The (Improbable) Story of Savannah Bananas' Rise to a $1B Empire

you gotta create attention first if people don't know who you are good luck trying to create something you guys have a multi million person waitlist list for tickets on tiktok you have ten times more followers than the new york yankee ideas are more valuable than anything whatever's is normal do the exact opposite no one comes home and said oh do you hear this thing it's so normal you get excited about remarkable unforgettable you're one of our mount rushmore more type of guys because you're playing the game on extreme hard mode and i respect you for it it's way harder than i thought so we completely ran out of money we had nothing left and then emily turned him me and said we have to sell our house so we sold our house did you have conversations of wanting to quit i mean it was brutal i feel like i could rule the world to know i could be what i going to from at all in in like a day he's all on a road less travel network guys oh my god it's jesse cole what's up how are you guys doing we almost wore the same thing today you should have you should have when there's a lot more going around these days i think i'm keeping them in business when did you start the yellow suit yellow hat what was the day what was the that's the crazy thing people even realize now it was before the bananas that's the wild thing oh yeah man we we had a team talk about first million we had keep gaston so i was i was wearing this before because of pt barn i'm inspired by him not just to be the same same you know regular host like everyone else so do you know what you're getting into at all with this know i listened to your show and i i'm i'm i'm ready i'm ready to rock i love the one with the two you had the owner of the the jazz that was an interesting that was more of a sit down when i was hanging out with him i was telling him a bunch of savannah banana anecdotes i was like you got you gotta do this you gotta do this you gotta get the grandma on the cords where he loves hearing all the other things he should do yeah yeah yeah that's really what he liked cone you probably liked that yeah now it was very well done and very well produced as well you guys did a great job with that thanks man well we're excited to have you here because you are you're one of our like entrepreneurial mount rushmore type of guys because you took some the you know the it's the it's about the gap it's about the gap of going from nothing to something and the way how far you went with nothing to something incredible is is pretty remarkable just to give people a sense i mean i don't know a soul in my life who wanted to go watch exhibition or minor league baseball that was not even a thing and yet you guys have a multi million person waitlist list for tickets you guys have i just looked this morning on tiktok you have ten times more followers than the new york yankee and so just accomplishing that kinda of blows my mind and i want you to come on here and i want you to tell your story and i want you to teach us kinda how you think because i think what you the way you think and how that's been applied to baseball could be applied to many other types of businesses i think that's the real gift you're gonna kinda give the entrepreneurial world yeah we'll fired it up let's that's jab alright so same where should we start start at the start yeah yeah yeah let's spend but we'll we'll we'll keep it a little bit abbreviated because you've you've done a lot of amazing podcasts we've talked about but yeah dude do set some set the context a little bit like ten fifteen years ago where were you yeah well i started as a twenty three year old general manager with the team in gaston north carolina and so it it was college summer baseball it which is a low level of baseball so that that's where i started with this and yeah it was team only had two hundred fans coming to the games two hundred and sixty eight dollars in the bank account i couldn't pay myself for literally three months it was december i i was able to take my first paycheck which i was making twenty seven thousand five hundred dollars so i wasn't making a lot of money regardless but that's that's where i started and so i was learning how to make college summer baseball exciting and entertaining and i did that for years and no one knew anything but we were just experimenting and trying new things and that's really kinda learned the the ideas of making baseball more fun and adding new things to the show why even be there like why weren't you an intern at jp jpmorgan or you know what why is your first job a gm of a summer league baseball team what was the plan never could got a job at jp jpmorgan those was for the record so no i i i i played ball so my whole life was baseball my dad owned a baseball facility i was very fortunate get a a huge scholarship to w college division one school down south carolina so my goal was my professional baseball i was getting you know letters from the met and the pi and the pirates and the brave and i was like this is gonna happen and then i tore my shoulder just like that so everyone's like oh you're gonna go into coach jesse your dad was a coach you're just that's your mindset and i coached for one summer in the cape cod league and i wanted to pull my hair out every day it was the best players like the highest level like these guys were all me first round picks and i was in the dug out of the best seat and i was just bored out of my mind used to go to the cape cod league games and it yeah was the hot dogs were great it was just baseball it was just baseball but it was it was high it was it was all these guys if you look at major league roster all stars a lot of them played in the cape cod league but i was born is it between playing and watching and so was the first time i really you know is walt disney thinks you know put yourself in the customer's shoes i put myself in the spectator shoes and i was like bored and so then i realized that i don't wanna coach anymore and i said well what if i you know got in the front office and tried to make the show and the entertainment and the experience better for fans and that's really where it started and that's when i went to take this job as a twenty three year old general manager of one of the worst meetings in the country isn't their story of disney going to i don't know if it's a park or an amusement park with his daughter he's sitting on a bench and he's kind of just like looking at he's like why don't like i wish this was fun for me and her and not just her for example is isn't there some famous story like that and that's where the origins of disneyland came came out how percent and i've studied well religiously so yes it was a griffith park it was his two daughters saturdays was his day with his daughters and he always took them he had you know daddy day with the daughters and so he took him griffith park and they're on the carousel and he sitting in there and he goes i wish there was a place that adults and kids could have fun together and that's where the literal at mindset said well what if we created a place like that and so i in a weird way was sitting in the dug out the best thing in the house with some of the best players thinking i'm bored on my mind why can't this be fun for more people and so that's where it kinda started the journey as a twenty three year old general manager with no money in the bank account not getting paid on how do you make this or fun and that's really where i fell in love with walt disney and pt barn and started studying wwe and cirque lay saturday night live i became obsessed with learning about entertainment not necessarily learning about the baseball business i wanna learn about the entertainment business katie you tells us the transition from employee to owner and then yeah first thought that was like what was that era i was a general manager for two or three years then i became the managing partner which the owner gave me like i think like a five percent just like equity stake for being a part of it and then it was twenty fourteen so that was she's six seven eight years later that i bought it from him so the team was worth very little made it worth a lot more so went into owner financing debt with him and and bought it for him in twenty fourteen and and he gave me every opportunity i was so fortunate that the owner ken silver just let this kid kinda run with the team and try things and experiment but we end up having success after that first year and so made the team a lot more valuable which is a good win for all of us and it was still like a real like a like a like a normal baseball team like for the first two years right oh oh no well it was no based i mean i i mean we had grandma up beauty pageant our first year i mean we had i started we came up with the garbage can nacho chose like foreigners orders of nacho three cheeseburgers three hot dogs nacho cheese jalapenos doughnuts we call it heart delicious i tried to get a cardiologist to sponsor it but no one was interested so like we started doing create we did a dig to china tonight we literally had hundreds of people go on the field and dig in in the dirt to get a trip to china but when the woman won she realized it was just a one way flight to china no flight back and no accommodations so so so had a lot of flood i mean we fired our mascot for bear growth hormone because h g h was big so we had bg g we we we offered george bush because he just finished his terms president an internship with us with a one thousand dollar s we we did like we were we're gonna get him a host family we're gonna figure it out he turned it down but like we we we just came up with all crazy ideas we were just trying to get attention i was look i was using the pt barn you know book of how do you create attention and so we were trying everything and the other the players we got the players to dance that first year they weren't great dancers and every player turned me down except for four but four dancers did the jump on at dance and they became the most popular players so we we we were dabbling and experimenting in no man's land where literally no one knew we were outside charlotte you're not even the savannah bananas yet you're still the gaston don't yeah yeah yeah i think the ones they'll be heard about i that's really important so they're sort of like the toil and obscurity trying things iterating now let me ask you those ideas that you just said every one of those ideas i'm like oh my god what a genius said that's fantastic and i could totally it makes me laugh yeah i can totally see i could