I Bought a Baseball Stadium, and it was the Best Decision of My Life.
Jesse Cole is the eccentric owner of two college baseball teams: the Savannah Bananas, and Gastonia Grizzlies.
When he was 30 years old, Jesse and his wife, Emily, bought the Grizzlies and started Fans First Entertainment. One year later, they started a new college baseball team named the Savannah Bananas.
In this article, Jesse shares the many lessons he’s learned as a baseball team owner, and as a professional showman.
Note: This article is an excerpt from his interview on the Author Hour podcast. Click here to listen to the full interview on iTunes.
Enter Jesse.
Keep throwing darts.
I made a phone call to the owner of the team and said, “Ken, we’re no longer going to be a baseball team.”
“What are you talking about?”
“We’re going to be a circus. It’s going to be all about entertainment. The reality is, no one’s been caring about a baseball team.”
Our players were going to do choreographed dances every game. We were going to have a grandma beauty pageant. I was going to get in the dunk tank every game, and it was going to become a circus.
We had nothing to lose.
We had a flatulence fun night where we gave away whoopee cushions and had a bean burrito eating contest on the field. We had a salute to underwear night where we actually threw grizzlies underwear in the crowd and people that wore their underwear on the outside got a free ticket.
It was the most un-family friendly night we could ever have. And believe me, both those promotions failed miserably.
But we learned. And more than anything, we created attention.
Will Ferrell recently said in a commencement speech: “You’ve got to keep throwing darts at the dart board, and you’ll eventually hit the bullseye.”
There have been a lot of trials, a lot of failures. But the reality is that we need to stand out and do things differently. We all need a little bit more fun in our lives.
Why are you doing what you’re doing?
I’ll never forget the moment that happened in a game in the 2011 season. Someone who was 21 years old and a celebrity in our community had gone off to Afghanistan and unfortunately was killed. An intern came up to me and said, “Jesse, I’m very close to the family. We’ve got to do something.”
Two weeks later, we had our “Salute the Troops Night,” when 3,700 people came to the stadium. In the first inning, we stopped the game. We invited his entire family down to the field and had everyone stand. Two Marines brought a framed jersey with his name to them, and for two minutes, we read a tribute to him.
You could hear a pin drop in the stadium.
When his mother walked off the field, she gave me the biggest hug I’ve ever received, and I walked to my office and just lost it.
It was that moment that I realized, really, why we’re doing what we’re doing. It’s to bring people together and create a family and treat them like a family.
That’s how we developed our business name, Fans First Entertainment. Everything we do is for the fans, to bring them together.
I went a different direction than all the colon cleansing and the port-a-johns. Now, moments like that happen every single year where families come to us and hug us and say, “You won’t believe what you’ve done for our family.” That means everything for us.
Whatever’s normal, do the exact opposite.
I have six yellow tuxedos. I proposed in a yellow tuxedo. Thank goodness, she said, yes.
That’s who I am. But everyone has something that makes them stand out. It’s about finding your best version of yourself. Not only yourself but also for your business.
Over the last ten years in this crazy business, we’ve seen the things that have worked. I believe it’s applicable to everyone: Be different, find your own self, and stand out.
Whatever’s normal, do the exact opposite. Normal gets normal results.
One of my mentors, Bill Veeck, says, “I try not to break the rules but merely test their elasticity.” I love him, but I’ll tell you, we break the rules when it comes to a lot of things.
If you really want to have purpose and fulfillment, that’s the key. That’s what we’re having fun with. We tell a lot of ridiculous stories, but it’s bigger than that.
Have a mirror moment.
What frustrates you about your business? What frustrates you about your industry as a whole?
For us, baseball was too long, too slow, too boring, and people weren’t interested anymore. So we changed the game on what baseball should be like.
If you look at yourself, if you look in a mirror, what’s frustrating you? What’s frustrating you about your business? Are you just going through the motions? What’s really bothering you, where you don’t feel passion, you don’t feel purpose?
That’s the starting point.
I call it a mirror moment. Once you get there, the question is, what’s the next step? The next step, I believe more than anything, is to become a sponge.
Create stories to tell at the end of the day.
How many people are just not that excited about their job? Maybe they need to change what they’re doing. Maybe they’re in the wrong field.
Ask yourself a few questions about your workday:
· Are you watching the clock during the day or are you losing track of time?
· What moments do you love the most? What moments are you having the most fun laughing?
· Identify the things that you do and don’t enjoy. A lot of times during the day, you’re doing things that you just aren’t good at. For me, I’m terrible at operations. I can’t put anything up around this ballpark. It takes me hours. Instead of forcing those tasks, hire people or work with people that have those strengths.
· What was the best part of your day? If it’s lunch or if it’s going home and having a couple of beers, you may need to look at something else.
Most people are content with their jobs. They’re content, they’re happy, they’re going with it. But we should come to work on fire. I think they should just absolutely love what they do.
Start being aware.
The other day, we adopted a pig and literally had a pig at our ballpark. Now, I’m not saying that if you’re an accountant in a law firm you can start bringing in a pig to the office. But you can do things that are kind of ridiculous and have fun.
When you go home, do you have those kinds of stories about your day? Start creating moments. Create stories. It makes life worth it.
Find your parking penguins.
I thought I was going play baseball. I put all my energy into baseball and was fortunate to get a college scholarship. But then my arm got torn to pieces and I was done.
You think you are the best at something and plan all of it, but things change.
I’m probably the only baseball owner in the country that says baseball has a serious challenge. It’s long, slow, and boring. I don’t love baseball like I used to. I love entertaining fans.
Life pivots. The key is being able to be self-aware.
Ask yourself what business you are in…but what business you are really in. A lot of businesses can’t answer that question.
To a degree, every business is in the time business, and they need to understand that. Are you making people’s time better, are you taking away time, are you giving them time? Once you understand how you help people’s time, then you can start to look at what business you’re really in.
At our ballpark, we have to give 100% to entertainment because people want to be entertained. They want to escape; they don’t want to watch baseball.
We literally go all the way to the beginning. When people show up to our stadium, they are going to see people dressed up as penguin costumes.
Why? Because they are our parking penguins. Doesn’t have to make any sense.
When they keep walking, we have a thirty-piece pep band. In baseball. You don’t have a pep band in baseball. Then people are dressed in banana costumes, and as they walk through the gate, The Banana Nanas, our senior citizen dance team, are doing a Justin Timberlake dance.
That’s all before you even get into the stadium.
Think about the perfect experience for your customer, and you can change the way people think about your business.
Go all in.
When we came here, the former team had cut the phone lines and the internet lines. We had a picnic table on a storage shed that we were working at. For six months, we worked so hard trying to market the team.
No one cared.
It was going from professional baseball to college summer baseball, and no one cared. It got so bad that I got a phone call in January. They said, “Jesse we’re completely out of money.”
We sold our house in Charlotte with our other team. We literally emptied out our savings account, found this terrible duplex down here in Savannah, and went all in.
When we had the opportunity to name the team, we went with Savanah Bananas and decided to go all out in the marketing. Our mascot’s named Split, we came up with the Banana Nanas. We set up a promotion where we throw bananas from the top deck called “Banana in the Pants.”
We thought about all of these crazy things that you could do, and all of a sudden, people started noticing.
We were working toward the perfect experience for our customers.
People were frustrated going to sporting events and getting nickeled and dimed. So we made one ticket price: $15, including all you can eat, all your food all night, plus the ticket.
We sold out the first six or seven games in advance, and on opening night, it started pouring. By 7:00 to 7:30, we had not started, but all 4,000 people kept coming. And they didn’t stop.
They just kept coming, and they waited until we started the game at 9:00.
It’s about simplification.
It takes a lot of work to simplify. Steve Jobs said it best, “If you could simplify things, it could move mountains.” That’s what the greatest companies have done.
When we simplified to Fans First, everyone in our staff could understand. Everything we do is about fans first. It means we take care of people. We don’t have this long mission statement, this complex thing about what we’re supposed to do.
It’s not about profit, it’s not about any of that. It’s about simplifying.
If you simplify your mission and what you stand for, it’s very easy to apply that to your whole system.
It’s a challenge. You’ve got to sit down and say, “Hey why are we doing this? What’s the point? How can we make this easy?” If part time staff join us for a day, how will they know exactly what we’re about and how to do it?
For us, simplifying has been vital.
Get comfortable being uncomfortable.
If you want to change your life, you have to have a mirror moment first.
You have to literally look at yourself and say, “Hey, what’s frustrating me? What’s bothering me? What am I missing? Why do I feel stuck? Why do I feel stale?”
Write it down.
From there, what moments fire you up? What do you get most excited about? When you’re pumped to go into work, what are you doing that day?
On the other hand, if you are not pumped going to work ever, you might realize you are doing the wrong thing.
That moment could change your life.
Sometimes I am doing things I don’t want to be doing or I shouldn’t be doing, and I try to pivot to find more ways to do things I absolutely love. It fires me up so that I look at the clock and realize, “Whoa I’ve been doing this for three hours.”
I tell my staff all the time: “Get comfortable being uncomfortable.” Every single day, are you challenging yourself, are you trying new stuff?
If you are constantly comfortable with what you’re doing, you are not growing.
If you’re going to be comfortable sustaining and maintaining what you’re doing, you’re not going to be doing things that fire you up.
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Jesse Cole, author of Find Your Yellow Tux, created an amazing life by doing the unexpected. He can be found at Findyouryellowtux.com, @YellowTuxJesse on Twitter, and on Facebook as The Yellow Tux Guy.
