How To Be Successful By Standing Out: Find Your Yellow Tux With Jesse Cole and Dean Jackson - I Love Marketing #410

I think Jeff Bezos said it best. You need to be willing to be misunderstood. And I think most people, when they come up with something brand new or different, they are misunderstood. A dentist. There's a singing dentist. I know that I saw a dentist on here. There's a singing dentist who got national exposure. He was all over Good Morning America Today show. Most people were probably like, oh, that's fun. But some people were like, dentists shouldn't be singing. Do your job, dentist. Do your job. And that's it. But he got national attention and his business grew dramatically because he was willing to have fun.

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 geniusnetwork.com on behalf of Joe Polish and everyone at Genius Network and behind this great I love marketing, we welcome you. Joe is still on sabbatical. There's a countdown five more months. I think it's five months and 10 days and Joe will join us. So Jesse Cole is our guest and he's the founder of Fans First Entertainment and owner of the Savannah Bananas. It's a baseball team. His teams have welcomed more than 1 million fans to their ballparks and they've been featured on MSNBC, CNN, ESPN and an entrepreneur magazine. The Bananas have been awarded Organization of the Year, Entrepreneur of the Year, Business of the Year and they won the CPL championship. In their very first year. Fans First Entertainment has been featured on the Inc 5000 lists as one of the fastest growing companies in America. The Savannah Bananas currently have sold out every game, every game since their first season which is back in 2016 and they have a waiting list in the thousands for tickets. Jesse released his first book Find you'd Yellow how to be Successful by standing out in January of 2018 with the World Book Tour at Epcot. Jesse has been featured on over 500 podcasts and is an in demand keynote speaker all over the country, sharing the fans first experience on how to stand out, be different and create raving fans of both customers and employees. Jesse is the host of the Business Done Differently podcast and has interviewed over 100 as some of the world's leading entrepreneurs, authors and speakers.

You've had sold out games for your entire career at in Savannah. You mentioned Gastonias were the first place where you start out 23 years old taking over as the GM. You've had no experience in being the GM. You're a baseball player. You've experienced it from the dugout. Was there a part of you that thought okay, I'm going to see. What do people do to market baseball teams? Or did you start out kind of going down the traditional path of what are you supposed to do? Did you immediately say, I got to do something different? And what was that, like, spark?

Well, I started meeting with people in the community. So, you know, again, what did Yogi Berra say? You can observe a lot just by watching and by seeing the numbers, that only 200 fans were coming to the games. I knew there was a problem. But then I started meeting with the community, and I started having these meetings with people, business leaders, nonprofits. And what they started saying is, we just don't like baseball. We don't like baseball. And I go, what? You know, it's too long, it's too slow, it's too boring. And I heard it over and over again. And, Dean, we're like the lowest level of baseball. Like, there's major league and triple A and double A and like, high A and professional, independent. We're college summer baseball down here. Yeah, you can't compete in that game. So I just kept hearing over and over again, and what I learned was that the starting point of all innovation, you know, all, you know, trying to create fans, is you got to find what that frustration is, what that friction point is, and do the exact opposite. And so I heard over and over again, it's long, slow, and boring. So I said, how do I convince people that it's not like a baseball game? And so I remember calling the owner of the team 23, and I was like, ken, we can no longer be a baseball team. He goes, well, what do you have in mind? I said, well, I think our players should do choreographed dances. We should have grandma beauty pageants. I should get in the dunk tank. We should serve garbage can nachos. We should bury diamond rings in the infield dirt and make it a circus. And he said, well, we got nothing to lose. And he gave me the shot. And we started failing pretty quickly doing all that. But we started getting our fans to think differently. And then it took a little while, and we learned a lot and started selling out in Gastonia. And that eventually brought us to Savannah. It was a constant testing, experimentation, and you test on what you believe is a better experience. You know, I couldn't be a fan of baseball if I couldn't watch the game. Then I had to say, all right, what. What can we do that I want to be a fan of it? And I played the game. I played my whole life. So we looked at every frustration Point. And it started with the game is too long, too slow and too boring. And started testing against that hypothesis that let's make it fast, nonstop, exciting, and see where we can go from there. And we got criticized, Dean. We got criticized a lot. I mean, baseball traditionalists hated us. You know, what are you guys doing to the game? But, I mean, you know, the criticism. I believe you're not getting criticized. You're playing it too safe. So we started being very clear, who are we not for? We weren't for baseball traditionalists. We were people that wanted to have fun. And so once we got clear on that and started defining, hey, we're going to try to be the most fun team in baseball. We're going to try to make baseball fun. And you know, the group I know doesn't know, like, five years ago, I was sleeping on an airbed, I had to sell our house. So we failed very miserably. And I can share more about that. But it's become clear through all that failure, what has been working best for us.