see the press release i could see the news clip i see the tiktok clip now to have ten great ideas you probably had what a thousand ten thousand bad ideas something like that tell me about your practice of generating ideas and what was your kind of system of creativity when he first started you know i learned from so bill v was the famous owner of the saint louis browns the white sox that he was brilliant what they did i mean obviously so many things grand stand managers night he literally let his fans in a major game dictate whether they were gonna bun steal or hit and run he put his coach in the grand stand and know it was unbelievable obviously he came with eddie guy the mid hit and he did so many things he gave away a live lobster to fans during games i mean he was brilliant his book v and wreck made a huge impact on me but i went to his his son's conference mike v another unbelievable pioneer the s saint paul say charleston river dogs had a lot of my early teams i went to his conference i was twenty three and he said my dad always said bill he said if there's a fire you gotta get the most important thing in the house and it's our idea box and so the idea box he said ideas are more valuable than anything and so he actually gave us a wooden box i still have it today and we started coming up with ideas and that as a twenty three year old started come with box i mean they were all a lot of them ridiculous some work some didn't salute underwear night failed flat one night failed you know i mean the har man in gaston county that was gross so i mean we did a lot of things that just didn't work but i started learning about ideas and you know the big premise that i kinda came up with is is whatever's is normal do the exact opposite no one gets excited about normal no one comes home and said do you hear this thing they it's so normal like you get excited about remarkable unforgettable and so it was literally eight years of doing that and when people i i think about the title of the show by first million we never made a million dollars in gaston you know we we started it was a hundred thousand dollars in total revenue of the year i took over the team it was the expenses were two hundred and fifty so we were doubling pretty consistently and getting like two hundred and three hundred and four hundred and five hundred and six hundred and seven hundred and eight hundred but we never got to a million i ran there for eight years wait wait wait let's recap that's pretty remarkable this is remarkable so it took you eight years to get to a million in revenue no we didn't even get two a million in revenue so don't you never got to a million it wasn't until savannah that we actually reached a million dollars in one year and how old were you on the eighth year or you're like what like thirty two so i twenty three yeah so yeah you know it was so when we finally got so get guest estonia and then savannah in twenty fifteen so we had both teams at once so i went to savannah in twenty fifteen twenty sixteen was the first year we reached a million dollars in revenue how many times did like kinda smart well intention friends and family sit you down and be like jesse what are you doing are you doing what's going on i was out i'm my some help do you did a job at the car wash like what what are you doing out there oh everyone have i've come across especially family knows i need help in many many different ways but that they were no they saw i was having fun guys think about this we took over a team that had most nights fifty to a hundred fans and my first year we had nights were getting over a thousand fans or fifteen hundred fans or two thousand fans by our second year we were selling out games like again it was only two thousand three thousand seats stadium but it was unbelievable i was having the time of my life where you make it a profit yeah oh yeah oh yeah i mean we got you know by probably eight hundred eight hundred and fifty thousand of revenue probably cost six hundred so like expenses so it was you know yeah it was a healthy profit you know was for college summer baseball we were killing it are you kidding me was like hey yeah look at what we're doing and you know in the late twenties in gaston a little tiny i was i was happy but every day i got to create new things that's what people wanna realize i got to create things i got to have fun and i got to see every day i got to test those ideas in real time will people show up or will they not will they like this promotion or will they not will it sell tickets or not will they buy this birch or not i got to test every day and henry ford at greenfield village on earth forgot i visited he said henry believed in learning by doing and i'm obsessed i wanna be the fastest learning sports organization in the world and so the more we do the more we learn so that started you know many years in gaston before we went to savannah alright you're hearing how jesse turned one weird idea into a million dollar business but you don't need to invent the ana ball to make money you just need one good idea and the guts to execute on it while the team at hubspot just updated the side hustle database with over one hundred new ways to start making money right now it's got the classic stuff that works but it also has new ai plays other people are sleeping on scan the qr code or click the link in the description to get the ideas right right now now let's get back to the show you mentioned pt barn and disney and how you obsessively studied them what were some of the early stories that inspired you or things that they did that maybe me who hasn't read about pt barn wouldn't know about but that blew your mind well you know with with pt barn it was so much about how do you create attention you know it's show he says without without promotion something terrible happens nothing and so when you when you look at his his books i mean he was just i mean he had vial he had he hired terrible performing musicians violin that were so bad that he put him outside of his museum and so he'd say the only way you can get away from is you have to come inside the museum like he would be like he would just come up with ideas and he would bring people together he was a master promoter he was also a tremendous writer and he was always writing he was always speaking so i kinda took his spot as like he was always a front person you know you gotta have someone that truly believes in what you do and pt barn believed in his museum he said hey some of it's true some of it's not you're gonna come in and you're gonna be entertained and he believed in that and he he went on top i've every mountain talk to yell at so i kinda took that from him it's like alright i was dressed like no everyone else i'm like no i'm gonna get a full tuxedo by the way the first one was black and it had tails and it was ninety five degrees in north carolina summer night and almost melted so i said we're not doing that so i found a yellow one that was brighter and fit the color of the g leaves which was also kinda yellow that's how that started but it was about show pt barnes show how do you create attention with all your acts and then bill v man he was the most fans first owner ever he would sit with the bands in the stands he was an owner he would literally set up and he would he would talk to all the fans every single life he would go v as i made up the term but after every game who go to the bars with the bands just to connect with them you know when he took over the saint louis brands they say what time the game starts he goes what time do you wanted to start like that was his mindset was always what would be best for fans and he did it he did constant giveaways he was first to put names on the back of jersey he had the exploding score with fireworks i mean he was just so far ahead of his time and every other owner hated him because he was doing so much more for fans than they all were and so you combine that with then walt disney's vision and it's kinda of fun to do the impossible and put yourself in the guest shoes those three kinda just set me on a tone of like let's try to combine these worlds and create something pretty special in baseball so all of that is like you dressing the way you dress and doing the thing you do now it's inspiring because the company is i don't know if it's real but the headlines is that it's worth a billion dollars and you're incredibly successful and you're well loved but for the first handful of years did you did you feel like i mean did you feel embarrassed were you you're like i don't know if this is gonna pay off i don't know if it's gonna worth it i'm risking my reputation i look silly right now did that fear come into play because when i hear what you're doing i'm like that makes sense i should do that and also i'd be embarrassed oh thousand percent we we've been criticized every step of the way i've been embarrassed many steps of the way you know our first eight years and nine years in gaston we did everything was myself was my wife we had one or two other team members we put out show tonight signs out around town just to try to convince people hey they have a game please go we did the trash before the game we did the hire and we did the concessions we did operations putting signs up we did everything and it was exhausting and people criticized it's like you're a college summer you know on wednesday night there might be five hundred people there and then when we went to savannah that's when the criticism and the skepticism reached an all time high why then well you had professional baseball for ninety years so you had professional baseball for ninety years and then all of a sudden there's a college summer baseball team coming in they just had the new york met affiliate the year before us and now they wanted a brand new stadium the city said no they weren't gonna invest because no one was coming to the games so all the professional savannah teams were the lowest in league attendance i mean literally somebody's having three hundred people in the ballpark for professional baseball so we came in and we got we're gonna make baseball fun we're gonna do this we're gonna do this we're gonna this they're like sure are we've heard that before kid and yeah we sold two tickets in our first three months and i mean we we were hung up on every day i mean my wife tells she would walk in so we had a a free launch of event where we literally i'm free food free drinks everything she'd walk into little shops stores restaurants and be told get out like literally told we're we're style selling we were offering free hey we just want you to come we're the new team we're here in town we wanna meet the community i mean it was brutal did you have conversations of wanting to quit you couldn't because we were now seven figures in debt you know we had to we had to buy we had to buy the team which was we bought it through the coastal plainly because it was an expansion team and then we also had to put money in the team we had to do the startup we hired people we had nothing so we were in debt and we had all these these young people right out of college a twenty four year old team president as well that we were responsible for and so there were no options of quitting it was just how do we convince these people to believe in us and what i realized is the only way to do that is we had to show them as steve jobs says no one knows what they want until you show it to them we were talking talk and talking that's not good marketing marketing is creating experience and showing people so we had to get to that point you seem like an incredibly optimistic guy and i love that i love your energy and obviously at this point there's a lot to be optimistic about but to the era that we're talking about things were not going well you sell two tickets in three months your seven figures in debt and i'm curious like nobody's optimistic one hundred percent of the times there are moments of either doubt or pain or struggle and like so when i say rock bottom and then they're making the movie about you what's the movie scene where the directors is like okay this is the rock bottom scene it's maybe it's you and your wife for it's you know you at the atm machine looking at the balance you what's rock bottom when i say that well so we got the phone calls four forty five pm january fifteenth twenty sixteen and that was when we were out of money so we completely ran out of money we couldn't cover payroll we had nothing left and so at at that point i moved i think it was like three thousand dollars over that i had in my own account to cover that the rest of the payroll and then we emptied out our savings count put that in to cover us for another a couple of weeks and then emily turned me and said we have to sell our house so he sold their house now people don't own the timing of this is me and emily had just got married ten ten twenty fifteen we got the keys for savannah that same week so within three four months three months we're completely out of money our first year marriage we have nothing left and we have to sell her house we found an old garage that i would like to say was turned into a studio but it really wasn't and it was the gross thing i've ever imagined living in it was the only thing we could afford she got an air bed a twin air bed we realized that we could only grocery your shop with just thirty dollars a week and we couldn't use credit cards anymore because we already maxed out so we were going with a twenty dollar bill and a ten dollar bill in to walmart for forty two meals that was pretty rough that was a tough time we the one sheet kept me i don't know how because i can get into you know i think all i entrepreneurs you know we're we're we're high performers and we think differently but also you can spiral a little bit and i started i'm to but i was like what are we gonna do we like this is bad everybody saying no to us but she's was like jesse we we did this we gotta get to that first game get to the first game get to the first game so she lived me up and we knew we just had to get to that that a bat but the first thing was really named the team because at that point we didn't have name the team so we had to get people to understand who we were and so that was the big thing too and that's when things changed positively and negatively because when we did a name the team contest everyone said be the spirits be the ports be the anchors you know be the brave i was like there's a team in georgia called the brave we're not gonna be the brave guys like it but there was one one person that suggested bananas and i remember we looked each other said yeah go bananas and we thought of the banana bananas senior citizen dance team and the man bananas mailed cheer team and a banana baby that we lift up before the game and a banana band and can't stop appealing we just thought about all those guys we like we have to go it is perfect and then we announced it and we got crucified man we were ripped apart locally i mean it was it was so bad guys i'll never forget the saint patrick's day parade two weeks after we announced and we're wearing green banana shirts and we're getting boo walking through town literally people are booing whether there's baseball p or did they think that you're insulting the town or what in yes embarrassment to the city we were insulting the town how dare you name the team after the silly bananas team i mean it was but naturally we were like sports center like logo of the year and like it was like actually like yes because you know they didn't to take the pride and savannah they're like this is fun this is gimmicky this is cool locally it was bad but at least people knew who we are and i believe attention beats marketing one thousand percent of the time you gotta create attention first if people don't know who you are good luck trying to create something and so they at least knew who we are and then when we're like oh yeah every single ticket all inclusive they're like what i go yeah every ticket your burgers hot dogs chicken sandwich is soda to water popcorn dessert all my long no ticket fees no convenient fees fifteen dollars who were like what and then they were like and then they started kind of paying attention that we're gonna try to make everything fans first here's where our players are gonna do we have a banana band here's our senior citizen dance team the banana and then like alright this is a little different and i think people were expecting us to fail so we sold that opening night they all came out and they wanted to see it and then people had to wait three hours for food because we didn't know we're gonna go through ten thousand pieces of meat in an hour we have no idea how to do that for the record but they watched the show they watched the fund they watched the banana baby and the band and the players dance and that's when they started telling everybody and that's really when it changed after that first night i watched to like maybe ten or twenty interviews of you now and we've talked about you a bunch of the podcast and i've noticed that you do a few things consistently and one of them you've done here already a bunch of times you've already named henry ford bill vet walt disney you talk about steve jobs all the time you name at pt barn you name drop all the time and am i taking i guess i'm reading into that where do you go out and try to find inspiration and then do you find like a couple lines and books and you're like that's it that's what we have to do or because i've learned you you you i don't think you've ever explicitly talked about your creative process other than i think you said that you make a list of ten new ideas every single day yep and then i've also noticed that you have these like frameworks where you say like walt disney said this and it's as if to be like read this buyer if you saw that one line you're like i live my life according to that now could you talk a little bit about that because that's kind of fascinating yeah well walt disney said curiosity keeps leading us down new pass and we'll keep trying things and experimenting and it's it's it's my curiosity so yeah i'll go very deep on subjects you know i think there's a track yes i do ten ideas a day yes i journal every day but it's the the reading i get fascinated by so when i start about walt disney read one book then a again you guides me to another then it guides me another book then it guides me know like i'm looking across right now i have an entire books shelf of all every book on walt disney and disney world like it's i don't know hundred books maybe and then i have a whole section on pt barn and then i have an entire shelf on amazon then i have an entire shelf on steve jobs then i have shelves on like espn i have every book on taylor swift she's fascinating what she's doing marvel you know a grateful dead you know all these different worlds because the there's is there's a blueprint on how to create something truly special a world of entertainment that's different than anyone else but in sports you know i would say you obviously wwe usc f one they're thinking differently but in most traditional sports it's the same thing you're you're competing to win and we're our game is compete to create fans and how do we entertain and so i'm i wanna to learn from the greatest entertainer in the world so my framework because i'll just go very very very deep and then what i do is i mark every single page and i know exactly where when i ear mark page what i'm looking for i've done book reports i've done numerous book reports like bill last tell me about a book report like what what's the book report yeah so we did this as a team so for many years in the beginning we actually paid our our people to read so we pay them to do book reports so we're we're obsessed with learning as part of our organization so we did that for many years now we do kinda team books that we read as as a group but yeah a book report all go through and just kinda the biggest takeaways the biggest things that lead to fans first ideas parallels david novak the former ceo of young brands he had a very good compliment to me i didn't know what it meant when he said it at first but he's like you're one of the greatest parallel thinkers i've ever seen i go thank you david what does that mean and he goes well he goes literally what what you you can see something and then you can make it your own in a parallel path and so like when i see something from grateful dead about what they did as far as you know they brought they brought the sound in house they try to bring the tickets in house they tried to they let all their fans record all of that then dave matthews followed suit i i can see that and then followed in our way so that's you know again no real method it's just you i wanna look at examples of the best in the world so like jimmy donaldson you know he was with us mister beast and so like i've read everything on him but we spend a lot time talking together because he's the best in the world at youtube so i try to ask all those questions i think that's just you follow your curiosity what'd you steal from jimmy well the big the biggest thing i i was fascinated with him was the youtube growth on how he looks outside of the country seventy percent of his views come from outside the us and so you better believe that we immediately we're hiring you know spanish speaking broadcasters we're gonna hire japanese speaking broadcasters we're gonna start having our games and social go all over the world we continue to grow there so that was the one thing i was like what in youtube can we do right now to grow an audience and creative fans and he shared what he's doing with his audience and dub and that was fascinating we did a episode jimmy and we he talked about the same sort of ten ideas a day so he was like you know i started this when i was eleven or twelve years old and he said kinda your same story he there's a great quote he it goes at twelve years old nobody watched thirteen years old nobody watched fourteen years old nobody watched fifteen years old nobody watched sixteen years old does anybody ever gonna watch nope seventeen old nobody's still watching and he's like finally when i was nineteen i started to get some viewers and even then it was small right so he had this kind of six years of toil and obscurity seven years where it just did wasn't working but he was getting better and he talked about how he used to do the kind of ten twenty he's like the most important thing in a youtube video is the idea the premise of the video so i came up with ten to twenty ideas a day he's like i would flip up at a dictionary at the source we had him do it live on the podcast we put a random word generator and he came up with ideas live on the thing and you could tell you you'd built that muscle so i'm curious like you say this thing about the ten ideas a day is that like you used to do that early on or are you still doing that or there's a sticky note on your desk right now like ten ideas you wrote this morning i did two groups of ideas no i have ear yeah i get please get it no so here is here's the idea so i have one every single year so what's that say of the cover what it just says twenty twenty five ideas been animal so i just have i have these books all the time and so yeah today i always obsessed so i'm working on our our two two of our newer teams so i'm working on the indianapolis clowns which we brought back one of the most famous knee teams and so yeah it's all the clowns characters dynamic con is bat boy the juggling talker juggling ball boy an empire that's a mime tram coaches strong men a balloon artist ring master slash barker human cannibal a character artist so like just and it starts listings like start thinking about ideas on how i wanna i wanna zoom in you do this first thing or you take meetings first or what what's your kind of process there are you like you have to routine you use sure hal a rod helped me tremendously so his book miracle morning was a game changer for me in twenty fifteen i read that you know i realized that most people they they don't start their day on purpose they start their day with other people's news social media other things going on and so when the morning when the day became a huge so twenty fifteen i actually ran into him as speaking appearance i showed him my first notebook or in twenty fifteen where i started writing in journal and so yeah i have to win the morning i have three kids you know under seven years old so i got it very early and i start i read because your input affects your output so i wanna read something that i'm read reread amazon bound right now just a the story of how bezos was continued to grow them and then literally i start writing journal than one of my ideas often i have an idea bucket at the day before so i i can already start thinking about a little bit before i go to sleep and then i start that idea bucket the next day did you're an animal you you're an animal but yeah i love it though it doesn't feel like it's it's it's never felt like work there's certain things that if you really love like ideas if i come up a good ideas or ideas that are exciting to me like i'm fired up the rest of the day i have great energy it's so it's like you gotta create before you consume i we consume when we read all these things and i'm gonna criticize we get create all these different things but it's like if i can create first and that's i mean we just today literally as we record this we just launched our first ever fans first ticket marketplace so secondary market right now we're getting killed people are spending four or five six seven hundred thousand dollars for tickets and often they're getting scammed we built our own one face value no markup no fees we just announced that thirty minutes ago like that fires me up because i'm gonna learn we're gonna get it out there we're gonna start experimenting like you get to do new things that's what walt is you get to try new things constantly and i love that i feel like the now the sort of you've hit escape velocity and people now recognize oh wait this is something special and you have a lot of momentum going and i'm sure whether it's speaking fees or like speaking gigs or just meeting interesting people throughout doing what you're doing you've now gotten into some pretty interesting rooms like you've you know you've mentioned reading jeff bezos you'll meet jeff bezos if you haven't already i these things will happen because i think everybody can take inspiration from a a brand builder and a fan first customer first not mindset that's like not just words but actually put into action in all these really interesting ways who have you met in this that that kind of was like a wow moment for you or or and and i'm curious what do they wanna learn from you what do they pull from you because i think you know it doesn't matter how sort of successfully we are on in one industry i think there's a lot they can learn from you well i appreciate that but you you know whenever i get a call with one of these people i'm picking their brain like crazy and asking questions but yeah just a question tug of war yeah it usually is you know it it's it's funny the the facetime and the videos and the calls that i get now and but you know one that stood up for me was bob ig a couple months ago and you know i have so much respect for what he did and to continue to make creative the the heartbeat of disney you know i think it it loses it's sometimes that ebb and flows with the creative and after the walt was gone for twenty thirty years they were figuring out then michael e and frank wells came in and went crazy and then i kept it going joel a whole another level and now again trying to re bring back that that was a thirty minute conversation i walked out fired up so you know what i mean there's it's a wide you know from you know the heads of wwe and some wwe wrestlers to actors to actresses to a lot of musicians now i'm hearing from a lot of musicians you know big time football players and you know athletes but you know i i think my biggest thing is i always just wanna host them come out to our show you know you you learn by seeing watch how we literally start entertaining seven hours before the game watch how we stay two hours after they game and continue entertaining like that's what taylor swift she's like i'm gonna do three hour and forty five minutes set which is crazy because i wanna over deliver and so we look to over deliver with everything and so you know i i enjoy hosting people more at our shows and getting to meet them and share with them the behind the scenes that's where i get a lot of joy when i hear you talk i think i would never wanna compete against this person and we've and and we've had a bunch of people like that i think jimmy was one of them where you're like oh this guy just like he's gonna he's gonna die or win i mean there's there's the you know you're going get a crazy person you don't seem motivated by money you don't seem particularly competitive with the outside world you must have a chip on your shoulder and what caused it and what's and what's kind of forcing you to keep on moving forward yeah name that chip i certainly have a chip on a shoulder and i think but that's not what i'm i mean yeah chip on my shoulder you know i was only child you know i i always wanted to make my dad proud that that was kind of a big thing for me i wanna make my dad proud he worked really hard it's spent a lot hours working and i always wanted to do well for him but then i didn't get drafted toward my shoulder i think often i've been you know misunderstood it's probably the way bezos would expire like misunderstood and you know we've got criticism every step of the way you know in gaston what are we doing here in savannah you know out dare you bring college summer baseball out dare you need the team the bananas how dare you'll leave traditional baseball to create this silly sport called banana ball you know it it happens all the time the one that really fires me up now that i have a folder saved it's a fad it'll be gone their fifteen minutes are up i have every one of those saved and i will never say anything back to them except so when some people when they get really going gonna get just write thanks for the inspiration because it actually it and i mean that sincerely you know those the and ones and all the groups that have kind of come along and disappeared i get fired up of that because because we are completely misunderstood people think we are the harlem globe charters we're building a sport there will be a world where the kids first ball they pick up is a yellow banana there will be a world where banana ball is played all over the world because of the entertainment level because it's not just about people who love the sport they love the fun they love the show plus they love the crazy talent that these guys can do with back catches and trick plays and the celebrations they love health they sit in the upper deck we're gonna come up there and we're gonna give them flowers and we're gonna throw giveaways we're gonna put on a show no matter where they're sitting even if they're the furthest seat away and so i get excited for that money you know again ten years ago where we we had nothing and so now yes we're very fortunate with the businesses but nah i chase moments like the certain moments you know our first game at fe park i was a kid to grow up with a goal to play a fe park up south of boston and we had the largest crowd of the year there and we're all singing the moment yellow which is a powerful moment you've probably seen the videos yeah everyone's with their flashlight the whole stadium is singing yellow and i'm on the field and saying look at what we get to do together or a first football stadium with eighty one thousand fans we're putting on a halftime times show with two hundred and fifty people in the middle of the game which should never happen and i'm jumping up and down because i'm feeling it you know when we're gonna do a hundred thousand seats stadium where we're gonna do a cruise where you know all these playing aircraft aircraft carriers all these things play games at beaches those moments fire me up because you get to feel a part of something that and you get to feel alive you know i think i wanna feel alive and i'm sure you guys get that feeling too with certain things it's not the money it's it's these moments that you know really light me up you're sort like this joyful version of dana white or vince mc man you know like i think dana literally said the same thing in a in a press conference he like he's like i'm in but we're in the business of moments and he goes we sell good moments and then sometimes we sell a holy shit moments and tonight it was a holy shit he's talking about a big knockout that happened it we're a similar mindset you know i've got to work a little bit with those guys haven't connected directly with him yet but i mean yeah he creates these moments that you never imagined i love he's just sort of like rage fueled more so than you're like i wanna create this amazing family fun you know you know but that but i think that's a part of the nature of fighting versus you know baseball yeah today's episode is brought you by hubspot did you know that most businesses only use twenty percent of their data that's like reading a book but then tearing out four of the pages point is you miss a lot and unless you're using hubspot the customer platform that gives you access to the data you need to grow your business the insights that are trapped in emails call logs transcripts all that unstructured data makes all the difference because when you know more you grow more and so if you wanna read the whole book instead of just reading part of it visit hubspot dot com when you sit when you step back get how do you sort of sort of figure out the good ideas versus the bad it's easy to come up with ten ideas a day it's easy to sort of think of these things again hindsight but you know when you say the ticket price is twenty five dollars there's no ticket fees we sort of round off the change that's cute when you're selling two hundred tickets now you're selling i think i do the math is like this is like tens of millions of dollars you're eating in cost by eating the ticket fees or revenue left on the table depending on how you wanted to look at it a bit of yeah and you know i'm sure there's a you know someone over there with a spreadsheet who's like jesse this is not can we not do that anymore like can we charge for hot dogs because you know this they know better an organization at this point but yes it's well like i guess what are your principles so one thing you've talked about is like fan first and i think if you asked if i go to a hundred businesses around here i said were you are you a customer first business they would also of course course customer matters but then you go look at their actions and they're totally out of line with with customer first and so like what are the different principles you have or the things you find yourself repeating over and over again that's sort of or when a new person comes in they really have to like almost break their brain and rebuild it to work the way you guys wanna work and come up with the ideas you guys wanna come we we started simply by naming our company fans first entertainment so that was the start so by naming the team fans first entertainment it made it very clear who we are who we work for you know we said our beginning our mission fans first to entertain always like that's what we do as we've grown we've developed a little bit more of our core beliefs in our fans first principles which we talk about all the time so like how we hire who we are is i try to keep things very simple always be so it's alphabet always be caring different enthusiastic fun growing and hungry so like that is who we are and so even we hire people essay how do they fit those core beliefs and then we have show us your future resume because we're not really interested in what you've done in the past we wanna know what you wanna do in the future and how do you fit if you say you wanna stay the same position for the next five years you're probably not growing and hungry so we can find that out then a few years ago we developed our fans first principles i inspired a little bit by bezos in his fourteen leadership principles we developed eleven and eleven is a very big number in in banana land so the eleventh letter of the alphabet is k and the symbol for potassium is is k so we use eleven a lot i know it sounds like kinda silly but the reality is we realized this all started because of a banana and if you think about walt disney they were out of business bankrupt and he said it all started because of a mouse and they had leo they had a lucky oswald old rabbit was stolen from them he had nothing and then he came up with mortem her mouse wife corrected him and said let's do mickey and that kinda of changed everything so for us to started with banana so we have eleven fans first principles we have eleven rules of an banana we do our countdown from eleven eleven is a very big part of us and so yeah it starts we're fan about the fan we entertain always play the long game whatever's is normal do the exact opposite so again i don't want anyone never gets excited about normal ideas are everything as we talked about that is kinda how it starting point everything constantly curious we're always gonna learn from the best and the outside the industry not in our industry outside everything speaks that's a walt disney one you know if you lose the detail you lose it all and so we're obsessed with the details fewer things done better so we eliminate all of our sponsorship in twenty twenty which we limit all of our events and we focus solely on banana ball because we wanted what can you be the best in the world at we believe we can create the greatest show in sports and so we went obsessed with that relentlessly resourceful when we moved into our new office don't people know this but i made a trade i got all of the furniture traded for free i i sold my soul a little bit i i think i gave two or three speeches but we get all of it for free and so that was very important it was hundreds of thousands of dollars and so little mindset uphold the highest standards that's very it's the highest not high because everyone has a different version of their high standards and then finally always plus the experience and so lowe's guide us we talk about them every tuesday and snapchat we have people give examples of how we're doing that and then when we have really big moments we share again a big example so everyone knows how we do that so i'm i'm cycling analyzing you a little bit because i've just i i admire you so much and i wanna like steal little pieces of like the way the the way you operate you're doing something that we talked about sean when we talked about mtv and how they sort of like said this is the world that we are building so they basically like what you're what you're doing is you're just saying i'm creating a world i'm world building i'm not necessarily empire building you're you're creating this world with its own rules and i think where a lot of entrepreneurs myself included fall short is you say like your values and you're like well i'm just kinda going into the motions of getting it done and if i ask you what your values were sometimes you wouldn't even remember what they are okay or they would just you know do it because they they have to you you you do this really good job of creating these rules and processes that you actually abide abide by and some of them sound incredibly silly like you know you'd have i'd like you have all these phrases like you had the one city world tour i think your first world tour it was just in georgia or making georgia there's there's meaning behind that in the whole thing there's meaning behind that which i get to too later but the point is is that there there's meeting there's meaning to there's intention and meaning to everything and i think a lot of entrepreneurs they don't have to courage to say this is the world that i'm building and here's the rules and laws of the world that i'm building and i'm gonna stick to them and i might some of them might sound silly like wearing a you tuxedo all the time but there's a reason for them but if i live it according to the rules it's gonna actually become a thing did you always have that in you or is this like something where like you learn like man if i just say it at enough times i'll start to believe it and it'll start coming true like walk we walk walk us through that no i guess if you're sure it's you're your average of the five people you surround yourself with my five people have been you know walt disney steve jobs jeff bezos and so and i mean that not arrogant i have read and learned more of what they think and that's around me and so walt disney was a world builder and yeah you better believe we will build a banana land the first ever sports and entertainment theme land and you better believe every single team that we build we build with that point of view in mind i mean if you don't think we just built the local beach coconut and we're not gonna build the local beach you're crazy and so and if you don't think we we we built the indianapolis clowns with a homage to the history the nineteen forties and fifties to build that land up like all of this has a bigger picture so i just surrounded myself with that and and i think you know it it it fires me up and there's certain principles like i wanna go back to the one city world tour start small dream big one city world tour we still call it a world tour we've got numerous opportunities to play internationally we've turned it all down but we call it a world tour because that is where we are going that is our vision that is what we believe and so we're gonna continue to call and then we will pretty soon start doing international but everything we do the cruise for the first time a football stadium for the first time is a one city dream big we did a few football standards that we're doing ten we're doing multiple nights at the super omen and the patriot patriots stadium and literally we're doing kyle field the neil and stadium with over a hundred thousand fans that was a one city test and now we're we're expanding it so yeah i'd