When you slip on a banana peel and strike gold
Bananas have somehow become a recurring theme of this blog.
Two years ago we discussed the insane but true story of Maurizio Cattelan, an Italian artist who duct taped a banana to a wall and sold the piece, entitled “Comedian,” for $120,000.
Not once, not twice, but three times.
Except the third time, a performance artist named David Datuna walked up to the piece on display at Art Basel Miami, removed the banana from the wall, and ate it.
He ate a banana worth $120,000.
That blog was about the subjective value of art, and how art is really just telling the right story to the right person, in the right moment. The person who spends $120,000 on “Comedian” isn’t buying the banana or the piece of duct tape. They’re buying the look on their guests’ face when they tell them the story.
So, when Jesse Cole and his wife Emily bought a failing minor league baseball and couldn’t get a single fan to come to a single game, Jesse realized his staff, his team, and his community needed a better story.
And that’s how the Savannah Bananas were born.
How badly do you want it?
It may be America’s pastime, but baseball has a few problems in a 3-second world.
That’s what Jesse found out very quickly in 2015 when they bought an expansion team in Savannah, Georgia. Here’s how he tells it:
“There was no one coming to games for this minor league team.
We came in and took it over.
And lo and behold, in the first three months we sold two total tickets to it.
It was like a donation.
We hadn’t done anything to earn them as fans.
It got so bad on January 15th of 2016 at my best friend’s wedding, I got a phone call that we overdrafted our account.
We were completely out of money.
In-between having an appetizer I asked Emily, “What are we going to do?
She turned and said, “Jesse, we just have to sell our house.””
And that’s exactly what they did.
Jesse and Emily sold their dream house in Charlotte, emptied their savings account, and started sleeping on an air mattress.
But money was only a band-aid. The real problem was deeper.
The Problem with Baseball
Beloved though it may be, baseball is fundamentally long, slow, and boring.
Sure, fans pack stadiums for the top-performing professional teams. But how do you get people to pay their hard-earned money to spend 5 hours watching a bunch of college kids who, quite honestly, aren’t very good? According to Jesse, you become a clown:
“I learned very quickly that people thought baseball wasn’t entertaining.
It wasn’t fun.
So we said, why don’t we make it a circus?”
Make it a circus they did. First, they named the team after a fruit.
Then they changed the uniforms to kilts and started having players do choreographed dances during the games.
They started a dance team composed of senior citizens called the Banana Nanas. And on top of that, tickets were all-inclusive: Burgers, hot dogs, chicken sandwiches, soda, water, popcorn, the game – all for $15.
“Once people came in and they saw the players dancing and the fun, they started telling everybody,” Jesse said.
“Lo and behold, we ended up selling out every single game and have a waitlist for tickets in the thousands.”
Their community had been telling themselves a story that baseball was long, slow, and boring. So Jesse told a new story, that baseball, at least their version of baseball, was fast-paced, wild, and interactive.
The Bananas were still playing the same game as always, but now they owned the narrative.
Jesse became the P.T. Barnum of baseball, donning a yellow tux and leading the circus to massive success. So much success, in fact, that in January 2020 he announced that the Bananas were becoming the first ad-free stadium in baseball.
They removed all ads and severed ties with all sponsors, throwing away hundreds of thousands of dollars, in service of their “fans first” philosophy. Jesse, Emily, and the Savannah Bananas were on cloud nine.
And then COVID hit.
What business are you really in?
“We’re not in the baseball business. We’re in the entertainment business.”
That was the key to Jesse and Emily’s success with the Bananas back in 2016. And so when a global pandemic shut down public gatherings and sporting events, they responded in the way only they knew how:
Create a circus.
Not that it was easy. When I spoke with Jesse on the Beyond Networking podcast, he was so relentlessly upbeat that I had to press him to let down the “character” and give me the real, gritty truth about last year.
“Brian, we took a 7-figure hit. I mean, we took a 7-figure, devastating hit.”
That was the moment the cracks in Jesse’s armor showed, just for a second. But as quickly as they broke open, he glued them back together:
“But it’s short term. Just like my wife and I selling our house. We got through that, so we had the resiliency and the muscle to be able to say.
It’s okay. We’re not going to be the company we were back then. But how can we be better?”
And then Jesse said the magic words, the key to resilience, adaptability, flexibility, Pivoting – whatever you want to call it.
“What do we get to do now?”
Instead of reacting to the negative, he looked forward to the positive. Not “what do we have to do to survive,” but “what do we get to do now?”
If you take one thing away from Jesse’s story, this is it.
Next time you are faced with a challenge or a scary, new, unpredictable situation, simply invert the question. Instead of being chained to the way things used to be, you are liberated to build a new, better thing moving forward.
How to save your business and reinvent your industry in the process
COVID was devastating. But it was also a reset.
In many industries the rules – real or unspoken – were completely wiped out, or at least temporarily lifted. And in that window there has been an unprecedented influx of creative thinking and innovation.
“When the world is in a weird state, you can try more things,” Jesse told me. “We said baseball is too long, too slow, and too boring. So we invented a new game called Banana Ball.”
That’s right, the Savannah Bananas, with the Man in the Yellow Tux leading the way, invented an entirely new version of America’s favorite pastime.
Banana Ball has a 2 hour time limit. If you win the inning, you get a point – first team to 5 points wins the whole game. You can’t step out of the batter’s box. You can steal first. No bunting. If fans catch a foul ball, it’s an out. Instead of extra innings, the pitcher and a hitter have a 1-on-1 showdown like a penalty kick in soccer.
The result?
Fans went absolutely nuts. So nuts that they stayed all the way to the end of the game, which never happens in baseball.
“I hope it’s the future of baseball,” Jesse said optimistically. “It’s more fun, more entertaining, and a better game.”
And perhaps most importantly, it was invented in service of the fans.
Listen to my entire conversation with Jesse Cole here, or watch below:
