Fans First: How the Savannah Bananas Stopped Chasing Customers and Started Creating Raving Fans Featuring Jesse Cole

We're all in the entertainment business, every one of us. The definition of entertain is to provide enjoyment and to provide amusement. So how are we entertaining every step of the way? When fans first buy tickets from us online, the first thing that they get is a video sent right to them. The video we sent that I was a part of a few years ago starts like this. Congrats, you just made the best decision of your day. Right now, as your ticket order came in, a high priority siren went off at our stadium and our Bananiacs rushed to the ticket laboratory to produce your tickets. And then a Banana Nana slowly walked in and hand-selected your tickets. We placed them on a silk pillow. We raised the silk pillow up in the air and we sang Na Svenja Na Hid to celebrate the birth of a new fan. And then we walked your tickets down to our vault underneath our stadium where they're being watched by maximum security. They're ready for you to go bananas. If you'd like to join world-renowned entrepreneurs at the next Genius Network event or want to learn more about Genius Network, go to geniusnetworkevents.com. I am honored to be back with you guys. The fact that you had me on your podcast, I've been a big fan of this group. I've listened to probably every podcast, the I Love Marketing, and a big fan of many of the individuals in this group and following you guys for many years. So, to be welcomed back is an honor, and I am truly excited. I will tell you that, you know, I believe the greatest leaders, the greatest organizations learn from outside of their industry. So, the fact that you're bringing a crazy guy in the yellow tuxedo says something about you. I will say that for me, my biggest mentors are 2 people. I have custom posters here in my office. They are of P.T. Barnum and Walt Disney, and they have impacted me more than anyone. I've read every book on them. And the P.T. Barnum poster right here says, showmanship, something terrible happens without promotion, nothing. And then next to it is Walt Disney, which it says, vision, it's kind of fun to do the impossible. I have kind of followed in their footsteps, trying to do everything we can to To make a team that was failing successful over the last 6 years. But the reality is the Bananas team shouldn't even exist today. We are the lowest level of baseball there is. You can't name any of our players. We have zero corporate sponsors. We sell only one ticket. We actually have no suites, no digital scoreboards at our ballpark. It was an abandoned stadium that the former team left. They left just to die. And we were able to do a few things that made it stay and made it stick and made us still a business here today. And it's based on 2 words, and those words are fans first and how to create raving fans. And that's what I'm going to share with you today. And I'll tell you, when it goes back 6 years ago, to give you context, there are so many failures that we've had along the way that I think will lead to some of these lessons that we've learned that hopefully you can use in whatever industry You're in. So I want to take you back just to 6 years ago when my wife and I, we were running a small team in Gastonia, North Carolina. We were running it for 10 years. And we heard about Savannah, Georgia, and that the minor league, the professional team was leaving. So we went to a game and walked in and there were only 200 people in this 4,000-seat stadium. And we realized why they were leaving. So they left. And for some reason, we convinced the city to let a college summer team come into Savannah. So, at that point, my wife and I went from zero debt to over $1 million in debt to buy this team and to head down to Savannah. And we walked in that first day. It was myself, Emily, my wife, our 24-year-old president, and 3 22-year-olds straight out of college. What a crew we had. And we walked in and the former team had cut the phone lines, cut the internet lines. They took everything out of the ballpark. So, we grabbed a picnic table from outside the park, brought it into an abandoned storage building, and started calling everyone in town. We were chasing every customer we could get, and it failed. We had this big vision of what we wanted to do, but we were marketing like everyone else and failing like everyone else. In fact, we only sold 2 tickets in our first 3 months. It was like a donation. This gentleman said, just take this, guys, you need this. That was all that we sold until January of 2016. I'll never forget it. On Friday, 4:45 PM, I got a phone call that we had overdrafted our account. And we were completely out of money. It was at that point that Emily turned to me and said, Jesse, we have no other options. We have to sell our house. And we sold our dream house, emptied out our savings account, put the little dollars we had into the team to cover payroll and keep it going. We found a dump down in Savannah. She got an air bed, and it was a twin air bed, which didn't make any sense to me, but she got a twin air bed. And we started there just saying, we got to go all in. We got to make ends meet. And so we said at that point, we got to get crazy. We got to get different. It's just not working. So we decided to name the team after a fruit, and we became the first ever Savannah Bananas team. But it wasn't just naming the team the Savannah Bananas. We thought, could we have a senior citizen dance team called the Banana Nanas? Could we have a male cheerleading team called the Mananas? Could we have banana babies every game? Could we do music videos to Can't Stop the Peeling? We had all these ideas with bananas. But when we first came out with that name on February 25th, 2016, We were crucified locally. Everyone said, you guys are an embarrassment to our city. You'll never sell a ticket. You're a failure. Leave our town now. Whoever came up with this name should be fired. Fortunately, we at least got attention, but people weren't that excited about this new team named after a fruit. They didn't even know that the shipment of t-shirts— the first shipment came in the week before, and we'd misspelled bananas. We actually had too many N's in bananas. So we were failing on every front to start, but luckily we got their attention. And we knew that if we got their eyes and ears, we could then go after their hearts. So we got their attention. They were talking. We convinced enough people to come out to opening night. And they came out to opening night. And we were playing in green uniforms because we weren't quite ripe. And we ended up making tons of errors, failing miserably. But the Banana-Nanas dance, we went all in on the experience. We hit them with great touchpoints in the beginning, great touchpoints at the end. And people left that game and they started telling everyone about a baseball game that wasn't like every other baseball game. And fortunately, after that, even after all the failures, they told everyone, we stopped having to market like everyone else. They did the marketing for us, and we've sold out every game. And now, the waitlist actually just hit 12,000 for tickets. But most importantly, my wife and I are now sleeping on a real bed. So, that is the context of where we are and what we're doing. And I shared before how this can fit this group is I think the big thing I learned was we were so focused on drawing customers. on creating customers instead of creating fans. We were chasing and chasing and chasing. We were marketing like everyone else. But when we focused on how do you create a fans-first experience, everything changed for us just like that. We believe customers are transactional. They come and go, but fans never leave. And whether you're a sports team or whether a business, how you create those fans determines on what you do every touchpoint of that experience. Are you doing the normal things? Or are you creating things that are remarkable? And we have mapped the experience every year to try to get a little better on creating an unforgettable experience where people leave our ballpark and say 3 words, you wouldn't believe. You wouldn't believe what I saw at the ballpark today. You wouldn't believe what the player did for my little daughter. You wouldn't believe what the team was doing on the field. Those 3 words, I believe, are the most powerful words of word-of-mouth marketing you can get. And we have mapped our experience like that. And now, fast forward, you know, this last game of the year, a family came up to me and it was a gentleman, his wife, and his 3 kids. And they said, oh, this was so much fun. Thank you. You know, we loved coming to town for this. I go, oh yeah, where'd you come from? They go, we drove 40 hours from Utah for this game. We're driving 40 hours back tomorrow. In my mind, I was like, what is wrong with you? I wouldn't drive 40 minutes to go anywhere. They drove 40 hours. And we have other fans that will spend 3 hours shaping their beard like a yellow banana and they spray paint it before every game. Other fans that get tattoos all over themselves, more than one Bananas logo. All you need is one, but they get more than one. It's crazy what's happened. And I think it's based on this idea that we're not trying to sell them, we're not trying to chase them, we're just trying to create fans. And that is what I'm going to share today, what I call some of the Bananas E's to create these raving fans. And we have about 5 E's, but I know I have a shorter time today, so I'll share 3 or 4 today that we can work with. And I think I'm fired up about the Q&A because that's where we can really see Does this fit with your type of business? And that's where I love talking about and jamming on. So if you guys are with me, we're gonna jam on the 4 E's to create these raving fans unforgettable experience that we can have fun. You guys with me? If you can throw a heck yeah in the comments or let's do this or something, that encouragement is very big for a performer. All right, I see something. Fans first. Here we go. Heck yeah. Boom. Yes. Boo. Yeah, get it. All right, now we're ready. Now we're ready. All right, the first E. Oh, they keep coming. I love this, guys. All right, the first E to create these raving fans, these extraordinary experiences, is what I like to call eliminate friction. Eliminate friction. I believe it's the starting point for all innovation. And I believe to have this starting point and have this, you need to have a mirror moment. If you guys remember back in the day, '96, I think the movie came out, Jerry Maguire, when he has that mirror moment about, you know, we need less clients, we need to focus more on our clients, we don't need more clients. And he wrote this big mission statement and memo and then proceeded to get fired. That was his mission statement. And that was his mirror moment. I had my mirror moment when I was sitting in a dugout coaching the best players all over the country in the Cape Cod League. And I had the best seat in the house. And I sat there and just realized, man, this game of baseball is tremendously long, slow, and boring. I had the best seat in the house, but I was bored out of my mind. And I realized we got to do something about it because I put myself in the shoes of our customers. And that is the starting point. So I remember when I first started, 23 years old, running a team in Gastonia, I realized I met with everyone and they said baseball's too long, too slow, too boring. Our company's not interested in coming out. Our nonprofit's not interested in coming out. And I said, all right, well, we have to be something different. And so I realized that to ask the question, what business are you in? But what business are you really in? We shouldn't be in the baseball business. We can never be the best at baseball. We can never differentiate ourselves with baseball. But could we be in the entertainment business? And I asked that question and it reframed everything. It said, we can eliminate all the friction of being long, slow, and boring if we focus on how do we entertain nonstop. And so we came up with all these ideas and many failed. Flatulence Fun Night was an absolute disaster. I thought giving away whoopee cushions at the gate and have a bean burrito eating contest would be a great idea. Or having salute to underwear night where we gave away underwear at the gate. And if anyone wore underwear on the outside, they got a free giveaway. It was the most unfamily-friendly night you could ever do. But we had all these ideas on being entertainment. And so, people started saying, you know what? It's different. I should come see this. And so, instead of thinking of the friction of it being long, slow, and boring, they said, let's give this a try. And then we kept going down that list. We started writing down all those friction points, all those frustration points, from a baseball experience, from going to a ballpark experience. For instance, you guys have all done it, obviously a lot more pre-COVID than the last 2 years, but you go to a sporting event, you pay your ticket fees, you pay your convenience fees, you pay your parking fee, you pay for a program, you pay for your food, you pay for everything. And all of a sudden, the other night, you're like, what just happened? I was robbed. And I realized that was a huge friction point. At ballparks, you get nickel and dimed. So we said, well, what if we made every ticket all-inclusive? What if every ticket included all your burgers, hot dogs, chicken sandwiches, soda, water, popcorn, dessert, everything for $20? No ticket fees, no convenience fees, none of that. We said, what if we try that? Would we love that if we were a customer? And by doing that, that started to create some attention. And we kept going down that line, having new mirror moments every year. We eliminated all the advertising from our stadium because we don't believe anyone wants to come to a ballpark and be advertised to, sold to, or marketed to. This promotion presented by this car dealership, this promotion by this orthodontist. So the dumbest business move we could ever have done, February 25th, 2020, 2 weeks before the pandemic, we threw away all of our sponsorship dollars, hundreds of thousands of dollars to eliminate friction. It was a terrible business move. Luckily, over the last 2 years, our merchandise has more than made up for it. But when you look at yourself, put yourself in the customer's shoes and actually go through your experience. What are those big friction points? What are those frustration points? No one thinks that baseball should be necessarily changed until the last few years. That's the way the game always was. What do you mean? You think we— everyone, you go, you buy your ticket, you buy food when you go to the game. That's the way it always is. But when you start really digging down to putting yourself in the customer's shoes, that's where things change. And that's why that big aha moment for us, long, slow, and boring, and a bad experience. And so that's what I challenge us. If we want to create fans, we got to create something remarkable enough that they want to talk about. And so you can see behind me, I've got the banana ball rules. For 3 years, we were testing a game with a 2-hour time limit where batters can't step out, where there's no bunting because bunting sucks, where there's no walks, where if fans catch a foul ball, it's an out. And we made all these rules up and we started practicing it. We learned that fans wanted to stay to the end of the game because it was a friction point. Most fans leave games early. So that is the starting point for us. And I think to any creative fans, How often do we actually do a friction audit of our experience? Sit back and say, hmm, what are we going to do to try to create a frictionless experience? And so we actually, every game, we go undercover. I take off the yellow tuxedo one game. Someone on our staff actually goes and we park with the fans. We walk in with the fans. We sit with the fans. We eat with the fans. And at the end of the night, we talk. What are those fans' first moments? What are those friction points? And when we get those, then we can start creating on how to get rid of them. I remember when I did it just last year, my car hit a pothole. Terrible first impression. Then I saw our parking penguins eating burgers with their back to me. I'll get to the parking penguins later, but it was a bad first experience. I never saw that. I imagined it differently. So we did this friction audit every single night. How often have you called your voicemail? Is your voicemail, please listen closely as menu options have changed? Menu options are changing around the country every single day. Let's change the voicemail. Ours is Savannah, na na na. You've reached the Savannah Bananas, na na na. Please leave your message. It's just silly and fun, but it's