ever thought of the world builder but i love it when you can create everything and control everything what people don't realize control is such a big part of this most people give up control and when you give up control you lose more fans than you realize we do our own we built our own ticket system now we built our own secondary system we do all the merchandise in house everything from ours we do our logistics in house we do the entertainment in house we do our broadcast in house which leaves millions of dollars on the table because we're doing it all in youtube and so like when you do it all in house you afford yourself the opportunity to learn and to fail but also to connect closer with your fans because you can see directly how they're responding and on outsourcing your core competency and so that's part of this world i think is you know walt disney you wanna control everything when people came into his theme park and you know he couldn't control a movie theater when you go into movie theater could be dirty it could be gross who's serving you sticky the food all that the lighting all that but he can control disneyland and i think about that often did you raise money for this or do you do you control a hundred percent of this business what's the what does the business side look like yeah well we we went into a lot of debt we took in the opening debt and it was just my wife and i and we paid that off very quickly fortunately after our first two years we were you know selling out games is good for the business model and especially the more fans you sell out it it helps and then the merchandise has been bigger than anybody's ever imagined so yeah now we've we get offers daily probably at this point in emails but we've turned them all away because they're they're interested in you know return and they're interested in you know some controlling aspects and you know i i have no interest in return if if if a shareholders would say start charging taxes start doing shipping fees start having more sponsorship take the huge tv partnerships there'd be easy probably fifty to a hundred million just like that and that'd be a no brainer for investor but that doesn't interest me so yeah we my wife and i own it a hundred percent and we don't plan to change that ever do you on your weekly leadership meetings or whatever you guys have do you pay attention to the finances at all or do you just say like revenue is a scorecard if for doing things right that's all i care about make sure have enough money in the bank to go do what i you focus on the metrics that matter most of your customers that's what i pay most attention to so you better believe that i pay attention to the speed of every game i pay attention to how long the merchandise lines are at every game i pay attention to how many trick plays are well what how many bowl for sprints do you really do you have a metric for like wait times off what's the wait time right now it depends on the stadium that's the biggest challenge so right now we're at a really if we go to a yankee stadium or fe way park or a football stadium depending on the size and the setup so we invested this past year another experiment jared and our president was brilliant in this he said we're gonna set up an outdoor mall so we bought a monster tent and that was a test at yankee stadium and that changed everything our per cap went up so we had to find the space to do that and we did the same thing in seattle we're planning there so it depends if you're indoors if you're in stadium we have a we can only have a small tent it's really bad my goal is to get everyone within ten minutes we're not close to it right now but the same thing at serving all you can eat food right now in savannah everyone can get fed within five minutes the first few nights it was an hour so like we'll get there but those are the metrics that i've focused on so to answer your question about money i get i have one meeting a year it's coming up and it's about an hour or two and our finance director and jared bill share us what we're looking at and me and emily just said alright great where are we reinvest and what data white said too i think dana i heard him say he's like i i meet with the cfo occasionally but i just you know i don't really care it's it is what it is and and again we're very healthy and all the estimates that people have are dramatically low on where we are like it is it we are very very healthy i know that i pay attention to right now we're going you know obviously you go to christmas holidays so how many fans are we serving merchandise how quickly are we serving how quickly are we getting it out we have a huge hundred thousand plus square foot warehouse that we have now and our team is like get out get out get out how quickly can we serve them that's the things so i'll know exactly how many people we serve when we do a twenty four hour shirt you know we're we we go through thirty thousand orders in twenty four hours like i know the metric this year versus last year and how do we continue to grow that because that means we're creating a better product and a better experience and have more fans social media i all that as well have you ever heard the founder of airbnb talk about twelve star experience you know love brian cha he's one i i would love to met me too i've taken a lot of inspiration from him yeah like the helicopter the fire the the fireworks going off the red carpet yeah you we'll we'll we'll connect you with him but one of the things that one of the things you reminded me of was there's a anecdote about you pointed the cameras at the game yeah at the stadium at the fans instead of at the game because you were like i wanna watch from the security camera when people get bored and when they leave is this true as you wanted to basically like study the fan experience and try to understand like what where are the lull where are the dips almost like a like how jimmy i would look at his youtube video retention chart and say oh seven minutes there's a dip what do we do at seven minutes oh that's when we did our ad we need to make those more entertaining because we can't we can't lose people during that time yeah obsessed with that yeah well people don't know that's when i'm on the field and again i'm on the field in front of the dug out with our players we're always out there i'm constantly turning around and watching the fans and watching the reactions and our my our director of entertainment who we've worked cutting now for five years it's so unbelievable because we can look at each other and all of a sudden and say alright energy music energy music now because we can know when the energy is down we can look at each other it's just a feel and it's it's really special but yeah it was jeez many years ago and when we were looking at this debate to go to banana and i realized that hey fans were leaving games early and i said we need to document this and so yeah we it was actually it was one of our staff members one of our our our usher we adam take pictures in video every thirty minutes starting five thirty six six thirty seven seven thirty eight eight thirty nine and we realized at nine o'clock at the first influx of people left nine fifteen a lot more nine thirty more and so i was like we gotta do a two hour time limit and no one said they wanted a two hour time limit the games at that point and major league baseball three hours and twelve minutes even when i shared internally our team was like jesse two and a half is probably fair i mean that's still dramatic i go no you want people to want more there's a difference yeah a great comedian you want more at the end a great concert you want the encore i go in baseball everyone's like i've had enough i was like we gotta create a product that people always want more and so that's what that helped us determine the two hour time limit and you know that's how we look at everything so me and tyler the c of high came up with a little challenge for you it's the newsletter challenge now if you know me you know that i'm a big fan of newsletter i got my own newsletter i also had a business that was a newsletter business that was amazing i wrote this newsletter about crypto we grew it to million subscribers and we ended up selling it after year for millions of dollars and i want you to be able to do the same thing in your business so we're doing a challenge ten grand is on the line plus me and tyler will should be in your corner as growth advisors you would just need to go to b hyped dot com slash m m and you either start a new newsletter or you move your current newsletter over there and i finalist will get picked pitch me and tyler sort like shark tank and the winner gets ten grand so go to bee dot com slash m m that's b dot com slash m m to enter the challenge today how many hq staff do do you have now i i wish i wish i had the answer for you i'll give you an idea of what it looks like on the road so if we go to a major league stadium or football stadium we'd we travel with two hundred plus people if we have a minor stadium it's a hundred and fifty people and so we have three tours we have six teams so we're traveling with five hundred plus people then we hire between one hundred to three hundred at each stadium as part time staff to help with merge tickets logistics etcetera and then we have our team in savannah so and then we have a cast i mean it's it's hundreds you know some are equivalent some are full time but yeah we're hiring every week there's new people joining our and i read that you had the business and you were like we're gonna get the social media and i think it was like i don't really know what i'm doing but like k you you know my coworker just start go and figure this out is that true and were you successful in just getting like young and experience people and inspiring them and that worked out and has that worked out better than hiring more the the more of the experienced people we have very few from now so i say eighty eighty percent have ben started as interns you know and i i was in intern for a little bit my wife was an intern we believe in that you learn you learn from seeing how people doing this kinda of culture and so yeah social media again first insight can't stop the appealing two thousand sixteen we create a music video to it and justin timberlake we made cancel the appealing it was a very rudimentary video but i watched i remember watching it put it on facebook i was like ten thousand views twenty thousand views thirty thousand views you got like a hundred thousand views i was like whoa people like this and i was like let's do more