Always be the challenger, with Savannah Bananas founder Jesse Cole

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This is Masters of Scale. I'm Jeff Berman, your host. This week on the show, Jesse Cole. The name you may not know off the bat, but Jesse is the founder of the Savannah Bananas and Fans First Entertainment. And if you've turned on ESPN in the last year, you've seen ESPN. ESPN. The man in the yellow suit. That's Jesse. He's part P.T. Barnum, part Walt Disney, and he's scaling a whole new kind of sport with his fast-paced, circus-style version of professional baseball. Jesse's relentless dedication to his fans offers important insights for anyone in the business of delighting customers, which really should be all of us. We are on location today. We are recording live at Angel Stadium where the Savannah Bananas are. And the Indianapolis Clowns are playing tonight. And we are with the greatest showman on earth, Jesse Cole. Welcome to Masters of Scale. Excited to be with you guys. Been a big fan of the show from when it first launched. So we've shared the episodes with so much of our team. So many people on our team. It's been great. Well, we're huge fans, but you do. And we were just talking before we turned the mics and cameras on about how you all have been capturing content kind of Hoop Dream style for a long time now. We're producing a movie of the Bananas and Fans First. And we might open. We're working on you leading the crowd and singing Coldplay's Yellow. Can you set the stage for us so we can open the show there? Well, as someone who grew up south of Boston, a huge Red Sox fan, my dad and I, we went to so many games. Back when tickets were $5, we'd sit out on the bleachers. And I was a shy, introverted kid growing up. And my dad had the opportunity to win this challenge for me to become an honorary Bat Boy. And so when I was five years old, I saw my first ever Red Sox game, but I was in the dugout before the game. But I was sitting by myself in one place, and a player came over and sat down next to me, and it was Hall of Famer Lisa. And he spent 20 minutes with me, this shy, introverted five-year-old kid. He didn't have to. And that moment changed everything for me because I saw him as this larger-than-life pitcher. I saw the Red Sox now as this larger-than-life team. And I vowed to, one day, play at Fenway Park. And so I put everything I can into my baseball career. I was fortunate to have professional scouts watching me, a Division I scholarship, and then tore everything to my shoulder. And that ended my career. Just like that, I was done. And so that dream of playing, of Fenway, was over, at least I thought, until we started in the front office and how to make baseball fun. And what people don't realize is I spent 10 years with this team in Gastonia, North Carolina, that no one knew about, just trying to craft what we were doing to get people excited about coming to a baseball game before we started the Savannah Bananas. And then we started the Bananas, failed miserably, lost everything, and then after many years, made it successful, took the show on the road, and was able to sell out Fenway Park with 37,000 fans and everyone singing yellow and lighting up the sky. And it was a moment I'll never forget. And what happened was I got some coaching jobs, but I also got this opportunity to be an intern for a college summer baseball team. And why would you want that? And I was like, "Well, it's right down the road. Let's just try it at the front office." And I realized immediately that at the front office, you could actually create a lot of the experience that happens for appearance. And I started to get ideas of, "Wow, we could change this about the game. This is boring. What if we add this? What about music here?" And so immediately as an intern, I started to get the idea of what it was like to work in the front office. And then I got offered a job as a general manager at 23 years old. - Outside of a legendary baseball front office man, when there was a year of yours pulled back. - Yeah. - You did lots of the best, wonderfully best things back in the '50s. But minor league and college summer league is where we've seen some experimentation in baseball. What did you try? What worked? What didn't work? Share that part of the journey. - Well, I was 23 years old. It was two months into my job as a general manager. I wasn't able to pay myself. There was no money. There was $268 in the bank account when we started. And there was no money. The team had lost over $100,000 the previous year. - Wow. - So I had saved money, you know, in college. I had to follow a ship. So I was living off that. And it was two months in and went to the vet conference. - What other vet conference? - So the vet conference is Mike Vac and he brings together minor league operators and they talk about ideas. It's all about ideas. So my mind started just seeing like, we gotta think a different way. I started reading about PT Barnum, Walt Disney. And I said, you know, let's do the things that are just a little bit different. You know, you have beauty pageants. Well, what if we had a grandma beauty pageant? And so we actually got grandmas from a senior, citizen home and had a grandma beauty pageant, which did not go exactly as we planned, but it was- - What happened? - Well, I mean, Gertrude stole the show. She was 87 years old. Well, first of all, they showed up late because I, you know, should have expected that. The first question we did, Gertrude, if you could be on the cover of one magazine, what would it be and why? And she goes, of course, Playboy. And I was like, this is in front of a live crowd. She's 87 years old. No one should be thinking about that. And that's how it opened. So