not a friction point. And so that's where it really starts for us is putting ourselves in the customer's shoes. Go undercover. Go on your website. How quickly does it take for you to get what you want accomplished? How quickly does it take for you to get a contact form and someone responds? That's the key for us. And I find friction every day. My bank, and I don't want to give anyone any names, but my bank, let's just call them Bank of Shamerica. And so, I'm calling my bank and all I want to do is speak to someone. How long does it take to get to talk to someone? Dial 1 for this, give your account number for this. Are you an organ donor? Yes or no? Social Security number for this. And it takes minutes and minutes and minutes to get in touch with someone. That's a friction audit. You guys are a smart group. You know all this, but the reality is, I mean, there's a reason why Blockbuster is out of business. You could point to a lot of reasons, but if you go back, look at all the friction points. You have to drive somewhere to hopefully get a new release that might be out. And then if you get it, and then you pay a late fee when you get it back, and it's this completely friction-filled experience. Netflix said, no, get as much as you want, whenever you want, no late fees, one price. And again, that's where we win. So that's where I'm going to challenge you. And my mentor, Walt Disney, every day he was going undercover trying to attack friction. He lived above on Disneyland, above Main Street, and he would walk out undercover. And he said, whenever I go on a ride, I'm always asking, what's wrong with this thing and how can it be improved? That is the starting point. How can we do that? If you're creating friction every day, it doesn't matter all the crazy and fun things you do to create fans, you're losing them every single day. All right. So, that is the first thing. Not as fun, kind of, you know, I don't love that one as much, but it's true. The second one I think is the most fun for this group of entrepreneurs. And I know this group is probably a huge component of this, but I'm going to share some examples on how maybe we could do it even more. The second E to create raving fans is experiment constantly. Jeff Bezos said it best, our success is a direct function of how many experiments we do per year, per month, per week, per day. I believe so few companies do enough experiments every day. We are constantly experimenting on how do we create more fans, how do we invent new things for our fans, how do we create new remarkable experiences for our fans. And a great framework that we use constantly is a simple one I learned from Alan Fadden, and it's called whatever's normal, do the exact opposite. People do not get excited over normal. Normal gets normal results. And I read Alan's book many years ago called Innovation on Demand. And he shared how he sold his book. He said, what's the normal way of selling a book? Most people will put your book in a bookstore. It'll go on Amazon. Well, he decided to buy an entire retail space in Minneapolis, and he created a one-book bookstore just for his own book. So, he had his book Innovation on Demand throughout this entire retail store. He had it in different sections like self-help, business, history. He had it all over. And he had a sign that said, shoplifting's encouraged. He just wanted people to get his book. It was brilliant. Because of this experiment, People Magazine did a full-page story, USA Today, CBS. He created so much attention because he did something normal. He took an experiment to create more fans, and he did. So, that has been a guiding light for us. So, everything has started with experiment. Our hypothesis is that baseball is too long and too slow and too boring. So, how do we get people to think it's not like a baseball game? Our first experiment we did was, could our players do choreographed dances every single game? And I actually started telling our staff or telling different business people, our players are going to do dances before ever even doing it. And I remember vividly, as I showed up the first practice with our first team in Gastonia, I said, guys, before we learn how to practice, We're going to learn how to dance. And I brought a dance instructor. And all the guys looked at me like I was crazy. And they said, we're not going to do this. We're— no, no, no. But a few did. And they danced. And they were good ballplayers, but terrible dancers. One guy said he was never going to do it, went off to the bullpen. The first game, the guys danced Jump On It in front of the fans. And the fans cheered. The second game they did it, those players signed the most autographs. By the third game, I'm walking through the grandstand, a husband and wife are having a conversation. And all of a sudden, I see the wife go, shut up, honey. They're about to dance. I was like, all right, all right. We're onto something. We're onto something. And right then, that whole year, those guys became very popular. The fans loved it. They always asked, what dance are they going to do? That was the experiment. And so, we tried it there. So, what is the experiment you could do that's based on your hypothesis for your fans or for your customers? What is that new experiment? And how do you test it? Obviously, there's big experiments, and I'm sure many in this room have done some, and I know they are. The big experiments you can look at for us, it's like Banana Ball, developing a whole new game is a completely big experiment. Developing a new way to watch the game. We said, whatever's normal, watching a typical baseball game is boring. Could we mic up all our