of this and again so once tiktok came around in twenty twenty when we started paying attention yeah whenever enters i said just post every single day she goes what do i post i go i don't know but make baseball fun if it said if it's make baseball fun if it fits that overall brand do it and we learn and then nothing happened the first few weeks then we had one that hit i was like alright our it's our players what are our players doing okay now let's do this with players how about a music other our players how about this and just kept iterate iterating we posted every single day from twenty twenty and so that's literally how we learned and you think about our second team the party animals they have more followers than every major league baseball team on tiktok because we started with them you know in twenty twenty two or so and so yeah everything is just you can't be afraid of failing i mean every night we do ten to fifteen promotions we've never done in front of a live crap game skit ideas every single night we have our scripts and you know it's different colors to show the new things we haven't done before yeah that that's where you learn and so like we're not afraid of failing because we're just gonna keep trying new things and our fans will give us the benefit of it out because they know hey we're together they're gonna try some new next and they're gonna keep trying somebody told me you guys treat this almost like saturday live like you have the the pitch meeting the way saturn on life has this kinda weekly schedule where the pitch and then they they then they script and then they rehearsed then they sort of edit from there like is that what you guys do so you you you solve first year problems the fans so every at the the the starting point of everything is what are the friction points from your fan point of view and then you can do it from your organization's point of view so the friction from the point of from the fans too long too slow too boring you get nickel and dime all that stuff so we just kinda went from there and to create that then from the internals was like okay creative it's hard it's hard to come up with creative ideas all the i mean i know these idea books it's hard and so we said alright well who's been sustaining creativity at a very high level for a very long time and doing new shows constantly sat alive you better believe i bought every book on saturday alive and then i realized guys there's a documentary on a a week behind the scenes this saturday alive but i think james franco i was like guys we have to watch this so our creative team was a small team and i was like we like alright coming monday and then they pitch the ideas of john malcolm mitch it was the host that way they pitched to john then they pitched a warn then they start writing then they have an idea session then they have a table read then they start getting the props and then they do it and then they do a show at eight o'clock in front of a live audience and they watch what hits with the live audience what doesn't they put the new ones in into eleven thirty and cut everything else out it's like guys were the same thing like let's just do that and so we started we built it it's tuesdays because mondays our travel day so tuesdays is our ot t session over the top ideas everyone comes with ideas so we actually have a form that you gotta fill just naming it over the top yeah hundred percent so yeah over the top and so form gonna fill up by midnight so we have all the ideas whether it's a walk up whether it's a celebration whether it's either to something in the crowd whatever that is and then if there's a video or a full description and then our meeting starts at ten o'clock we review all those then we have a a smaller group meeting at eleven o'clock then the players share some of their ideas broadcast share some of their ideas and by four o'clock on tuesday we have a table read where we go over what's gonna be in the script then we start getting the props the creative then we do rehearsal when in the in savannah then we do rehearsal in the city then we do rehearsal in front of our vip are very important bananas which is our special vip group and so we get to watch them how did they react are they taking video are they into it or not and then we put it into the show and that's repeated with every one of our views this business sounds so hard to run you have i mean so you have that you have just the production of the and snl you know just so you have your per personnel issues you're gonna have some personality clashes you're gonna have like pay paying them and keeping everyone in line yeah and then getting funny step out the door then you have merch i think merch makes up half or forty percent or something of your revenue which is hundreds of millions of dollars you have supply chain issues then you're traveling with hundreds of people then you're doing social media i mean this is an incredibly complicated business you're playing the game on extreme hard mode and i respect you it's way harder than i thought what are you david i'm like oh my gosh there's so much and then you just have like normal company operations the principle is don't do the same show ever again every oh has to be brand new and yes the logistics are impossible we hired somewhere in the military to out us and and like because we've got trucks all over the country multiple trucks when were going to a football statement with a hundred thousand people we need twelve to fourteen trucks but then we also have two other games another part of the that we need separate merchandise and the teams are playing each other different times so we're bringing all the merchandise and all the show and all the props to go there and then we're flying everyone around the country getting them in it's crazy and and they mess us out look if you move your head so move your head like this it looks like you have two books behind you i think you wrote two books right does jesse cold yeah oh my god okay so jesse cole has three books and then i also read online then you a bit hulu documentary and i think you have another one somewhere else yeah and then i think i read somewhere online that i i think you said you don't take a salary or you're one of the lowest paid people and that you live off of your speaking fees okay so jesse it has a book three books documentaries speaking fee i did this mod of a business that is incredibly complicated what price are you paying to do all this it's a good question and i think it's the right question i i believe in doing what gives you energy i'm very very fortunate that what i do gives me energy when i first started in gaston and i was doing everything operations hiring you name it i was worn out now like speaking or being with you guys right now this fires me up i love creating i love sharing i love growing so when i can go speak you know that that that's an energy give and so you know i think our family we homeschool school now you know we have three kids we homeschool we travel i i think you know i do daddy daughter dates and burger boys and my son and i i focus on that but i can always be better in that area i'm obsessed i'm obsessed with it i love it it brings me so much joy and i stay really focused even though it sounds like there's lots of things i'm focused on trying to create the greatest fan experience in sports and the greatest show in sports every day and if i'm speaking i'm sharing about it if i'm a podcast i'm sharing about it or in the morning i'm working my team on creating so it's really it sounds widespread but it's all focused on doing something very very narrow what's your talent strategy so are you like oh we use recruiters and then they come in for interviews or is it like you look in the tiktok comments and you find people like what what what does jesse doing to source some of these like diamonds that that that end up being there this is the crazy one guys so like yes i'm very grateful that we have four point two million people on our you know waitlist to get tickets or whatever there's twelve thousand seven hundred on our waitlist list to work with us and so we have we have a waitlist list so it's what i believe is is attracting over recruiting if you're very vocal on who you are and what you stand for you often attract people and i track people i never imagine we'd d attract that i mean even you guys i was listening to you guys before we even knew each like again i i i'm so grateful for that and so yes and we do i'm working with cirque away right now on bringing on some cast at a higher level because you better believe the indianapolis clowns it's gonna be the greatest show people have ever seen it's gonna we're gonna take that to a whole another level so i i'm working with some of the you know work with wwe and u on some stuff you know people that are great but a lot of it is just attracting young hungry talent that believe in us and believe in what we're doing and they'll give their hearts to it and they're very very special i think that so if i had to make a prediction i think and and i'd be curious to hear like if you ever we probably don't have enough time but like we brainstorm ideas here on this podcast a lot but i would be curious i think that so aria emmanuel who runs endeavor and they own w u dvr whatever yeah a ton of stuff he did this great podcast with patrick o's and he was like basically i'm betting i'm making anti ai bet so he was saying like hotel bookings for thursdays are now up through the roof busy drive times are at eleven am and he's like basically people are working less and they wanna go out and get and have experiences and so my prediction for you guys is that there's gonna be a second win i mean you're already like at like you're you're i i don't wanna say you're at a peak but you're like you're like killing it right now i think there's gonna be another like macro trend that pushes you even further up this mountain of glory are you feeling that and also have you seen any other like a lot of people don't realize this that circus sole delay is a multi dollar cup company and have you seen like any cool events businesses that like are are shockingly large or will run or that inspire you you know i mean i i think i may i named the main there's probably other ones out internationally that i'm not aware of at this point but yeah no i i'm fascinated by the cruise industry too as well because they're they're combining the entertainment the shows everything they're creating their own worlds so i've got a lot closer obviously we're doing our own to learn can we put on a show for five days for all