Episode 110: Going Bananas for Profit First with Jesse Cole

Oh, we need. Hold on, hold on, hold on. We gotta do this from the top. You know why? Because Jesse's on the phone with us. We said we're gonna start having our guests grunt with us.

Oh, man.

Jesse, are you there still?

Yes, let's. Let's get the grunts going.

When the music kicks in, we want you grunting. Okay, so we're not. Let's just pick up right from the start. But, Chris, of course, as always, we'll never edit this out, so this will be the second start. All right, so you're listening.

Oh, sorry.

All you can. I'm sorry.

You're listening to the Profit first podcast, episode 110.

There he is.

I found. He's on the phone grunting.

Good job, Jesse.

Wow. Welcome, everyone, to the show. My name is Chris Curran. I'm the founder of Fractal Recording.

And I'm Mike Michalowitz, the author of Profit first and the newly released book Search. I'm joined in studio by my colleague Christina Bulldog.

Hello.

And hello. And you're listening to the Private first podcast, where we make our guests grunt. And people in the neighborhood are looking at them going, what the f are you doing?

He is outside, actually.

Oh, he's outside. People like, what the hell? This guy's grunting. It must be like some kind of anger management class he's taking over the phone. And we also talked a little bit about profit.

Right?

Of course we explore it. And today we're gonna talk about debt eradication. Perhaps one of the most important parts of becoming profitable is eradicating your debt through that profit.

Sign me up for.

That's right. It's all about profit. Revenue is. Oh, God. See, now it's hard for me to even come up with.

Oh, keep going. That revenue's.

Oh, God. Revenue is. Oh, God. But profit is.

Is a simple mod.

You are really good at this, man.

Wow. When you start saying it, my eyes start skirting around. I try to think of the word even before you say it.

Well, this is great. You can hear our show anywhere. You hear a podcast on itunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Tunein Radio, and the website Profit first podcast dot com. If you haven't been there. I mean, I know, look, you probably use your mobile most of the time. You probably, maybe on your desktop or your laptop, have not gone toProfit first podcast.com. but you should, because there's all our previous episodes, all kinds of awesome resources for you and your business. And the thing I love about Profit first is that profit equals sustainability. That's how you stay in business. That's how you live a good life. And that's why we talk about it on the show. We have a great guest every week. Different kinds of guests, too. Some are experts, some are people who are putting into practice. And then Mike and Christina and I, we give our takeaways from what we learned. It's kind of a nice little package we deliver. Right, Mike?

Oh, my gosh. And today's episode is going to be perfect. We have a major success story. A guy who turned around an organization using profit first, and quite frankly, a lot of other innovative tactics. So we're going to dig into that. But before we do that, I first Chris got to know what you been up to, my brother.

Oh, last night we did a full moon hike. Actually, it was at 9pm it was, you know, just. Just got dark, and we met with our meetup group and we did a full moon hike. But it's funny, couple hours before, and this happens a lot in Colorado Springs. It was raining and it was a little dark, and people are writing on the meetup page. Are we still gonna do it? I don't know. It's. It's storming, and we're like, look, we're gonna show up and we're gonna see if it's crazy rainy and muddy when we get there. Then we'll just, you know, maybe go to a coffee shop. But anyway, it was clear. We had a nice hike, 12 people, and it was beautiful.

Oh, that's a nice turnout. I'm always shocked by the weather forecasts, how inaccurate they are. I listen to ACCU Weather, which is the most inaccurate weather in the world.

Well, it helps. Well, it doesn't help living near the mountains because the mountains do create weather. And, like, literally, it'll just turn dark. It'll rain a little rain for five minutes in the middle of a sunny day, and then 20 minutes later, it's sunny again. So it's the mountains.

That happened in Jersey, like two days ago. I went and I stopped in at the food store. It was like, sunny and beautiful. And then I stepped out. It was like torrential downpour. And I actually dropped my phone in a puddle.

It's bizarre. Yeah, it's bizarre. So when we engage a new member, when someone joins our family, we play Thunderstock. It's tradition here by AC DC and the music cranks up right. Well, now I want. There's seven of us here, so we're slowly growing. I want everyone pounding the desk during the pivotal moments. So to demonstrate how to do it, I start pounding my desk. I punched my keyboard. I ripped my finger open.

Oh, you didn't see it?

No.

This was yesterday. Yeah, and then I looked this morning and there was skin wedged in. That is disgusting.

In my keyboard, you were rocking out so hard. You were bleeding.

It looks like I got in a fist fight with somebody.

That's ridiculous.

Oh, I hope you're okay. That reminds me of Ron. When Play the music on the gmab show, Ron gets so psyched, he started flailing his arms. I think he punched himself, right?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

He did punch himself. That was awesome. He got so jacked. I'm going to give you another little teaser about our guest today. He runs a baseball team. Okay. And he's using Profit First. I'll give you full details in a second.