players? Could we have drones during the game? Could we let our fans determine who's going to pitch and who's going to hit? We did all 3 of those. They all 3 failed miserably. I remember the first time, The player had mic'd up and he was running. It was like you couldn't hear anything. The first time we had a drone, it actually flew right into the net. It was trying to chase the ball and the drone got shut down. And then the time we had the fans choose who was going to pitch, they picked a guy from the University of Georgia and he allowed 6 runs in the 9th inning and we lost the game. My coach wasn't too happy with that. But those were all experiments that are going into, are we trying to make baseball fun? And so what are the experiments that you can test to try to make it a better experience? What are the experiments on the first impression that your customers have? What are the experiences after the experiments you can do after they buy? How do you continue to try those? For us, we're going on tour. We started with a one-city world tour, which makes no sense, a one-city world tour, but we decided just to go to one city and test, could this work? And fortunately it did. And so now we expanded to 7 cities and we'll continue to expand. And there's small ones that you can try as well, just in your regular experience. Some really funny ones that we did was the tap of the morning beer festival. You know, talk about whatever's normal, do the exact opposite. We said, let's have a morning beer festival starting at 9 AM because you can't drink all day if you don't start in the morning. Well, only 90 people showed up, and boy, they had a party. But that's all that showed up. That was the last time we did that beer festival. In fact, that along with the running of the bananas, the Field of Trucks Food Festival, the haunted stadiums, all those events, they were doing almost $1 million, and we cut them all because they weren't creating more fans. They were just bringing more people to the ballpark. They weren't creating banana fans. That huge experiment made us focus on what we could be the best at, and that was a huge game changer for us. So how do you build this culture of experimentation? I think you start having IdeaPaloozas with your team. Everyone talks about brainstorming. You know, let's go brainstorm some ideas. Well, what if you build it into your culture? So I started, and I think James Altucher did this first, 5, 6, 7, 10 years ago, whatever it was, 10 ideas a day. I write down 10 ideas a day to a theme of what we could do, merchandise ideas, promotion ideas, senior citizen promotional ideas, all these different ideas. And we've brought that into our team. And so every week our team comes together and we come up with 2 to 3 ideas as a session towards a theme. What can, what can we do at the finale of our baseball games to make fans want to stay at the end other than fireworks? What are things that we can do after our fans buy a ticket that can really wow them on their way home? We come up with all these different ideas and the whole group pitches, and then we get this ownership of our company is built on ideas. How often do the ideas just come from the entrepreneur? Hey guys, I got all these ideas. Let's do this. You build that culture within, and then all of a sudden you build your real IP. And we call our IP not intellectual property, it's ideas and promotion. If you build your ideas and your promotion, your company will keep going over and over and over again. So I challenge people is first eliminate friction. Now start experimenting on that hypothesis. What can you do to start creating those fans and have those idea sessions? We don't need more meetings on how we're going to drive more revenue next quarter. How are we going to drive more fans next quarter? I challenge people to look at long-term profits. Long-term fans over short-term profits. The profits end up taking care of themselves. So we got to eliminate friction, experiment constantly. And this third one, once you realize those experiments— and for us, the more we did, the more we realized that our fans liked us to have fun and do things on the field like play in kilts and give away porta-johns and give away colon cleansings. And our players introduce themselves coming up to bat. Now batting for the Bananas, myself. They love all that crazy stuff. So we kept doing it. So, all right, they love entertaining. So how do we go all in every step of the way? And I think this is where most companies can reimagine in a completely different way. So the 3rd E to creating these raving fans is entertain always. And I know, again, look at this guy in a yellow tuxedo. Easy for you, you crazy guy in a yellow tuxedo that's obsessed with P.T. Barnum. Yes, I get it. But we're all in the entertainment business, every one of us. I believe the definition, the definition of entertain is to provide enjoyment and to provide amusement. So how are we entertaining every step of the way? And this is what we sucked at in the beginning. We had no idea what we were doing, but we reimagined and said, all right, let's look at every touchpoint. Can we make it entertaining? Can we make it fun? And so we started mapping it. And so for us, the experience, I'll share just a little bit, we map the moments. When fans first come out to— or first buy tickets from us online, the first thing that they get is a video sent right to them instead of just a regular payment confirmation. And I think Derek Sivers did this. Derek Sivers did this best with CD Baby. You guys probably all heard the funny little email reply. We did a video, and each year we do a new one to