of our for our fans with no playing of bin banana so that's a good test that we're looking about but yeah no i i don't i don't think i look at that but i i i'm fascinated about the youth game of bin banana in developing that we did a one city roll tour our test with a a youth tournament sold out in cleveland had kids from forty eight states come in so we're gonna build the sport that way and then obviously continue to look at i mean we're gonna do a tour movie i'm really inspired by what taylor swift has done and how she built that ecosystem created a great tour than all these little you know things from the flywheel that jumped off it we're we're gonna do some of that we're creating original music i haven't an announced but we have an unbelievable music partnership with very well known group that's gonna help create original music for us so all those steps i think are gonna take the show during the level if we keep making our show better i believe everything will take care of itself we just we can never settle for hey that last year's show was great let's do the same thing that's that's what scares me if we saw you when you were a kid like a teenager or twelve years old baby what would we have seen were you like selling cds and like hustling entrepreneur entrepreneurial were you like mister popular at school were you on the fringes like who were you when you were young would there have been any clues that this is who comes out of that yeah no i was i was i was a it was a shy kid to start and then when i was by myself a lot and so i mean i remember literally during the summer my dad i would go to work and you i was twelve or whatever thirty day was like jesse what you did i was i went to alex's house i rode my bike house i didn't do that like i didn't have a lot of friends and i had my friends through baseball and so in anytime i around my baseball team i would try to create attention i would try to do anything because it was my time around people my age and so you know i think that that love and being around people i think i didn't have that as much and now being around fifty thousand a hundred thousand people and staying to the last fan leaves to sign their autograph like that is something that i think because of what i had and what i what i i wanted now i can have at a higher level that i keep pushing for that but yeah i was i mean creating attention we we we instead of public speaking which ironic i now speak we create movies so we use imovie and were the first ones to create movies so i learned how to create movies in social media and like like not social media back then but how to make videos that people were interested in that guided us with what we're doing on social media so yeah i i was creative but i was alone i just played baseball and i just i think it was more the world i surrounded myself with after after school the the walt disney a pt barn the bill x it was that world that really you were interested in in those guys when you were younger no none of it no it was after so like yes did i go to walt disney i was the big k typhoon lagoon in which they let me in early and i got to have his whole experience and was magical did i have some really cool experiences at au national tournaments are going to disney yes i didn't know anything about them other than what most people knew it was that world i surrounded myself afterwards like you guys i mean think about this ten fifteen twenty years ago it's what you've learned now in the last ten fifteen years that world has impacted you you know i maybe there were some influences obviously back in school but it's more now you find this new world of entrepreneurs in creative a thinking and creators and that inventors and that that fires me up sean have you ever seen the talk so jesse does these things on his instagram where he gives the players a talk before the game i don't know if it's like new players or something like that or if it's before every game but you have the guys in the stand no i haven't seen so he gets everyone i'm gonna tell a story for you jesse as an outside outsider and you can correct me if i'm if i'm getting it wrong but you have the the i think it's the team but maybe there's some of the staff you have a i think in the out field stands they're somewhere like not in the front row and you're like you're sitting here because you need to be where like some of the worst seats are so you understand that we have to make this great for everyone and then you tell this amazing story and it i'm i imagine you repeat some of the stories but every time i've watched it it's been a unique story and it inspires them so so much where i'm like this fucking guy has made like playing like silly baseball like seem like i'm like saving the world and i'm so invested into it where i'm like you guys are doing god's work right like you're the guy still is doing god's work like i'm still wanted i agree with you agree i agree with you you've j me where like totally bought into this did you have to learn how to story like this because you're doing such a good job of getting me invested and i see the players the players and typically baseball players by the way when i i i i grew or hung out with the college baseball players they weren't like the coolest guys they always kinda like too cool for school like they didn't wanna like do silly stuff and these guys are like so wholesome and awesome did you learn how to like tell stories like this because it's incredibly effective thank you hundred percent and yeah still to the day i tell that right those talks yes you yes it's whenever we come to a a city the first thing we do is we have our fans first talk and so that is the entire staff the cast the players we can have upwards of two hundred people in those but yes all both teams the players are there and every week we have a new talk and it is one of the most stressful things for me and i'll tell you i could speak in front of a fortune fifty company or ten thousand people i'm more nervous speaking to our hundred and fifty people because i know my words our words mean so much to them and and and it's weighted differently and i care truly how it impacts them so yeah i every week it's like what's our message does it fit fans first how does it fit a principal how do we you know like win the upper deck we talk about that all the time win the upper deck and you know i just think about i have a lens now you guys look at this like want two lenses i have is a friction fighter wherever i go i see friction so this is walt disney said whenever i go ride i'm always asking what's wrong with this thing and how it can be improved if i go to a restaurant if i'm driving down the road if i'm going to a store i noticed one are the friction points from a customer point of view that's just my lens now the other friction or the other lens i see is i always see stories and everything anything that happens what's the story that that that can be told and when i think about speaking it's like what's your story what's your message how can people get one main thing out of it and then leave and so that's what those short short speeches so like to give you an example one i haven't shared forever was russell wilson you guys know the the quarterback in the nfl he played from me in gaston and literally the first night i had all the players come down from the roof and to high five the fans coming out to the the the the field and i said guys just hey hi five the fans get on the field ring need the starting lay so i'm up on the roof and like batting first for the gas g from men nc state number one russell will city goes down batting second from cl and each one goes down i'm up on the roof and i see all the players on the field except russell wilson so finally i see everyone in the field except russell so i go down onto the grand and i see he's way out in the left field grand he was high f every single kid in the stadium he was twenty two years old and he knew what mattered it was high every fan more than getting out of the field and i just think about moments like that guys we're doing something so much bigger than just putting on a show it's how we make people feel you put yourself as that five year old kid that seven year old kid that went to their first game and all you want was an autograph you wanted a ball you wanted a high five your favorite player and how many times did you not get that we can provide that every single day now you guys are even bigger booked upon even bigger than some of those major leaders now we owe it to that owe it to that kid to do that and so we just share these messages and examples in everything this morning yeah gave us the speech i'm ready well wasn't that wasn't when i go work on my i don't think i want you guys i don't think i've shared that because it was back in gaston days so you brought me back to that one so i'm in man i'm in desi there's a there's a quote that you remind me of a we can leave it on this which is this is john wesley quote and he says light yourself on fire with passion and people will come from miles to watch you burn and i feel like that's what you've done like you you have lit yourself on fire with passion and you've done that with this thing that none of us even realized we wanted ml millions of people wanna come watch you guys burn and i think that's that's amazing i got i well yeah hopefully you about the other burn way because if some people probably do the baseball traditional traditions is imp but i want you guys to see a show i'm i'm so impress on how much you've known and how much you're able it to to talk about this but for you to see it and see it from the beginning to the end and watch what goes into it so just gotta get immensely prepared you know get some good rest before that well god bless you thank you so much we appreciate you coming on this is this has been an all timer a lot of fun thank you guys seriously really appreciate y'all alright that's it that's about i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's off on a goal travel never looking back alright everyone if you're listening to m you probably want to make more money well i wanna tell you about a podcast you might wanna check out it's called the sales evangelist and it's hosted by donald kelly each week donald interviews the world's best sales experts who share their strategies to six seed in sales they share actionable insights and stories that will encourage challenge and motivate you to hustle your way to the top if you're someone looking to raise your income level check out the sales of evangelist you can find it wherever you get your podcasts