I hope his appearance is a home run.

No, he's never heard that one before. You know, with his wife, he always gets to second base. That was so stupid. I don't even get that. So I first want to thank our corporate partners who make this episode and all of our episodes a reality.

Love it.

They are Receipt bank, who bought 100 or 200 copies of profit First. Is that right? And are you handing them out to people?

That is correct.

I'm seeing on social media, hey, thanks Receipt bank for this amazing book. I'm like, oh, what's the book? I'm like, oh, my gosh. Profit. Oh my God. Nextiva voiceover IP phone system Fund a box. If you have invoices that need to be, you know, collect a little bit faster, they actually finance them and then fund Dara, which is one stop shop loan sourcing. By the way, one last thing about them, all those sponsors, except Receipt bank hasn't inked the deal yet. All of them are going to be at Profitcon 2016. Now before we enter our interview, here's the one thing you got to do. Go type in Google, you know, profitcon1word 2016, or go to profit first professionals. That's our website dot com. And click on upcoming events. September 29th, October 1st certified. We are going to talk about profit first. And this guest you're about to hear from is going to be keynoting at the event. You're going to learn how to bring more profit to your business, how to grow your business, how to become more innovative and all that stuff.

Now, I think Barry's work, I think Barry has actually seen Jesse speak. And Barry, what is Jesse Cole going to need at ProfitCon to really kill it at the keynote talk?

You're gonna need a couple of horses. A couple of mules. Of course. Of course.

Genius.

Genius. Jesse Cole is the founder of Fans First Entertainment. Check the parallel there. Who owns and operates the Savannah Bananas as well as the Gastonia Grizzles? Grizzlies. Grizzles. That's the. The bacon division. It didn't work out. The Custodian Grizzlies in the Coastal Plain League. In his first year of owning the Savannah Bananas, the team has gained worldwide recognition and publicity. Obi Wan Kenobi even has one of their hats. He's proudly sporting it today. I have their T shirts. We're getting more of their gear. They've been featured on espn, Good Morning America, the Today show, and all these other amazing things. But I think most miraculously, he's the guy who took over the league. Jesse did, and took him out of debt. And we're talking a lot of debt. Hey, Jesse, how much debt was it?

Well, excited to be here, guys.

As far as the debt, by the way, welcome to our show.

Thank you. And guys, this is the first interview I've ever started by grunting. So that was the new person.

Thank you.

So, yeah, definitely a lot of debt. When we started our first franchise in Gastonia, I came in the first day and we only had hundreds of dollars in our account, and we found out the team was losing hundreds and thousands of dollars. So that was when we first started. I, right out of college, learned about that debt problem. And then two years ago, when we bought Castonia and then bought Savannah, my wife and I went from zero debt to $1.8 million in debt pretty quickly. So that was a new adventure for us.

Oh, wow. How does a guy come out of college and say, yeah, I mean, I own a baseball team?

Well, I had the opportunity to be a general manager. So I played baseball my whole life and got an opportunity to be a GM right out of college. And that's when I really found out that the team was struggling and that we had to be dramatically different and make it about entertainment and not just baseball. So after a few years of improving the attendance and having success with Gastonia, I had an opportunity to buy in and become a partner, and then eventually bought my partner out a few years ago.

So, minor league baseball, what was the attendance for this conference and perhaps other minor league conferences throughout the nation? What's the typical attendance to events that's resulting in this debt accumulation? And what's the attendance for your events now?

Sure. What I found out with our team in Gastonia, Our first year previously they were averaging just a couple hundred fans coming to the games. I mean, a big day would be five or six hundred fans. It was disgusting to look at the numbers and see that few fans coming. Right now in Savannah, we're averaging over 3,500 fans a game and we we're about to sell out 75% of our total games with over 4,000 fans.

Wow. So you brought it up by 700% increase in fan attendance off the best case scenarios. What do you do to increase the fan attendance like that?

Well, again, our name of our company is Fans first Entertainment. I think what a lot of people look at is baseball and just keep it as baseball. We look solely at the experience and how to create baseball fans of people that might not come to a baseball game. So to give you an example, our first year back in Smithsonian and now we carry it into Savannah. Our players do choreographed dances during the games. We actually have dance instructors come teach our players how to dance. And they do it in the middle of the game. We have grandma beauty pageants, we pie people during the game. We even have our players come into the crowd and deliver roses to little girls in the middle of the game. So it's all about creating those memories. So there's a lot of ridiculous stories I can tell about what's happened at the ballpark, but our goal is for people to come and leave that. You won't believe what I saw at the stadium tonight. And what happens is creates all word of mouth marketing and you know, with first Gastonia going from a couple hundred fans a game to over 2000 and now to Savannah sung on almost all the games, it's really been all about the experience for us. And that's what we look at. And so it's been a wild ride, but a lot of fun, I'll tell you that.