keep it fresh. But the video we sent that I was a part of a few years ago starts like this, me at the office. Congrats, you just made the best decision of your day. Right now, as your ticket order came in, a high-priority siren went off at our stadium, and our Bananiacs rushed to the ticket laboratory to produce your tickets. And then a Banana Nana slowly walked in and hand-selected your tickets. We placed them on a silk pillow. We raised the silk pillow up in the air, and we sang Na Svenya Na Hee to celebrate the birth of a new fan. And then we walked your tickets down to our vault underneath our stadium where they're being watched by maximum security. They're ready for you to go bananas. And people are like, what's going on? Like, we've got thousands of remarks, people saying, what are you guys doing? We said, yeah, you know, your tickets are ready for you. They're in our vault. And it's just a fun little touchpoint. What's the touchpoint after people buy from you or fill out your contact form or request for information on your website? The experience starts the first time they're on your website. And so once they buy from us, then We follow everyone up with a thank you call. That's crazy. I learned from Brian Chesky, do the unscalable to really grow something. Unscalable, obviously, Brian Chesky, Airbnb. We set up Excel sheets for our whole staff. We have 100,000+ fans a year, and we call every fan and thank them after they buy a ticket. And we just say, hey, our tickets are, you know, they're in their vault. We're ready for you to go bananas. People are blown away by a simple thank you call. And then from there, our ticket experience card said, I'm going to send you a playlist of music to listen to on the way to the game. So we send Can't Stop the Peeling, the Holler Back Girl by Gwen Stefani, some of those other banana theme songs, and they come to the ballpark. Then when they get to the stadium, the first thing they see, I mentioned before, is the parking penguins. And this is just people dressed up in penguin costumes parking your car. Does it make any sense? Of course not. But I thought the idea of people parking your car in a penguin was a fun touchpoint. And now they actually pass out freezy pops to the kids and say, stay cool tonight. Then as you pass them, you'll see our players greeting people, signing autographs. You'll see our pep band playing Final countdown, Rocky music, our Banana Nanas are dancing. You'll actually see our banana ticket takers in banana costumes, which used to rip your ticket— tickets that are shaped like bananas and are scratch and sniff and smell like bananas. So you try to do all before they even experience your product. We even hired a professional high fiver, which was really hard to find. No one wanted the job. I thought it was a great gig. But finally, right before opening night, a 6-year-old and his mother walked into our stadium. And the 6-year-old started high-fiving everyone in our office. I said, kid, you got the job. So we hired him. We got a jersey. On the back, it says, hi. His number is 5, and his job is to high-five 1,500 to 2,000 fans a game. And we actually pay him, which is breaking every child labor law in the book. But we get away with it somehow. We pay his mother. We figured it out. And he's great, except every 30 minutes, he needs a snack break to get cotton candy or Snickers. But he's amazing. And it's all about like, we don't invest in marketing, we invest in the experience. We invest in the touchpoints because that's what gets the real marketing coming from other people, not us. And so, that's before people come to the ballpark. What happens before people actually really experience your product? What are those ways that you entertain always and touch every single touchpoint? Everyone in your, you know, whether it's your office or whether it's your online business, There's parts of the business that we kind of neglect. For us, we have 1926 bathrooms. Literally, our stadium's 1926. When I first came in, it was a horse trough. So imagine, you know, where the guys— it's a big trough and everyone just pees in the same spot. It's the most disgusting thing in the world. We eliminated the troughs, but we put regular urinals in. But we said, we can't make it really nice. How do we make it fun? And so our biggest rival is the Macon Bacon. So we actually got— that's a real team name too, imagine that, Makin' Bacon. So we got urinal cakes with the Makin' Bacon logo and we put it in all the urinals. So our fans are actually pissing on our rival every night. It's those little details that people walk out of the bathroom and are like, what is wrong with this? This is ridiculous. It's those little touchpoints that matter. And now obviously during the game, we have the banana baby that we lift up to Simba. We have weigh-ins. we literally have the visiting team versus the home team, UFC weigh-ins. We have Mardi Gras parades. We have our players deliver roses to little girls during the games. We have players go on dates with fans. We plan all these little moments, which are fun, but it's all part of that experience. And I challenge each business to focus as much on the first impression and the last impression. That's what we failed so bad. The last impression leaves a lasting impression. I learned that from Shep Hyken. What is the last impression after someone buys from you? And I realized we were failing so much in the beginning when we had literally people would just leave the game, you know, like just leave like Walmart greeters. It was a great idea, but mostly they're like, yeah, they don't even say anything when they leave. So finally we said we had the great idea, let's give away free s'mores. But then we realized open flames and messy marshmallows weren't a great idea with kids after a game. So now we give away banana moon pies to every fan. And we have our pep band playing and our players signing autographs. We make it an event. And our players actually, instead of— when they ask for an autograph, I remember one player, he got down to his knee and said, only if I can have yours. And now you see our players' hats and they all have Joe, Alice, Steven. They have little kids' names all over it. It's reversing the moments to create those things that are special. And so that's all about mapping. And I think a challenge that we realized is There's always things that go wrong in a business. You can map everything really well, but what about when something goes wrong? Do you have a plan for that? And for us, the worst thing that can happen in a baseball game is rain. And so, we developed a rain delay script. And so, this past year, a team got a flat tire right outside of their city, so they didn't get there till 9 o'clock. So, we had to extend our rain delay script for 3 and a half hours of all different entertainment, pass the monkey, sing-alongs. We have this huge rain delay script. What's your rain delay script when something goes wrong? When a client, you miss a deadline, a customer, something failed on the delivery. What's something that you can always go to to make sure that you're entertaining them? The best moments to create fans are often when things go wrong because they're already upset, but then you can wow them to a different level. And I think that's what we failed at first. We had no rain delay scripts. We'd play music like every team always did, but now we go all in on the rain opportunities. Our players lined the gates with umbrellas to walk fans to their cars. We had interns walk their fans to the cars. And I remember one intern, she was with us for 2 weeks, and her name was Laura. Well, her name's still Laura. So she's walking an older gentleman, and the older gentleman says, I'll take a walk, and he walks her, and she's gone for like 30 minutes. I'm like, where is she? And all of a sudden, she comes back and she goes, I walked that gentleman to his doorstep. I go, you walked him home? She goes, he said he was just a quarter mile down the road. And I go, wow. She's like, it was like a mile. And she goes, fans first, right? She knew 2 weeks in that it's all about fans first. And that's the name of our company. And that's what it's about. So, I challenge you to how do you entertain every step of the way? You want to create these raving fans? Map the experience. Don't just map the marketing. All right. Lasty, and I'm fired up to get into some Q&As. in a little bit. Last E, and I think this is maybe the most important one. We can have all these ideas. I often say, guys, if we can just eliminate a little more friction today, if we can just find one new way to entertain our fans or one new experiment, that's just one. But often the key is the final E, and it's empower action. How do we empower action in ourselves and most importantly, our teams to start creating these raving fans? And I know I've shared a lot about Walt Disney, and he's a huge mentor for me. But my biggest mentor by far is my dad. And I grew up with just my dad as a kid. And I remember when I was 5 years old and I used to play T-ball, and I would come up to the plate and my dad would say, Jess, swing hard in case you hit it. And every time I came up to bat, my dad would say, Jesse, swing hard in case you hit it. And I swung as hard as any 5-year-old's ever swung. And I swung and missed a ton. But when I made contact, I made pretty good contact. And we continue to think every day, how can we swing hard in case we hit it? What are these big chances? Taking the bananas all over the world, playing a new game that's never been played before doesn't make any sense. I wrote yesterday, the other day on LinkedIn, that in 5 years, we're going to sell out Fenway Park with 40,000 people. That's a huge swing. I was a bat boy for the Red Sox when I was 5 years old. I got to pitch there when I was 20. Selling it out would be a huge honor, make my dad proud, and make me proud to do it. It's a big swing, but how do you do it? You got to empower your team to believe they can do it, which many of you guys know. Not many people know this, but there's one player who has the most hits in Major League Baseball. You guys, some of you guys who know baseball, you can throw in the chat who has the most hits in Major League Baseball. There you go. First one, Evan, that a baby. Pete Rose. There's Sean. Pete Rose. Yes. Do you know he has over 4,000 hits? Do you guys know how many at-bats he has? 14,000 at-bats. He's got 14,000 at-bats to get his 4,000 hits. He's got 2,000 more bats than anyone that ever played the game. Of course, he's got more hits. He kept coming to bat. How do we inspire our team to keep coming to bat and keep swinging, keep going for the hits? How many bets did he have? That's a great call, Gordy. He had a lot of bets too, but he also had a lot of hits. And then I asked a question too. All right, who failed the most in Major League Baseball? Who had the most strikeouts? Which hitter struck out more than anyone else that ever played the game? No looking it up. Pete Rose, good guess. Hank Aaron, another good guess. He's up there. Barry Bonds. Very few people know this answer. Babe Ruth, I hear that all the time. The answer is not Babe Ruth. It's not Pete Rose. The reason why, he's not known for his strikeouts. He's known for his 3 home runs in Game 6 