we did that. I mean, we had flatulence fun nights with Whoopi Kushner giveaways. We had sleuth underwear nights. You know, we had garbage can nachos, which we still do in Savannah, like which five orders of nachos, three hamburgers, three hot dogs. It's heart-stoppingly delicious. Still can't get a cardiologist to sponsor it. But all these things we started thinking about, how do we do things there? And that's where the experimentation last started in Gaston. - It's one thing to say, I'm gonna take the blinders off. - Yeah. - It's one thing to actually generate the ideas for the grandma beauty contest or whatever else it may be. - We had nothing to lose. So people realize they always put so much weight on failure. They put so much weight on an idea. When we first started, you do something who cares, it might not go right. So we just kept doing all these different ideas. And so now we've developed kind of a system on how we generate our best ideas. You know, we follow a Saturday Night Live model and we generate ideas on a Tuesday all day idea sessions. Then we have a table read and we start doing rehearsals and we go through all that to have a brand new show every week. And I think when you take out the weight of that and just say, we're gonna try things, you find out a lot more goals and you find the goal because you're doing more. You learn more by the more you do. And so, Henry Ford says, you learn by doing. And so we're just constantly doing things. Well, so back in the day, the first 10 years of Gastonia, there was no one covering us. There was no social media. We were just testing things and you'd watch other fans react and you'd try it again. - There's so many people right now who are working at companies. It could be massive, you know, Fortune 50 companies or at relatively early stage startups who've had a plan. And whether it's because of AI, other exogenous forces, external forces are coming in and forcing them to have to think different. When you talk to these folks, when they come to you, you're saying to them about how to inject that, let's go with it, you know, into a process so that you take away that fear of failure and actually give yourself freedom to inspire. - Yeah, we had a plan. We were a college summer baseball team. And then the plan changed because we watched what our fans were doing. We watched as fans were leaving games early. No matter how much entertainment we had, no matter how much dancing, celebrations, crazy moments, surprises, our plan was to be a baseball team. - Why were they leaving early? - Because the game was too long. It's too slow. It's too boring for people. It's a late night. You're taking your kids home. No one wants a three or four hour show. And so you saw that. We literally videotaped and we're taking pictures and watching every 30 minutes. But no one told us that, "Hey, we want a faster show." But they act. And so we had a plan. Everyone's so focused often on their current customers. We love our fans more than anything. I will put us up against any company in the world how much we love our fans. But we're also thinking about our future fans. Where are our fans going to want in three to five years? And you can see little things that they react. What time do they show up? When do they leave? How do they react to the thing with your original music? When we put things on social media, we put millions of things on social media, you can respond right away. It's not, "Oh, the algorithm likes it." No, do your fans like it? And if your fans like it, they will tell you that. And so I think the reality is it's not about what are our plans, it's you need to put more things out there and share with the world and find out what they like and what they don't like. Companies are afraid of doing that because they're afraid of the perception of what people will think. I don't care the point what people think. We're gonna fail every day. We do silly and crazy promotions. Every day, baseball traditionals criticize. We're not for that. Who are you for? If you're trying to grow a business, you're trying to create customers, you put more out there and see if they like it. Don't do surveys. Just actually go do it. And that's what Walt Disney believed in. And that's what we try to do as well. - You could easily become the most successful front office person in summer college baseball, Miami baseball, or maybe in Major League Baseball. You could have been. That's a path that was available to you. Why isn't that the path you ended up taking? - The greatest creators create things that they believe are going to be a buff. Often someone that's a creator, they're in a system, and they're in a cog, and they're creating someone else's dreams, someone else's vision, someone on a board member's goal. I realized that someone who played the game and loved playing, watching, it just was never truly exciting for me. And I realized that if I stayed into this box that they put you, these are the rules of the game, this is how you have to play, these are the rules of the league, you better not break the rules, or you're gonna get fined. If you can get out of that box and just create things that get you excited, if you get excited about it and you love it that other fans and other customers will get excited about it. It's the world I wanted to live in. And I just believe that something was out there that not your traditional baseball fans would love, that a family would love, that young people would love, that people just want to go have fun and not take themselves too seriously. There's the conventional world of sports, which we play a little bit in that world, but we can't control whether your team wins or loses. But what we can control is the show. And if we build the rules, we make the rules of the game, we make the rules of the show, people can leave and have a great time every single night. That's what we're trying to do. So a lot of entrepreneurs would have built their deck. They would have gone around and pitched this idea for a new concept and raised a bunch of money or tried to and go from there. That's not what you start doing. One city world tour. Start small, dream big. We had this idea. We had this belief. We played banana ball and we did it behind closed doors. We played nine innings in 99 minutes and the players said it was the most fun they've ever played. And I watched it. You couldn't take your eyes off. How do you make that happen? I called my two college coaches and said, crazy idea. Can we do this behind closed doors? They said, sure, Jesse. We'll give it a shot. And we got fired up. And we said, all right, well, let's test. And it didn't work right away. No. What happened? It never works right away. It always starts as chaos when you first see it. But then we said, all right, well, is there something here? There's some magic. Do you not want to take your eyes? I didn't want to blink because I was like, what's going to happen? Yeah. And so we just said, how do you make it work, people? You can't take your eyes off. You can't leave your seat or you may miss something you've never seen before in baseball. You didn't raise outside capital. You're not like an independently wealthy guy spending a trust fund down or something. You save a few bucks with scholarship. How are you even sustaining this while you're trying to get enough traction or product market fit? And most businesses, a lot of businesses aren't, hey, we've got to start this. We need to raise capital. Or we're going to have advertisers, sponsors, we've got to get all this. Well, what we were fortunate with College Summer Baseball, we started a model where if we could sell the tickets and get people excited enough to come, we learned how to be successful by just selling tickets. So everyone's like, oh, I don't know if we can do that golf event because we lost our sponsor. Well, then the event's not good. If people don't want to pay to come see it, we had a product that people wanted to pay and come see in College Summer Baseball. We were selling out every night, 4,000 seats. Now, this is after only selling two tickets in our first three months, running out of money. My wife and I have a cellar house, empty out our savings account, sleeping on an airbed with nothing. But we got them to see the show and we saw dancing players. We saw fun moments. We saw banana babies, banana bands, all that. People were like, this is something we've never seen. So that started a small $3 million business for making money. And it's fine. Was there a moment where you and your wife looked at each other and said, this isn't going to work? Was there a moment where you lost faith or you just weren't sure you were going to get there? We wouldn't let ourselves go there. We couldn't. We were a million dollars plus in debt. We just got married. We have to go on. There's no other option. So what's the inflection point then when you've sold that house, you're sleeping on the air mattress, have to be some moments your wife and you were looking at each other like, oh, deep breath. We didn't sleep at all. Yeah. We'd walk the streets just thinking. And we just kept saying, get to that first show. Get to that first show. It's like my dad, you know, get to your next at bat. And forget about what happened in the last at bat. Get to your next at bat. And that's all I said. And then swing hard in case you hit it. And so we said, we're going to get to that opening night and we're going to swing hard. Bananas went out and danced in the pouring rain because it was a rain delay. And we had the players doing dances and people were like, what am I watching? But it created attention. They were saying they saw something. So from that point, we started selling out every day. So the business became set at a 4,000 seat stadium. So we already had a little bit of a cushion to say, hey, we can experiment. Let's go take this on the road. We had a Penske truck that we just packed all our stuff in. We didn't know how to set up merchandise. We didn't know all the logistics. We didn't know how to do sound systems at other stadiums. We didn't know anything. But we said, can we get enough people excited to come see it? And we sold it out. We failed miserably the first night. Sound went out. The anthem singer didn't show up. But enough good hat. That's the next day to find a great show. And I knew right there we had a surprise. Fireworks show. We had the fans stay an hour plus after the game. They didn't want to leave. Which normally games, you want to leave. And I said, this is it. And so the next year we go to seven cities, then 33, then Major League Stadium, then football stadium. You just keep expanding after you start doing it. Still ahead, more with Jesse Cole on how he uses social media to supercharge growth. When you've built substantial wealth through your business, it's often tied up in a single equity position. The upside is real, but so is the risk. And knowing when to act isn't always obvious. Creative planning works with business owners to build a strategy around concentrated equity. When to diversify, how to manage tax risk, and how to protect what you've spent years building. Creative planning, where wealth works together. Learn more at creativeplanning.com slash masters of scale. Humans will never be more intelligent than AI. There's going to be two types of companies. Those are great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't. 