Yeah, I'm definitely going to ask you. I got a list of different events you do or activities at the games. I want to ask you about those in a few minutes. Word of mouth marketing, I assume that takes time to dribble out. So when you took over the Gastonia Grizzlies, when you took over and now are running Savannah Bananas, I presume the first few games you still got the core audience of a few hundred people. Did it take time and how long did it take to get the word of mouth out about this new approach to baseball?

Well, our first year we went bizarre. I mean we, I mean literally, we thought of every ridiculous promotion. We had a flat shot where we gave Away whoopee cushions and had a farting contest on the field.

A farting contest on the field, which was.

Which was ridiculous to watch. And then we. Then we had. A few nights later, we had a salute to underwear night where we gave away grizzlies, tighty whities, and if you wore your underwear on the outside, you got in a free ticket. So literally everything we were doing was to create buzz. And it worked. At first it went from a couple hundred to twelve hundred a game and then to fifteen hundred and then over two thousand and twenty. You know, we're selling out five or six games there a year in a smaller market than Savannah. So the word of mouth market was all about just create buzz. And people were really talking like, what are they doing? I mean, we had donut dogs, donut burgers, waffle burgers. We have this garbage can, nachos with three orders of nachos and burgers and hot dogs and nacho cheese and donuts. 3200 calories of chaos on there. So we just thought of everything that was ridiculous and then got people talking and they started coming out and saying, wow, this is more than just a baseball game.

What do the other owners think of you? They. Yeah, just what the other owners think.

I'll give you a great example. I remember the first year when I was a GM and I told. I said, we're doing dunk. The GM inning and the fifth inning of every game. I went into the dunk tank and had all the fans and even staff get a chance to dunk me. And the commissioner of the league said, what are you doing? A GM should not be in the dunking. And I said, why not? I said, the GM should be having as much fun as anyone else. So they started thinking of them like I was crazy. And the other owners, you know, to an extent, they're seeing the results. But yeah, they think, you know, they think I have three heads and they think the way we do things is completely different. But, you know, that's. That's what we want to make in our ballpark. It can't just be about baseball.

Are you getting pushed out or pushed back from them? Are they trying to get you out of the league? Are you damaging the reputation of baseball?

No, fortunately, at least I don't know if I'm not getting pushed out of a league. But, you know, obviously what we fulfilled it as, we're developing baseball fans. I mean, I love the game of baseball. I think it's challenged because it's so slow. And I think it needs to be sped up. I think it needs to be more exciting. However, a lot of our people that are coming to our games are now building a love for baseball. A great example was the other night. You know, we have about a couple hundred fans come dress up in banana costumes to our games here in Savannah, which is awesome. But what happened at the end of the game? We lost a close game and the entire fan base gave our players a standing ovation just because of the way they played. I was like, wow. You know, this happened because now they're developing appreciation for baseball. So hopefully that message can get built to the owners. But if it's not, it's not. We're going to do our thing and we're always going to be different.

So the banana costumes, those fans, they're coming on their own accord. Like, you don't give them costumes that they. They're starting to buy into the brand that strongly now.

Oh, 100%. I mean, we actually sell them in the. We sell them in our banana stand, which is our merchandise store in Savannah. Here we sell them and we have some nights we'll sell 15 or 20 of them. We've had people come in gorilla costumes, self made banana hats. I mean, it's become this ridiculous phenomenon where people are doing everything banana themed and we're loving it.

Now let me ask you about the fans that are historically there for the. They've been there prior to you attending. They clearly, if they're one of the hundred fans in the stand, they love baseball. Do they think you're kind of smearing the legacy of baseball?

I'm sure there are some, you know, I'm sure there's. I mean, we've had some fans say, you know, hey, the games are so packed, they're crazy. It's not. It's a circus. It's not a baseball game. You know, I just wanted to come find, watch baseball and, you know, I'm sure there's a few that we lose, but it's not really smearing the game. If we only play with what's happening in between innings, we really don't mess with what's happening between, you know, from when the inning starts, every minute and a half between innings, we have 18 different shows that we put on and then the hour and a half before the game starts. That's all art. So, yes, we do have live music that plays during the games. Not post game concerts, not pre game concerts. So there are a few things that mesh and cross that line, but most everything is just done when we have our break.

Gotcha. So tell me about the implementation of Profit First. I know you discovered the book and you started doing something with, you know, this $1.8 million of debt you were carrying. How did you leverage Profit first and where do you stand on debt today?