of the 1977 World Series. He's known as Mr. October. He's a Hall of Famer. And I'm sure some of us know who it is now. It's Reggie Jackson. My point is, he's not known for his strikeouts. He's not known for his failures. How often today are we talking about the Amazon Fire Phone? It was a $200 million loss, but the technology they got from it helped to develop Alexa. So, what I hope today is we can empower our teams on how to take these chances, on how to create fans, and not focus just on the short-term profits. I'll give one example with one of our interns. I'll finish up here. We had a young intern, Barry Aldridge, 22 years old with us when he joined us. And we were 2 weeks or 3 weeks into his internship. And we were calling people to thank them for their tickets, for the ticket orders. And one family bought 8 tickets, which was a good ticket order. And he called and he He couldn't get through. So he tried again the next day because he wanted to make sure to thank them and they were all set. And the father answered the phone and said, oh, I'm so sorry I missed your call. He goes, my wife bought these tickets for our 7 kids and she just tragically died. And Barry, as a 22-year-old intern, came up to me in my office and he said, Jesse, what do we do? And I turned to him trying to figure out how to get him involved in this. And I said, Barry, What do you think? And he goes, I'd really love to do something special for them. And I go, whatever you need to do, just do it. I trust you. Fans first. And so, he called the dad back and the dad answered. He said, hey, we'd really love to have you and the kids out. We'd love to provide a great experience for them. And the dad said, you know what? It would probably be good to get the kids out of the house. We'll take you up on that. Barry gave him his cell phone. He met them at the gate right when they arrived. He brought them into the front row of seats. It was the dad, the 7 kids. As they sat down, the entire team, not just 2 players, not 4, the entire 30-man roster came up, sat next to the kids, signed autographs, signed bats. They didn't just hang out. They were there. They were there with the kids for 30 minutes before the game. When the players left, Barry presented the dad with a jersey with his wife's name on it and the amount of years that they were married. The team, the kids, and the dad stayed for the entire game. which never happens in a baseball game, stay for the entire game. They stayed all the way to the end. And the father came up to Barry and said, that was the last gift the mother ever gave the kids. I couldn't imagine a better gift. Now, that's a sad story, but fast forward, that family has become fans for life. They come out every year. Barry became our vice president and he's still with us today, 28 years old, going strong. And it was just one example of how even a 22-year-old intern can create a moment that will never be forgotten, can create an unforgettable experience. He eliminated friction by meeting them at the gate. He figured a way to entertain them throughout the whole game. He experimented by doing a jersey with their name on it. He's never, never done that before. And he felt empowered to create that amazing fan experience. Obviously, a lot of things today I shared are over the top wild, and they may not fit with your business, but I think the mindset does. Some people don't want to dress up crazy like this to create attention and build people into what we're trying to do. But maybe it's something simple. I remember 6 years ago, I read the book One Word, and I said, wow, I'm going to choose my word. It's going to be care, but I got to do something to hold me accountable. And so, what I decided to do was a thank you experiment and write a thank you letter every single day for the whole year. I bought 500 yellow cards, custom cards, and started writing thank you letters to old teachers, to coaches, to friends, to authors. Probably some people in this room have received a thank you letter from me. And it changed my life. I remember one person that inspired me so much was Simon Sinek, and I sent him a thank you letter. And I was driving, I was driving down the road for lunch. This is 6 years ago, and I got an unknown phone number. And this was back when you answered unknown phone numbers. And all of a sudden, I answered and said, hey, Jesse, Jesse, it's Simon Sinek here. I go, shut up, who is it? I go, it's Simon Sinek. He goes, I just want to call you and let you know how much your letter inspired me. The reason why I do is to help people live inspired lives. And your letter inspired me. And for a minute and 41 seconds, I talked to someone who made a huge difference in my life. So maybe today we can just go to a thank you letter or a thank you video. That's a way you can create little unforgettable moments that most people aren't doing. That's not normal. As the brilliant philosopher Will Ferrell once said, keep throwing darts at the dartboard, you'll eventually hit the bullseye. I challenge us, if we want to stop chasing customers, creating fans, which many of you are already doing, Let's start looking at eliminating those frictions, entertaining always, experimenting constantly, empowering our team to create these fans-first moments every single day. If you do that, you'll have more fun than you've ever had. And as my biggest mentor said, all of our dreams can come true if we have the courage to pursue them. Don't miss another episode of The Joe Polish Show. Subscribe today at thejopolishshow.com. If you'd like access to the show notes to take action on what was discussed, please visit TheJoePolishShow.com. /65.