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Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find this conversation and more on our YouTube channel and be sure to check out the link in the show notes. To subscribe to our newsletter. It strikes me that 20 years ago, this would have been a heck of a lot harder to do in part because you just didn't have the range of social media. And it's so hard often to take that in-real-life experience so special and translate it on social and digital. What was that? Well, we spend $0 on marketing. We invest in the experience. So most people, I think, when they think about marketing is like you got to go promote something to get people to want to buy something or take on a service. What we think about is how do you make your experience so remarkable that you capture that and just share that. So, but P.T. Barnum, one of the greatest promoters of all time, he said something terrible happens without promotion. Nothing. And so I think without social media, it would have been a great challenge. But yes, now social media, we can amplify, but you still have to create something truly remarkable. And that's what we try to do every night. You've referenced P.T. Barnum. You've referenced Walt Disney. There were elements of Vince McMahon and WWE here. There were elements of Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead. When you're looking at these folks who've innovated and created these extraordinary fan-friendly experiences, how are you determining what's going to work for you, what to draw from them? When you're researching, you're reading about these folks, saying that as folks, what are you looking to latch on to? You start with the best in their industry. So the Grateful Dead, they were the most fan-friendly band of theirs. They let the fans record every single night. You know, they create a newsletter for them. They were speaking directly with them. They brought in their own sound because they wanted to be better. Like they were obsessed with communicating directly with their fans. They started selling their own tickets, their fans, their fan clubs, all of that. So we said, all right, how do we do that? So we have 40,000 fan club members that get access to all of our tickets, furnishers, special meeting rates. That could be well over 100,000, but we're still learning with it every year and slowly growing it. I spent a couple of years at the NFL, ran the digital media group. Yes. There is perhaps no organization more zealous about controlling its right. 100% of the National Football League may have built a pretty darn good business doing it. Yeah. You guys with the Fan First program, you'll do an ESPN. You'll do a CW deal. You'll keep the rights to stream games on YouTube for free globally. When you're balancing that driving revenue and creating that fan experience, because you're still a business, right? I mean, we're a healthy business. So how are you striking that balance? Is it always Fan First? Are there moments where you go, boy, if he has fans with 10X the dollars they're going to give us, I'm not going to live stream every game? Is that even a discussion? No. Fans First always. We started this company to be fans first. That's who we are. That's what we stand for. It's our mission. It's our values. And as soon as you deter away from that, you're in trouble and you'll be glorious in the short term. And then every day, you'll just lose a few fans. Two, three, four, five, and 10, and hundreds, and thousands. That's my fear. There's a different mindset when you're in a challenger brand than when you're at the top. Yeah. But you should always be a challenger. Well, so that's exactly where I'm going. How do you maintain that challenger brand mindset as you're getting up there? I'm scared every day. I'm scared every day that won't be, we've worked so hard when we first started and sleeping on the air bed that we can lose fans. I'm scared that this is going to be built from nothing. And now it's, I guess you'd call it productive paranoia. And I have that every day that our show has to get a little bit better. Our experience has to get a little bit better. Our entertainment has to get a little bit better. Our emotional experience has to get a little better. Our ticket experience has to get a little bit better. To some people, it's like, ooh, that sounds unhealthy. To me, it fires me up. It excites me. I love looking back at where we were last year and where we are this year and knowing that we're only 1% of the way where we can be. I know that. I believe that. Because we're venting a lot of it as we go. It's going to be messed. It's hard. Every time we do a new show, it's hard. We have six teams now. It's extremely. hard trying to have that level. And I don't think most people realize this because the bananas are becoming this phenomenon. You can't go on social without seeing you guys. Phenomenal. But you're now a 16 league. You've got a season. You've got an end of season. So have you been worrying about diluting the brand by expanding into these other teams? 