You weren't sacrificing the baseball though, too, right? Because with Tim was saying, you won a championship, so you're still playing at the high level.

Yeah, well, that's mostly in Savannah. You know, Gastonia. We had some tough years, but we weren't smart enough to realize this. But when we focus solely on trying to create the most fun team in baseball and have the most fun and create the best culture, the baseball took care of itself. So we don't focus on the baseball. We focus on the fun. We focus on how are we making a better environment for the guys. And I think obviously in this group, there's so many leaders. They know if it's a better environment for your people, they'll perform better. And so we became very clear. And I know we've bounced around a little bit, but in Savannah, you know, you can't get a uniform on until you go through an hour and a half, at least minimum hour orientation of the bananas way. And how we go fans first. And we share stories of what fans first means. And for the group here, that's the name of our company is fans first Entertainment. It started as a terrible law firm name Team Cole and Associates. But that really didn't fit our brand. So we changed it. Yeah, it was terrible. It's like a law firm accounting office. But we changed it to fans first entertainment with very simpler mission is fans first entertain always. And every decision we make is at fans first. We weren't focused on creating customers. We were Focused on creating fans. And that became kind of the driver of our company, the name of our company, our mission. And so any player, any person that joins our team, they will go through a full fans. First you on how do you create fans and how you create these remarkable experiences? Because that's for us as again bounced around and I can tell the struggles in Savannah. You know, we spend $0 on marketing right now, but we invest everything on the experience on our.

It is all marketing. I mean that's part of the.

Yeah.

Is that we tell people that main thing is that you've got to have a dream come true experience. That that's really what you're trying to create. We had an episode and we've had so many great people on the podcast. But Richard Branson, one of the things that he said, because they really don't, you know, he looks at everything as marketing. But his advice was, first of all, you. You got to have something that you want to scream about on the mountaintops. You got to love what it is that you've got. And that sounds like what you're saying there, that whole experience for people.

I love that so much. And we convinced the city to let this little small college summer baseball team come in. So we bought an expansion franchise. My wife and I actually went from zero debt to $1.8 million in debt between buying the team Savannah. It was brutal. And so we came in on October 5, 2015. I'll never forget it. I walk in, it's myself, my wife, our 24 year old President and three 22 year olds 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. And we walked into an abandoned storage building, grabbed a picnic table and started calling people in the community and saying, we're here. And the problem, Dean, is what? They could care less. We sold only two tickets in our first three months. Wow, bigger debt. Two tickets in three months. And then by January of 2016, we got the phone call that maybe some of you on the call have got, but we overdrafted our account and we were completely out of money. And that was five years ago. And I know you know the story, Dean, but yeah, Emily turned to me and said, we have to sell our house. So we sold our dream house, emptied out our savings account and found a dump down here. It was on the market for three years. No one wanted it. We got an air bed. We were sleeping on an airbed, sleeping with our Socks on because there were cockroaches. It was a disaster. We were living on $30 a week. And that was just five and a half years ago. And we knew we had to create something big and different and attentive to create attention and make special. And so that's when we went all out on going with the bananas and going a whole different route. And fortunately, now, after the failures, it's worked out okay. So we said, what can we do dramatically different, to play a different game? And we said, well, what's a big friction point in a ballpark experience? And this is again, the starting point for us. What are the friction points? And most people, you go to a sporting event, you get nickel and dimes, right? You know, you pay $5 for parking, you pay $20 for your ticket, you pay $4 for a program, $5 for a burger, $6 for. So whatever it is. And we said, well, what if we eliminated all that? So we said, what if our ticket included all of your hamburgers, hot dogs, chicken sandwiches, soda water, popcorn, dessert? There were no ticket fees, no convenient fees, everything. Free parking. Free parking. Everything for $15. Right? And that's what we did. We didn't know the numbers. We had no idea how to do it. In fact, the first night we did it, people waited three hours to get food. It was a disaster. But we knew the vision. Yeah, we knew the vision. That'd be a better experience. So we tested that. And now every single ticket, if you come to a bananas game, includes all your food. And so we had to find a way to dramatically be different. If they hadn't experienced the show, we had to be with a different value. And so we played that game. I think the biggest thing we learned from Walt Disney is the power of plussing. And so I just recorded a whole podcast on this because it's like Disney believed that we're always plussing the show. You always need to plus the show. It's a living, breathing thing. If you don't plus the show, it's going to cost you 10 times more to get someone back. And so we developed this whole plussing mentality. And at first you bought your ticket, it was a regular payment confirmation. And then we said, no, let's map it. Let's map everything to what would be remarkable enough to create fans. We don't have marketing dollars. We were in $1.8 million of debt. We were failing. So we said, how do we get an army of marketers that are fans? And so, yeah, you know, when you buy a ticket Online from us. You immediately get a video and we do a different one each year. But the video starts like Dana goes with me. Congrats. You just made the best decision of your day right now. As your ticket order came in, a high priority siren went off in our stadium and our bananiacs rushed to your ticket laboratory to produce your tickets. Then a banana nana slowly walked in and hand selected your tickets and placed them on a silk pillow. And we raised the silk pillow up in the air and we sang na sabana here to celebrate the birth of a new fan. And then we walked your tickets down to our vault where they're being watched under maximum security ready for you to go bananas. And that was the video they would get. Then we start doing thank you calls and then, you know, when they come to our games, we send a playlist of music to listen to. And like, you know, bananas, you know, this is bananas B a n a n it can't stop the peeling. You know our voicemail, when you call our voicemail, it's savannah na na na. You've reached the Savannah Bananas na na na. Please leave your message. You know, and then our hold music is ring ring ring ring ring ring ring banana phone. And people call us every two weeks and actually want to be put on hold. It's the weirdest thing.

