savannah worthy comment was with it's not called reasonable hospitality sam yeah no we're gonna tip to our way in this is me beginning of the pool the pool party this weekend and half an hour in i'm still under the nipple line and i'm just like hey i just take my time okay i just need my time to get in i will get in okay every comment seriously make a comment on spotify because that actually signals i we're testing something we past five thousand just the sam gets the taste this that signals that you're listening on spotify and i think it's gonna to go make us go up in the rankings i think last week or two weeks ago i think we have the thirty fifth or something most popular podcasts in the world on spotify all categories all categories not just business and so we're gonna we're gonna game the system in front of everyone so just comment on spotify and we'll reply alright that's it that's the pod i feel like i could rule where to i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a road travel never looking back alright let's take a quick break because as you know we are on the hubspot podcast network but we're not the only one other podcasts on this network too and maybe you liked them maybe you should check them out one of them that wanna draw your attention to is called nudge by phil ag and whether you're a marketer or a salesperson and you're looking for the small changes you could make the new habits you could do the the small decisions you could make that will make a big difference that's what that podcast is all about check it out it's called nudge and you can get it wherever you get your podcast