100%. That's a huge fear. So you have to make every single show so distinct and so unique and so different. We've invested millions in each show. So like the party animals, which people don't realize, they have more followers than every major league baseball team on TikTok. Really? They're selling out major league stadiums without the bananas. Like 170,000 people joined the list to go see them in Detroit. Based on those numbers, we could sell out eight straight nights without the bananas. The clowns, our newest team, which obviously paying tribute to the major league team with what they did was unbelievable. I mean, we're bringing Broadway type centers, a brass band that's unbelievable. We have acts we haven't shared yet, but from Cirque du Soleil. I want people every night to see these shows. I've never seen that on a baseball field. And it's very hard because they're all just getting started. Can they build that brand on their own? Or how do you think about integrating them with the bananas? They're creating fans every night. The local beach coconuts are, their merchandise is right up there at number two, because that brand is so fun that when they start playing at the end of the game, everyone's chanting local beach and coconuts. And so they can build off each other, but you have to make it distinct. You have to make it, they think, oh, it's just another one of the banana scenes we're in trouble. That's a huge fear of mine is we got to continue to come up with new ideas. The Dodgers have a home game tonight. I chatted right before we sat down. It's a very cheap to seat in the stadium is 80 bucks. You guys have kept a very low fixed ticket. Right. Our goal is very simple. It's to create fans. Your goal is to make money. We could charge a lot more. And we've been told to do that by every consultant. You could be making this. The average ticket price in the secondary market is over $200. For us, it's 40, 50, and $60 with no ticket fees, no convenience fees. We pay your taxes. It's a game. If you're a public company, they would say there's a hundred million dollars right there. Charge what you shouldn't charge. No interest to us. And we even built a secondary market to deter the whole secondary market. Yep. And it's all face value, which just costs us money. Yeah. We're literally doing, developing, putting all the money into it, taking all the fees. That's all on us. Just so our fans can get tickets at the price that we believe is best. The other thing that I imagine that a private equity investor down there to get in your business would say is, okay, fine, Jesse, do it that way. Do it your way. But let's go use this sickening platform for everyone else. Is that part of the plan? Well, yeah, if you follow, I guess, if you look at what Amazon did, I mean, it was great. Bezos and the group built something that could handle their infrastructure and say, wow, a lot of people could use that as well. AWS, a hundred percent AWS, which is the most profitable part of their business, billions of dollars. Yeah. I think there's a world where our ticketing platform that we have built and our secondary marketplace could be used. But right now we got to get it to a point where it is so great for our fans. It is almost that perfect for our fans that we want to put it out to everyone else. And that's going to be a long way. Again, our goals aren't to make a lot of money. Our goals are to create the best experience. I get that. And also, the more money you make, especially if you're not charging fans for it, the more you can offer it, right? Yeah. I mean, obviously that's, that's a lot like we're investing a lot more in our show, millions of dollars. Our broadcast, we invest $13 million this year, which we're not getting that, like it's free on YouTube. So that's part of our ethos. We will invest more again in other Bezos. They continue to invest for the long game. We're learning how to do a broadcast at a high level. We have 16 full-time truck drivers that are driving our trucks around the country with all of our equipment and merchandise. We didn't know how to do a trucking logistics. We didn't know how to do a trucking logistics company, but we have to now because we're in 75 stadiums, all in 45 states, and soon we'll be international. We have no idea how to do that. You're building a fan experience. All of a sudden you're building technology, you're taking platform, you're building a logistics company with the trucking. When a neat challenge like that comes up, how are you fit? What to do? Well, it depends on what part of the business. So like, you know, I think we learned this again, you look at Walt Disney and Roy Disney. Walt was focused on all the creative and Roy was focused on all the operation, how you pay for it. And you know, we have an amazing president who's been with us since day one, Jared Orton. He is, you know, he's been with us since day one. He is, going home on the operations and figuring out, he always finds a way. You know, his mindset is, we'll figure it out. We don't know, but we'll figure it out. And it's going to be messy. It'll cost us a little bit more as we figure it out, but eventually we'll get it. I'm focused on how do we create the show? What's our next step? What's our next event that's going to be larger than life? What's our original music that we're creating? What's the next media thing we're doing? I spend all my time there. He spends all his time focused on how do we actually take care of our fans and make this happen. We work very well together. There are a lot of, leaders running consumer businesses who would love to have a little bit of your system. Brian Morlap was my boss at the NFL. He's now running the PGA tour. Brian calls and says, Jesse, one note. Should I be doing different? At the PGA tour? Yeah. I'd break the rules. Let fans have fun. Let golfers have fun. People want to connect with the athletes. They want to connect in a way it's okay to celebrate. It's okay to have fun. Why don't the golfers come through high-fiving all the fans more? Why don't they actually have some entrances? Why isn't there an entrance music as a golfer comes out? Why does it have to always be quiet? Again, there's obviously movies and Gilmore and all talking about that. There's a world now where I think people are looking for entertainment nonstop. We have seen amazing golf shots. We've seen home runs. We've seen touchdowns. It doesn't take away from the sport. It's amazing to