Always be the challenger, with Savannah Bananas founder Jesse Cole

Jesse Cole became general manager of a struggling minor league team in Gastonia, North Carolina at age 23, inheriting a business with only $268 in the bank that had lost over $100,000 the prior year. He could not pay himself a salary, eventually sold his house, emptied his savings, slept on an air mattress, and carried more than one million dollars in debt. In the first three months only two tickets were sold before the business turned around.

Cole modeled his approach on PT Barnum and Walt Disney, running early promotions including a grandma beauty pageant, flatulence fun nights, and garbage can nachos. Because there was no social media in those early years, the team tested ideas by watching fan reactions directly and videotaped fan behavior every thirty minutes to track when people arrived and left rather than relying on surveys. That observation method revealed fans were leaving games early not because of lack of entertainment but because games ran three to four hours, which led directly to the development of banana ball, a format tested behind closed doors with two college coaches in a private nine-inning game completed in ninety-nine minutes.

The business model required banana ball to work because revenue depended entirely on ticket sales rather than sponsors or outside capital. After selling out every night to four thousand seats in Gastonia and growing that operation into a roughly three-million-dollar business, Cole expanded the tour iteratively from one city to seven, then thirty-three, then major league stadiums, then football stadiums. The Savannah Bananas eventually sold out Fenway Park with 37,000 fans, a venue Cole credits a childhood encounter there as the foundational experience that shaped his entire philosophy around fan experience.

The Savannah Bananas spend nothing on marketing and instead invest in the experience, relying on social media to amplify remarkable moments. The organization invested $13 million this year in broadcasts offered free on YouTube and operates across 75 stadiums in 45 states with 16 full-time truck drivers moving equipment around the country. Ticket prices are held at $40, $50, and $60 with no additional fees despite every consultant advising higher prices and despite secondary market prices averaging over $200. The team built its own ticketing platform and secondary marketplace to enforce face value pricing, absorbing those costs internally. Cole has noted the platform could eventually be licensed to others, comparing the potential to Amazon building AWS from internal infrastructure, though he says that is a long way off.

The Savannah Bananas have 40,000 K-Club members who receive access to tickets at special rates, with Cole saying membership could be well over 100,000 but is being grown deliberately. The Party Animals expansion team has more TikTok followers than every major league baseball team, and 170,000 people joined a waitlist to see them, generating enough demand to sell out eight straight nights in Detroit without the Bananas on the bill. The Bananas have invested millions in each individual show for expansion teams and are bringing in performers from Cirque du Soleil along with Broadway-type performers and a brass band. Cole's primary fear around expansion is that new teams will be perceived as a lesser version of the Savannah Bananas rather than distinct brands.

Cole generates ideas through all-day Tuesday sessions followed by table reads and rehearsals, producing a brand new show every week. He treats social media feedback from actual fans as more meaningful than aggregate vanity metrics and says the most important metric is the number of amazing moments created for fans, not money, sales, revenue, or growth. He maintains a challenger brand mindset through what he calls productive paranoia, believing every day that the show must keep improving. He has advised the PGA Tour to let golfers have fun and add entrance music, and would advise LinkedIn to lean into what makes it distinct rather than copying other platforms.

Cole describes joy as the most contagious thing in the world and credits it with driving the energy of the entire organization. That culture extends beyond players and performers, with even back-office staff members getting excited reactions from fans who learn they work for the team. Fans regularly wait outside venues in Bananas gear, treating attendance as a bucket list experience. The core argument Cole makes is that deviating from a fans-first mission leads to gradual fan loss over time, and that joy as an operating principle is not separate from business performance but is the mechanism behind it.