What would be your advice to start if we were, if you were coming in to take over somebody else's business, what would be the kind of thought process that you, that you have that you'd go through?

You know, it's funny for a lot of you guys are entrepreneurs, you're in it, you don't really think about how to teach it. But as I've been able to look back and been an opportunity to speak a good amount, you know, I've realized that there's obviously we look at most people are trying to create customers, clients and vendors. We're trying to create fans. It's a different conversation. Customers are transactional. They come and go. But fans never leave. Most companies, they have conversations on how they can drive more revenue, create more sales. But how many companies have conversations and how they can create more fans? We have ideapaloozas every single month where we get the whole team together and we say what are things we can do to create more fans? In every part of our business, it's a different conversation. And so from there, you know, we said, all right, if I want to break it down, if there's like notes, I would say there's three e's that I Think you can focus on eliminate friction, Entertain always and experiment constantly. So eliminate friction. Starting point. What are the friction points in your industry? What are the frustration points? So we start there. What are the friction points? And for us, we looked at baseball too long, too slow and too boring. Number two, you get nickel and dimed. Number three, which many people might not see. I don't believe anybody in the world wakes up and wants to be sold to, advertised to, or promoted to. Yeah. When you go to a ballpark, what do you see all over the outfield walls? Right. Ads everywhere.

Because they've got that captured attention.

Let's bring in some revenue, guys. How can we create some more sponsorship revenue? Not how do we create more fans?

Different conversations, these impressions.

Yeah, let's monetize, let's make more money. And so we did the craziest thing at the worst timing ever. On February 25, 2020, two weeks before the pandemic, we announced we were becoming the first ever ad free stadium and ad free team. And we got ripped up part by the industry. People were like, you traders. What are you doing? We threw away hundreds of thousands of dollars right before we went into a pandemic. But we said a, we don't believe people want to be sold to, marketed to, or advertised to. How do we create something, a better experience? The only person we work for is our fans. We don't work for our sponsors. And so when you come to our ballpark, you will not be advertised to, you'll not be sold to. It's a time to escape and have fun. We made that decision. What happened, Dean? Merchandise went skyrocketed even more from all over the world. And now merchandise has become a seven figure brand in itself. And it's well outdone our advertising. But it was the courage to attack that friction point. So we're continuing to attack that. And I don't want to keep going here. But we're also attacking the game of baseball. We invented a new game, banana ball, which is two hours long. If fans catch a foul ball, it's an out. All right, you can. Oh my. The fans get involved. Yeah. Yes. Get the fans first. You can steal first. It's a two hour, fast paced game and you could search it. But we developed that because we realized we watch our fans, we videotape our fans in the crowd, and we realize every 30 minutes we take pictures. No matter how much entertainment, the breakdancing, first bass coach, the banana nanas, all that fans still leave early. And so we had to get better. So we're going to attack that friction point, that one more. And we did a banana ball game two weeks ago and 98% of our fans stayed till the end of the game versus 60% during a regular game. When Walt Disney was alive, he said, when he's going to Disney, I said, whenever I go on a ride, I always ask, what's wrong with this thing and how can it be improved? He was constantly attacking friction. So I know I've spent a lot of time on that. But I think anybody can look at their industry and put yourself in the shoes and say, what frustrates me? The next one I love is entertain always. And I think people have, oh, you're in a yellow tux, you run a baseball team and entertainment team. I'm in, you know, I'm a dentist, I'm in finance. I had to look up the definition of entertain because I'm like, oh, you're in the entertainment business. The definition of entertain is to provide enjoyment and to provide amusement. Aren't we all in the entertainment business? Yeah.

And it would hurt. Would it hurt that in addition to whatever you are to also be in the entertainment business while that's happening?

I mean, I think if we think of everyone, that we're a host of a party at our house. No matter what we do, we're a host of a party. And you entertain people at your house. And so how do you treat them? You know, what's the experience? You take their coat, what's the last impression when they leave? Do you thank them? Do you give them a hug? And I think a lot of times I think Shepkin said it best. The last impression leaves a lasting impression. We look to entertain at every single touch point. And so to make it kind of, that's who we are. And I think we all have those. So, you know, when people have their last experience with you, is there something fun that's sent? What's your email signature? How do you enter invoices? Like, you know, we were bad at this for a while. And invoices I think are a great opportunity to entertain. And I can share one of our bananas invoices if you want. I think that might be an example. It's congrats, this is your day, the day you've been waiting for. Today is the day you get to pay. You may think, you may think you've had days like this. The day you bought your first house, the day you bought your first car, or maybe your first all inclusive vacation. But nothing is quite like bananas payday. So Pull out your money order, savings bond, bitcoin gold, cash, credit card, or check, and make that payment like we know you can. We believe in you. This is your moment. Now seize it. Your life will never be the same. Love, Jesse Cole.

What do you think holds people back from succeeding like this? Like in doing, you know, coming up.

With two things, I would think, I guess it's direct roi. You don't see it. It's playing a long game as Amazon focuses on all the time. I don't see the direct ROI of handing someone a banana moon pie or handing someone a free cookie at the end of the night. And also it's fear of no one else is doing this. We get letters and emails from the league every day about things they say we shouldn't be doing because we push the envelope. But I think it's fear of what happened. I mean, this. This was tough. Putting on a yellow tuxedo and speaking and knowing that people think that I'm like, you know, all about attention and all about, like, you know, it's all about myself. Well, actually, it's draw people into what we're trying to do. It's draw people into the message. And so, you know, I think Jeff Bezos said it best. You need to be willing to be misunderstood. And I think most people, when they come up with something brand new or different, they are misunderstood. A dentist. There's a singing dentist. I know that I saw a dentist on here. There's a singing dentist who got national exposure. He was all over Good Morning America Today show. Most people were probably like, oh, that's fun. But some people were like, dentists shouldn't be singing. Do your job, dentist. Do your job. And that's it. But he got national attention and his business grew dramatically because he was willing to have fun. And I think that's the question that we want to have, is, does the message, does the purpose, does the impact matter that much that we're willing to be misunderstood, get some criticism and jump into the deep end? Just the last one we've learned is experiment constantly. And. And again, Bezos, our success is a direct function of how many experiments we do per year, per month, per week, per day. And so we actually judge our people by the experiments and the stories. We incentivize stories over sales. So what fans for stories are they creating? And that's mostly based on experiments. So everything we do when we meet weekly, monthly with our team, we said, what experiments are you doing in your department this year? What are you inventing on behalf of Our fans. And so that is huge. And like, you know, for instance, we started doing a live stream of our games. We said, what are we going to do that no one else is going to do? What. What's. What's normal? Do the exact opposite. And we said, well, can we mic up players every game? We have a drone flying during the game. Can we let our fans choose who's going to pitch, who's going to hit? And we asked all these questions and started asking, what if? And then we said, all right, what experiment are we doing today? What experiment are we doing tomorrow? Our director of entertainment, he knows we have to do one new promo every game that we've never done in front of a live audience. And most of them failed badly. But it teaches that idea of experimentation is how we're going to get better and improve the experience. We don't want people to become, say we're not relevant anymore, or we're not enjoying the experience because they're not doing anything new. And so the experimentation, I think, helps build fans on a regular basis.

We always encourage people to look at that experience timeline as a living, breathing document that you can innovate within that. Look at the benchmarks, the categories, the where things are. First of all, looking for friction and then looking for opportunity. Like what you were saying about the car washes and those. Everybody in every business has that opportunity.