watch. What you haven't seen, the athletes have as much fun. Whether you're a golfer, whether you're a footballer, it's like a football channel that said, "We're going to have touchdowns at least. We're all good. Celebrate. Have fun. That's good." And that's become a part of our society now. That didn't hurt the game. It added to the game. So why don't you embrace that? If you're in golf, it's like embrace those moments. Let's just do this one tournament. We're going to have music pumping. We're going to have live bands. We're going to have entrances. We're going to have certain walk-ups. We're going to have celebrities doing singing. It is going to be the most fun golf tournament in the world. Just test it for once. Golf purists will hate it. But you might draw a whole new audience that you'd be surprised. And they'd come out and have the time of their life. Let me go to the other end of the spectrum. Reid Hoffman is the co-founder of LinkedIn. A lot of us may not know where the party happens. If you're giving one product note to LinkedIn right now, what are you asking them to do or to change to make it more fun, more content-friendly? It's not because it's very easy to just go and do whatever else is done. You see this ever, you know, TikTok takes this for Instagram. Instagram takes this. It's very easy. I wouldn't try to do whatever one else is doing. It's not because it's very easy to just go and do whatever one else is doing. I would lean in on what makes them different. And love is better than life, as I've heard many times. You know, get a million, two million, five million, ten million to love you as opposed to hundreds of millions. Like, can't count them like that. If someone is about to graduate college is coming up to you and saying, Jesse, like, what do I do? The entry-level jobs are disappearing. I'm really not sure what to do. What's the piece of advice that you're giving? Do what gives you energy. Biggest game changer for me happened about six years in my professional journey. I was with the Gastonia Grizzlies, and I was doing everything. I was doing hiring. I was doing sales. I was doing food and bed. I was doing operations. And every day I was, and then I realized that what were my best days? What did I do? I was, ooh, I was coming up with ideas. I was creating, I was sharing. I was on a podcast. I was talking about what we're doing. I was growing. I was learning from some of the best of the best. And so I created my energy list. And I said, these are the three things, these buckets, creating, sharing, growing. If I do that every day, everything else takes care of itself. You know, people always ask me, can it keep you up at night? To me, that's the wrong question. It's what gets you up in the morning. And so for someone that's graduated in high school, graduating college, what gets you fired up? What gets you excited to do that you could do for hours? Time just flies by. You know, often people are washing the clock in their jobs. What is it that you don't even realize? Like at the ballpark, it's 12 hours going by. I'm like, oh my goodness, it's showtime. Because we're doing things that we love around people that we love to do it. That's the difference. And so what I just think about that, it's what are those things every day that you get truly excited to? Not necessarily your passion, but what gives you energy? What makes you want to do a little bit more and a little bit more? Because the truly great people are the ones that work on their craft more than anyone else. They do things that no one else will do because they love it. And that's what drives them. I have to tell you, I mean, anyone who's watching or listening is, your energy is infectious. Your enthusiasm is infectious. But here's the thing that has struck me, especially being here. Same thing for your team. The people who work around you, and I don't mean just the players. I mean, Taylor, who works with me, there's a spirit in which you don't feel at that most places. And I hope you see it. I hope you feel it. It's also important to offer that feedback. There's an energy that you don't get those places. And it's joy. Yeah. Yeah. It's joy. And I think the world needs more of that. And when you have people run a whole company that we're doing it for the right reasons, because it brings joy, because we get to feel it. In a few hours, we get to see thousands of people that had this game on the bucket list and they're waiting outside, they're wearing their gear. And as soon as they see us, they start jumping up and down, getting excited to high five us. That's our staff. They get excited. That. And so that gives me energy. And I hope it gives all of our team energy because every day we get to do special things and enjoy. Well, I'm confident that everyone watching listening is taking joy away from this. Thanks for being with us. I appreciate it. Thanks so much. Thanks again to the man in the yellow suit, Jesse Cole, for joining us. Not everyone is bold enough to create something as wacky and wild and just wonderful as the Savannah Bananas. But the lessons from Jesse's scale journey are essential for all of us. The one that struck me most watching his team rehearse for a show. Jesse Cole: Oh, yeah, that's a great question. That's a great question. So, joy, it's contagious, it's good for business, and Lord knows we need more of it. I'm Jeff Berman. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next time. And mastering by the audio boys, Aaron Bestinelli and Brian Pugh. Original music by the legendary Ryan Holiday. Our head of podcast is Leetal Mollad. Visit mastersofscale.com to find the transcript for this episode and to subscribe to our newsletter. And be sure to check out our YouTube channel.