Yeah, I was blown away when I, when I read that and read that chapter on debt. I think I read it three times in a row. And I, I went to my wife and I said, this is a serious problem. And at that point, I remember getting a phone call as I was reading your book. I got a phone call in January that Savannah had run out of money. And literally this was before we launched our name, before we had any games. And I said, we have to go all in. We have to minimize all of our costs. We have to get rid of all of our debt. And I kept reading that chapter and especially the part where it says you need to enjoy saving more than you enjoy spending. And so Emily and I made that a challenge and we said, all right, let's go grocery store shopping and try to spend less than $30 for the week. And it was the most enjoyable college like ramen noodles experience, experience I've ever seen. And we started doing that with everything. And I mean, to give you an example, I mean, literally, we looked at every expense. How can we cut it out? And how can we start focusing solely on debt? I mean, we're probably the only owners of any team that's left on an air bed. For three months. We sold our house in Charlotte. I mean, we were sleeping on an air bed in the duplex that we had down here, a fixer upper that was maybe 500 square feet. I could roll out of the air bed, literally go to the kitchen, in the bathroom in two strides. And I remember I wake up in the middle of the night. As I go to the air bed, Emily, my wife, would get airborne because we're on an air bed. She's flying in the air. It was a very interesting three months, but we looked at everything. We have a charger, a phone charger that's literally hanging on by one little string and it's about to fall apart. But just from your chapter that you talked about, one more day, one more day we've held on to that charger. And I have a laptop that was $250 I bought four years ago. That's my only laptop I'll use. I don't use an iPad. I'm still using that asus. That was $250 that I bought four years ago. So we try to look at everything, and from there, we started focusing on how can we get rid of every little debt burst. And that was Emily's student loans and our other small loans from the team and just knocking those off to now. You know, I think right now we only have the two big loans for the teams, and it's about $800,000 left. So we've knocked about a million dollars off.

Million dollars. What do you think about that, Christina?

I don't even have words.

Unbelievable. Now, to cut a million dollars in debt, you have to sell a lot of tickets, right? I mean, what generates the revenue to eradicate that debt?

Yeah, Obviously, ticket sales is huge. Sponsorship and merchandise in Savannah has been unlike anything I've ever seen. You know, we sold 49 of the 50 states. We're still waiting on Alaska. I hope they step up soon.

Come on. All right, so let's just take a second right now. If anyone is listening from Alaska. And I know we have Alaska list. We do step up now. Go to Savannah Bananas. Buy a hat or something. We, you know, we have them here. You can mail it to me as a gift. Actually, that'd be even cooler.

I'm gonna go on and buy a T shirt.

Yeah. All right. So someone from Alaska buy it right now. But you. So you have 48 states that have bought from you already.

49. Hawaii has actually done more than 50 orders.

Wow.

They like bananas.

Who doesn't like bananas?

Yeah.

And a funny story about that. So when we released the name, we knew there was going to be some backlash because it's so different. And so we prepared our whole staff. We said, we're going all in on this. So we announced here at the stadium. And we bought. We had shirts and hats and everything ready, and we announced it. And fortunately, people cheered here. There were a few booths, but most of the to cheers. And then Emily, my wife, comes up to me later that afternoon, later that evening, and we were trending on Twitter, and it was on sportscenter. And she said, jesse, we're all out of all the shirts and hats we bought. So literally, we didn't plan. We had a. We had a max out credit card to rush in all the extra merchandise. And that first night went to six different countries. And we learned pretty quickly that the shipping to different countries, like Australia, it doesn't work out for us. So we shut down the international shipping ASAP because it was about $100 to ship those shirts. So we learned a lot of lessons quickly. But for merchandise and ticket sales, and concessions. You know, that's really how you build. And then also outside events. You know, we try to look at the ballpark not just as a stadium, but how can you have concerts and beer festivals and 5Ks and you know, we're looking at really as an entertainment venue through and through. And that's how you build the revenue to help off that and start take.

Care of the debt while we're sitting here. Christine, Christine, explain. She's looking at some of your merchandise.

I'm actually looking at your website right now. I was looking at your merchandise and I particularly like the save second base T shirt with the two baseballs as a bra.

Yeah.

Oh my.

Yeah, that's a good seller for us.

So, okay, so you increase.

We have more too. We're trying to be strategic again, you know, everything. We release the brand and then next year, I mean, you know, from keep calm and go bananas to just peel it to, you know, we've got so many ideas of things. You can play off the banana theme that we'll just slowly unveil next year so we can get build more of a fan base with all of our merch buyers. So it's all part of a strategic plan. We don't have our best stuff out yet. We're going to release that as we move forward.

You could make a banana bandana.

Oh, oh, do you think of that one?

I like. No, that, that's, that's a no brainer. And then we also have a tree area at the ballpark which hopefully, Mike, if you get to come out next year, we're going to put all yellow hammocks and call it the banana hammock area.

Yes. Oh, bro, I am coming out. My wife Krista and I are coming out. Be prepared. So the next question I have is around you increase your sales, but you also said you're keeping costs really in check. You're living the kind of college budget at home and in the business. Do you, if you can compare yourself to other owners, do they run it as cost effectively as you do you believe?