Well, I think it's what Andy Stanley said, do for one what you wish you could do for many. And that guides us. Every night, our players, we have 12 players go into the stands and deliver roses to little girls. They get down to a knee and they drop it down. And then we have one player go on a date with a fan. And one, it's usually a grandma, but sometimes it's like a little girl and they get to have dinner and only one person gets it. But it's an experience hopefully they'll never forget that will create a fan for life. And so I think often we said, how do we scale that? How do we do that for so many people? Well, just come up some unique, unique moments that could be special for one.

And then the people around it, they're telling that story too, about.

Right, right.

So it's a way for everybody there. Let's talk about kind of the mindsets and emotions, how you get. How you kind of manage that among yourself or what. What kind of do you come into this with on a daily basis? I guess, you know, you're. Do you. Are you an affirmation guy? Are you.

Yeah, I guess I'm an enneagram 3. Most people think I'm an enneagram 7, but I am still driven by success. Affirmations. Yeah, we actually did the love language test with everyone on our staff, and. Which is good. You know, we say love your customers more than you love your product, but love your people, love your team even more than you love your customers. And so if that's true, do you know what your people love? And so we didn't know it. So our fans first director said, I want to do a love language test of all of our people. And so we did a test of the entire team, and it was great. We found out that 90% of our people were words of affirmation was number one. Number one. And it was funny. Our president was words of affirmation was number one. But touch was on the bottom. He goes, guys, tell me you love me, but don't you ever touch me. Yeah, don't ever touch me. But yeah. Yeah. So we learned that. And you know, again, I remember we asked our team every year what was their favorite moment of their year. And I'll never forget our director of operations. And we hosted huge concerts here, sold out crowds. And he goes, jesse, it was after our first concert and you put your arm on my shoulder and said that you were proud of me and that I did well tonight. He goes, that was my best moment. And I go, wow. And I was like. It was just something I never really remembered. But, you know, we, as leaders, how do we tell people, you know, that we care about. Recognize them?

Isn't that interesting how knowing that little bit of information, like if that person was words of affirmation and touch, you just like full HD appreciated them. And what. You could do that same thing if people are gifts and quality time or. Yeah, you know, looking at that, I see how that would. How that would work.

And you have a database, you know, when you. We have all of our fans, we have all of our team. When they join our team, even in the interview process, we ask all these questions so we get to know them. When they first show up that first day, we try to create the biggest fan of them. So we map their entire day. You know, when they first come in, we actually have everyone in costume. Silly string. We have their favorite breakfast. We have a whole breakfast ceremony, you know, and we map their day. At the end of the day, we have a big cheers. Their name goes up on the wall and. And so again, I think if you want to create great fans of your customers, you got to Create great fans of your people first. And that's, that's part of our strategy, how we do things. But I don't know if that was the whole question. I think you asked some affirmations. I'm an energy guy. I just try to thrive. I try to do things that give me energy. I was terrible at operations, I'm terrible at finances. I'm terrible at, I don't touch those things, details. I stay in my energy. So I created my energy list. What are the things that give me energy? And I realized it was creating, sharing and growing. Whenever I'm coming with ideas, creating new visions, sharing with our team, leading on a speech on a podcast, or growing, reading, learning, listening to your podcast, other podcasts, I try to spend most of my day doing that and hire other people to do everything else. So when I go home to my. Yeah, yeah. And I go home to my 23 year olds, you know, I have, I have energy. I have energy to be there for them because I'm doing the things that gave me.

Because everything you're doing all day is energy. What's your best piece of advice for say, startup or somebody who's thinking, you know what, I'm gonna take something on here and I want to take this approach.

It's not the most poetic, but I would ask this question and I'd put it right on top of the front page of your paper and look at it on a regular basis. What makes you different? And what we did is we actually challenged our team and it's on our website, on our about us. We wrote all the different things that were different. The only all inclusive ballpark. We have no ads at our ballpark. We have grandma coaches, eight year old coaches. We play in kilts. We wrote all those things. And I think everyone tries to be a little bit better, a little bit faster, a little bit cheaper. What can you be the only at? And when you're the only, you don't have to market, you don't have to do everything else. You're the only because everyone's doing the marketing for you. So what makes you different? What can you be the only? I think for a startup, if you're trying to be a me too, it's hard work. It's a bloody ocean as the blue ocean strategy, right?

Exactly. Well, Jesse, you've been very generous with your time and this has been fun. I love it. I'm so glad we got to connect. I'm glad you're able to join us.

Thank you guys. You're the best Seriously, what a great group. You're doing amazing things. Thank you guys.

Awesome. Thanks so much.

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