You know, I mean, I can't speak for other owners. I think what we've learned to maximize is trade out. You know, we literally look at every opportunity to use our assets to trade for something as opposed to buying. So I mean, I learned this back in Gastonia. When I first started, you know, 10 years ago, we had literally no money in our account and I was like, how can we get stuff that we need without paying for it? So we started getting our business cards, trading and Our printing traded and our sign installation at the stadium traded. And we looked at everything that we could get traded by offering either some tickets or advertising. And we still do it today. For instance, all of our bananas for the whole season. And we go through a lot of bananas. I mean, we, we throw a banana in the pants promotion where we throw bananas off the top deck and people catch them in their pants. That usually ends.

Oh my God, that's incredible.

We usually end up with 12 broken bananas. We actually had the players, the entire team do a whole practice with just bananas. Taking batting practice with bananas, throwing bananas, ground balls with just bananas. So we go through a lot of bananas and we got that. So we have all of our bananas covered. The season traded. I wear. I own four yellow tuxedos because. Why, why wouldn't an owner own four yellow tuxedos? So. Yeah, of course. So I own four of those. And our dry cleaning is traded for the whole year. I mean, we look at every single thing that we can trade as far as the relationship and that cuts cost dramatically. I mean, probably throughout the last 10 years, we're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars saved based on doing trade outs.

Amazing. Amazing. And what about the ticketing machine? I remember you and I were talking offline and you said you wouldn't believe. I did. With tickets.

Yeah. I mean, most teams, what they do is they have a ticketing software which could be 20, 30, $40,000. And then the biggest thing which really kills me is that it charges those quote unquote convenience fees, which there's never been an extra fee that's convenient. So that goes so anti fans first that it drove me nuts. I was like, I'm not going to pay a ticking software and then hurt our fan experience. So for the last 10 years, we've never charged a convenience fee. You know, obviously they're shipping for merchandise, but if people buy Tickets, it's a $9 ticket. It's a $9 ticket. So to do that we had to bring our tickets in house and think again, differently. So what we designed, we worked with a company and we. All of our tickets are shaped like bananas. So every ticket is a pre printed yellow banana ticket. And again, we don't have to give out fees. We don't have to pay for all the ticketing software, the ticket printers, the ticket scanners. And it's, you know, saved a lot of money over the years. And you know, again, it's just, I always say, can you think differently and unique as opposed to think how you can spend it's you know, outspend. And I think that that's what a lot of owners, a lot of times they get, you know, think what's the easiest way to do things. And that's not usually the best.

And I love that the ticket is memorabilia. I mean, like, they're getting a gift just by getting a ticket now. Are you serious? Tickets are only $9.

Yeah. So. Well, the biggest thing that we did is, again, I know I'm being really repetitive here, but think differently. I think about what the best fan experience is. And when you go to a ballpark, you go to any sporting event, what happens? You pay your 10, 20, $30 ticket, then you pay $5 for a hot dog, you pay $10 for a beer at some places, and you keep adding up, adding up. So we reworked the whole thing here and we said, no, let's do everything included. So we developed in Savannah, and one of the reasons why we sold out most of our games is the all inclusive tickets. You get a ticket, all your hot dogs, burgers, chicken sandwiches, soda water, popcorn, and dessert, including the ticket for $15.

And what do you do with the. With the live music and things like that, too? I mean, are you paying for these, these musicians to come in, or are you making arrangements with local bands and saying, hey, you know, come play at our stadium. We're building a great, you know, rapport with our audience and you get some, you know, fans out of it, or how does that all work?

Yeah, same thing. A lot of times what we do is we trade that or, I mean, the most we'll usually pay for acoustic act and a full band is $200, because we work it as they're playing in front of a huge fan base and we get the opportunity to sell their stuff as well. But, you know, again, it's looking at, you know, like we were saying with the tickets, the $9 is just if there's a single game ticket available, which most of the games, there's not. When you have the 4,000 tickets, it's all that $15 ticket, which includes all their food. So people come to the ballpark and they don't pull money out of their pocket. They literally can just enjoy their food, enjoy the entertainment, and it's, again, a better fan experience.

Fifteen bucks. And with that volume of tickets, it's a profitable event for you.

100%. 100%. You know, we do all the math. Unfortunately, that goes back to making deals. You know, I went to our hot dog vendor and I went to our soda vendor and our beer Vendor. I said, hey, guys, we're about to make all the food and drink at our stadium for free for everyone. And they looked at me like I was crazy and I explained. And so we were able to obviously get better deals so we can cut our cost there and then make it a profitable venture.

What do the baseball players think about this?

I'll never forget the first story in Gastonia. My first day I showed up and, you know, again, I was only 23 years old. I was a new GM and before their first practice, I had a dance instructor walk out. I said, guys, before we practice, you're going to learn how to dance. The look that I got, I had one pitcher even walk away and said, you got to be kidding me. However, as the season went on and the attendance started to grow and play in front of sold out crowds, I'll never forget that pitcher. He was doing the jump punnett dance in front of all the fans. He rips his belt off. He ripped his shirt off. And he's getting into it more than I've ever seen. So to answer the question, it takes time, but once the guys see it, for instance, we just released a music video. You know, Justin Timberlake's Can't Stop the Feeling. You guys should check it out. It's called Can't Stop the Feeling. And we. So we did this music video and the guys who put the players in it and within two days it got 150,000 views on Facebook. So now they're celebrities and they're feeling like. So they're now, hey, whatever you want to do. We'll do cracks with bananas. We'll throw bananas in the crowd. They're all in because they know they're playing in front of 4,000 fans here, whereas the other ballparks might not be playing in front of it that much.

I mean, absolutely amazing. A win for the customers, the attendees wins for the players.

Sound like a steal, customer?

It's a steal.

It's benefiting the business.

And you don't even have to be a baseball fan. Like, let's just go for a game.

I want to go to a game.

I mean, Jesse, how much further can you go? What's next for you? More baseball teams? What are you doing next?

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, we keep looking at, you know, obviously it's a challenge. My wife and I spend a ton of time working. You know, we're still, you know, hopefully to start a family soon. So we want to keep doing this because we love it. We're always looking at new markets. But, you know, again, I think there's other ways that you can look at a fan favorite. First, entertainment. It could be in the restaurant business. It could be, I mean, any type of thing that's entertaining fans or an entertaining customer and just look at it that way. So I'm not sure where we're going to get into, but, I mean, I'll tell you, we absolutely love every day. I mean, we come in, it's hilarious. Everyone in our office is loving the time of their life. I mean, we're coming up with new movie ideas and new promotions, and it's more like just a fun game that we're playing as opposed to work.

Wow. One of the most amazing businesses I've ever heard of. Hey, Jesse.

One second, Mike, I got a quick question. What would. What advice would you give to people listening that have pretty, you know, regular businesses, landscaping companies, or just any kind of business? What would. What advice would you give them to. To come up with these new ideas and maybe sort of tweak their business model? I mean, some people might not even know where to start. Maybe some people aren't as creative and wildly creative as you have been. What would you advise?

Well, I mean, I always believe and I always believe and think differently and think more in your customer stakes. So, for instance, a landscaping business. So if someone's doing landscape, think about, what do your customers want? What do they hate about the landscaping business? And I'll tell you. Example, landscaping business. A lot of times you don't get calls back. There's no nice touches. I mean, what about if they mow your lawn and they take care of you and leave, you know, some cookies or snacks or something where they're with a nice note, hey, glad to keep. Take care of your lawn. And then all of a sudden you create that fan base that people are taking pictures and they're tweeting about it. I mean, there's all different things. If you think, what is your perfect experience from. I mean, it's what Uber did. It's what Uber did. Uber literally said, the cab business doesn't work. We don't like it. We're going to make it a much better experience. And look how they're doing. So I always say that. I mean, don't think of the way it used to be, but think about the perfect scenario for your customers first, and then you can create a business. You don't need to be the most creative guy in the world. Just think if you had your lawn mowed, what could it. What could Be. What does it look like? What's that? Perfect experience.

Jesse, thank you so much for this wonderful interview. We'll be in touch, brother. And everyone, Jesse is coming to ProfitCon to speak. So join us at the event. We'll give you details on how you can attend to there and see Jesse speak. But again, Jesse, thanks so much for joining us today.

Thanks a lot, guys.

Thanks, Jesse. And Mike, you got to dress up as a banana when you go down there.

I think I do that at Profit.

I love the banana in the pants.

What's his website again?

Oh, gosh. SavannahBananas.com. jesse, are you still with us?

Yeah, it's the SavannahBananas.com gives you another example. Someone wanted to charge us a ton of money. I said no, we'll just be the savannahbananas.com. thank you.

Oh, beautiful. So you just said the. You added the.

Yeah.

Thank you so much.

The link will be in our show notes anyway.

Yes.

So, yeah. And is there any other thing we should share about your. So people can get tickets for events? Is that where they go, Jesse?

Yeah, they go to the Savannah bananas or GastoniaGrizzlies.com and, you know, I'm on LinkedIn and Facebook and, you know, Facebook's where we really. That's one of our big platforms. So we're constantly updating our. Both of our teams on Facebook because that's really our way to reach our fans, the best way right now.

And we didn't talk about Gastonia Grizzlies. Is this kind of the same format as Savannah? Vaness, you have all these amazing activities going on.

We try to. Yeah, again. Yeah, we just. We just think of what's. What's a ridiculous thing to happen at the ballpark, and we try to do it.

Cool. All right, brother. Thanks again.

Thanks, Jesse.

Thanks.

All right, so in a second, we're going to do a recap of what we learned. Pages of notes everywhere. Christina's surfing the website. I hope you as a listener right now going, holy cow, this is amazing. Totally. It's. You can turn your business around. And that $1 million of debt. I think when I was interviewing him, I'm interviewing him for the new release of Profit first, the Expand Edition. I believe he did it in about a year.

That's crazy.

Blew away the expectations for the lenders to recover their money, and everyone is thrilled. But first, I want to thank our corporate partners to make the show possible.

We love them.

They're kind of zany people themselves. They're wildly successful companies. I want to Start with receipt bank.

Yes.

Receipt bank is a way to track your invoices. I'm sorry? To track your receipts. Hence receipt bank. Otherwise, we called invoice bank to track your receipts. So you spend a bill. Actually, Rookie 2, one of our interns has came back with a receipt. I need to now scan it into our system here. And so I'll know that she didn't go out and buy, like, clothing for herself. She actually picked up our sandwiches.

That's her actual, like, birth given name, by the way.

Yeah. So we have two new interns, and so Rookie one. Rookie two. It's kind of like, like, Thing One thing too. And they're awesome.

If one of them was a guy, you could. One could be Rookie one could be Mookie. But they're both girls.

Yeah, Moki, cut me. For God's sake, cut me. So that's for C Bank. Then we have Nextiva. Nextiva is our voiceover IP phone system. We live it. Rookie 2 is getting her own phone.

I think this week it should.

Yeah, we got check. We got check. Yeah, we do. We do the slow order. They can overnight it to us. That'll be our. In this office alone, eight phones.

I was gonna say, like, 10th.

10Th phone. Yeah. So a lot of phones. And they're awesome. Voice over ip, inexpensive, but effective. You know, I hope Savannah Bananas is using nextiva. Next is Fundera One Stop Loan funding. So if you need to get a loan, maybe a new ticket machine to process those banana tickets and put a little kind of pop a hole in it to. To check them in. You can. Fundera will source that. You know they will.

They find the people to take care of it all for you.

They do, right? They do, right? That's a good point. That's right. If you need new uniforms for your.

Team, if you need banana suits, you need banana suits.

Yeah, But I like how Jesse's approaching. He's like, screw it. I'll just get the stuff for free. I'll talk about that in a minute. And Fundbox is. If you have invoices that your clients aren't paying and you need those funds, Fundbox will release the funds to you. It's kind of a form of financing. They'll never collect from the client. You get the money when you normally do, and then you return the funds to fund the box, plus their little service fee. Amazing companies again. See them all out at profitcon. And I'll mention profitcon again in a second. Hey, Christina, you're up first. What did you learn from today's? Call.

Oh, God. I just love that he's pushing the boundaries and the camaraderie that he's built, not only with the team, but with the fans. It's just thinking out of the box and not sticking to the traditional baseball game, I think is brilliant because look at the outreach that they're having all of a sudden. And when I was on their website, they have a list of upcoming events. I think they have, like, a family day, and each one's, like, sold out. So. And it's just. It's amazing how little you have to do in order to get a crazy amount of success when it comes to that, like, just being creative and, you know, pushing the boundaries and, you know, not following the traditional route.

Yeah, it's so unbelievable. Here's what I learned he said. And he said really quickly as he was discussing all these different things he did. He said, baseball's so slow, right? He figured out the biggest problem baseball has, and he fixed it. He said, I don't mess with the game, but every time there's a break, we're doing something special. And I told him I would ask him about all the different special things he does, like the grandma beauty pageant and the donut burgers, but he actually explained almost everything. He also has a midnight madness game, which I don't think he mentioned. The second thing I learned, too, is he said, it's a venue. I have a venue here that doesn't get used just for baseball. It's a venue, so we have a marathon happening. So he realized he has this fixed asset that he can use in other ways. How many baseball stadiums are doing that? Yankee Stadium. Every time I go by, it's absolutely empty. Now, I know they're major league and they make their money off TV and stuff, but, wow, he's really using everything he's got. He puts on 18 shows per game he's shared because he's filling in that space. And my favorite thing was the college budget. He says, I first took the college budget home and. And we went shopping for $30 for a week's food supply and had fun doing it. You know, when you live it personally first, it's so easy to translate into business. You know, our personal life and our business life has to be one of the same. You can't live frugally in work and excessively in the home life. There's this incongruency. But he decided to make it fun, and now it's congruent across the board. Chris, what'd you learn?

Yeah, and when he was living cheap at home, he said he was sleeping on an air mattress two steps away from the bathroom in the kitchen. And when he got off the bed, his wife would up. I was like, man, you got, like a little bounce house right in your house.

Yeah, right. The kids come in the afternoon. They're all hopping on it. That's funny.

So before Jesse took over the team, actually, Barry, the maintenance guy in our old building, he. He attended a game. And when we asked Barry after the game what he thought of the whole experience, this is what he had to say. This is before Jesse took over.

There's no activity, no giggle, no nothing. No. Ironically, that is so well suited because there was no activity and no giggle and no nothing. No nothing.

Now, Barry, you've been there afterwards, and you love it, right?

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Hey, Barry, I got one for you and Chris, I have Barry over here now. He just miraculously teleported over to our location. Barry, question for you is, you know, Chris wanted to know how other businesses, these ordinary businesses, so to speak, could be extraordinary and so innovative. Do you have a specific tip on what they could do exactly, to be more innovative? Maybe even like a lawn care business? Smoke weed every day. Ah, that's a good way to be in a. That's a good, innovative strategy.

I think it's a ripple effect, though, because the more entertainment you have for the audience, the higher their excitement is. The higher their excitement is, the better the players are playing the game. And then there's more wins. And it's just like there's so much happiness and joy surrounding it that it just creates such a positive.

I'm gonna look up. Can't stop this peeling any. You know, right when we're done.

I can't wait to see that.

Yeah.

And the dancing. But what I like best was when what he said, his answer to my question at the end. What can you do? And he said, think about the perfect experience for your customer and think about it. Yeah, it just requires thinking. I think a lot of times we don't just sit down and think and maybe brainstorm and think. I mean, thinking is the highest function we're capable of. And we get caught in this where we just got to go do, do, do, go take action. Take action. And, of course, do the same thing everyone else is doing. No, stop. Think. Plan something. Look at the success Jesse's having. It's crazy.

Break the industry norms. Break the industry norms. You know, that's what he's doing.

Then people take pictures and tweet about you as well.

Yeah. Start wrapping us up here now.

There you go. So that does it for us. Thank you, Mike. Thank you, Christina. By the way, Profit first podcast dot com. It's a website. It's on the www. It's Profit first podcast dot com. You know what's there? All of our previous episodes.

All of them.

Hold on. I got a cough.

Let it out. Let it out.

Okay, I need a pattern.

I'll fill it with something.

Qualcomm punch.

Okay, that covered. That was just to cover his cough.

All our previous episodes. Look, you're. You're in business. You want to be a profitable business. This show, listening every week is just, you know, dripping this wisdom into your brain. It really is making such a difference. I mean, I challenge you. If you've been listening for, like, 20, 30, 50 episodes, write. Comment on this post and write an email to Mike and tell us the effect this has had on your business. Just talking about profit, thinking about profit. It's really great. Of course, you can hear us everywhere. You listen to podcasts. You can also rate and review us as well, and we're really happy you're listening, Helpy. What did I say?

Yeah, well, I know you've been smoking weed every day yourself.

Hey, now. And also behind everything, this is like the wizard behind the curtain is Profit First Professionals, because Mike Michalowicz and Obi Ron Kenobi are. Talk about changing a paradigm and shaking things up. My God. Profit First Professionals, please.

Okay, so, you know, normally I tell you, put your ear closer to the speaker this time. Put your rear end right on the speaker right there. Put it there. Closer, closer.

Oh, okay.

There you go. I hope that hurt. I. I hope that hurt. Why? Because I want to get you moving yourself over to your keyboard on your computer and typing in Profit first professionals dot com. Then I want you to go to the find button. This is exactly what Jesse did. He connected with us. This is exactly what you can do. You can connect with us. Do you want your business to be more profitable? We do that. We have a group of Profit first professionals who guide you to profitability. And you don't have to do it in some staunch, boring fashion. You can have the time of your life just like Jesse is. So do it for yourself. It's time to get your business profitable. It's for you no longer to be that 200 people attendance business. We want you to get up to 3500 people like Jesse has. Go to profitfirstprofessionals.com right now and click on the find button. We'll do the rest.

It's such a great system you and Obi Ron can have set up and it's really great. So profit first, professionals.com. and don't forget ProfitCon in the fall. I can't wait. I want to go. I want to have a little setup outside the room with some microphones. We'll record some live interviews. It's just going to be great. So thank you, Mike. Thank you, Christina. Thank you to Jesse Cole and of course in the background, Obi Ron Kenobi and the Hawaiian Lumberjack and Rookie 1 and 2, which you're going to have to get more creative with that, Mike.

And Mo and Mo.

And Mo.

Who's Mo? Yeah.

Well, we got so many people on here, Aaron. Yeah.

All right. Well, thanks for listening, everybody, and join us next week.

We got America's number one business coach. You always wondered who was the number one business coach. We found him. It's Clay Clark. Oh, it's Clay Clark.

We got.

I knew you knew. Number 17, number 12. Who's number one? Clay Clark. He's coming on and he's going to tell us why happiness and profitability actually comes from the word no, no, no, no, no, no.

All right. Well, thanks for listening, everyone. Thanks again, Jesse. We'll see you all next week.

See.