Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This episode, you already know is fire. Like, just wrapped it up. Jesse Cole gives a masterclass. Like, I'm not even gonna prolong this. A masterclass in business and scaling and experience. So if you're a leader, if you're a business owner, if you're an entrepreneur, this episode is giving you all the tools that you need to create the best experience possible for your customers,
for your fans, and for your employees who are often the most forgotten. So get your notebook ready, get your recorder ready, because this is truly a masterclass. Ladies and gentlemen, I present the brilliant, the amazing Mr. Jesse Cole.
You're listening to Mick Unplugged, hosted by the one and only Mick Hunt.
Chapter 2: What inspired Jesse Cole to create memorable fan experiences?
This is where purpose meets power and stories spark transformation. Mick takes you beyond the motivation and into meaning, helping you discover your because and becoming unstoppable. I'm Rudy Rush, and trust me, you're in the right place. Let's get unplugged.
Jess, how are you doing today, brother?
So great to be with you, my friend.
Man, I'm the honored one. You know, I always start my podcast by asking my guests about their because, right? That thing that's deeper than your why. You know, Simon Sinek wrote the book Start With Why. And I do believe you start with why, but you're actually fueled by your because, right? So if I were to say what's your why, you'd probably say your family, your kids, success.
But when I say but why... That sentence usually starts with, well, because, and I care about what happens after, well, because. So if I were to say, Jesse, man, all the things that you do, the way that you give back, the way that you've changed industry and marketing and visibility, what's your because?
Well, it's a deep question and it's what makes you feel alive. You know, what gives you energy, what fires you up. And, you know, a lot of that, if you really dig deep, I think it goes to the root of your upbringing. And, you know, for me as an only child, you know, my parents got divorced when I was a kid. My dad helped raise me. And, you know, I always wanted to feel loved.
I want to feel part of something. I want to feel with people. And, you know, what we get to do every day is bring people together from all over the world, from two years old to 82 years old. See people have fun, let loose, not take themselves too seriously, to be in a world of joy.
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Chapter 3: How did Jesse Cole transform a struggling baseball team?
And I get to be in the middle of that every day. And I think the world that has joy, that has fun, that isn't so focused on all the things that are going wrong is a better world. And so, yes, our platform is banana ball and we get to put on a crazy show every single night.
But I hope that we get to do something that is truly contagious, that joy, that fun, that togetherness, that let loose, be the best version of yourself can continue to for people when they go home to at work, to their friends, to their colleagues. And so I think my because it's it's it's bringing the world together, filled with joy and just having the time of our life doing it.
And that's what I think about daily.
And you do it better than anyone I know. And now a lot of things make sense, Jesse. It's the only child thing. Right. So like I told you, like Damon, John, my mentor, he's the only child. You two are so alike that now I get it. Like it's it's it's the only child thing. Right.
Like you had to be so imaginative and creative and, you know, to get people to not not to be around you, but to to get people to want. to, to, to continue those relationships with you and you get home and it's you and your parents, right. Or your parents were separated or divorced. So like it literally is you and you've got to be creative with, well, what do I do? Or who do I talk to, man?
And create attention. And, and, and like, you know, I wanted to, you know, like, Hey, you know, my dad worked so hard. He was working constantly. It's come home and I want to, you know, Hey dad, let's do this. Let's do this and create attention and be fun. And, And, you know, when I got to be around friends, it's like, what can I do?
And it was, you know, just to build, make the most of every moment with people. And, you know, I think about that, you know, when I go through a door every day, you know, my mindset is bring the energy, bring the fun.
And so it's like a trigger for me whenever I interact with people, like, you know, I want them to feel more energized after talking with me and being with me and more fired up about what we can do and not what we can't do. And that excites me.
And so, yeah, I think as an only child, you know, obviously I was spirited to try to make the most of every moment when I had a chance to be around somebody. And I still try to do that to this day. There you go.
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Chapter 4: What does Jesse mean by 'normal gets normal results'?
You've changed my life. You changed my businesses in so many ways because my mindset has completely shifted. One of the things that you've said and it's on my wall. Because I need this reminder every day is that normal gets normal results.
And for me, the serial entrepreneur, the highly competitive person that I am, and I know that there are a lot of people that are listening, that are watching, that are just like us. Explain to us why normal just gets normal results and doing the unreasonable is where your focus should be.
Well, let's go back to when I started. I was a 23-year-old GM of a very small college summer baseball team in Gastonia, North Carolina that was failing for seven years. Lowest in the league, the country in attendance, only a couple hundred fans coming to the games. It was what it was. And I realized that they were doing the same things every other team did. You have fireworks.
You do a bobblehead here and there. You would do the things that everyone else did. Well, if you do what everyone else is going to do, you're going to get the same results as everyone else. And so, you know, you got to do what others won't do. And when you do what others won't do, you're going to do things that may fail. And so I've just been...
I think I learned that first concept from Alan Fadden. He wrote the book, Innovation on Demand. Really brilliant man, very creative. And yeah, it's whatever's normal, do the exact opposite. And he shared the story of how he sold his book. Most people would have their book in a regular bookstore or with thousands of different books, or you'd have it on Amazon.
He's like, I bought an entire retail store in Minneapolis and I made it a one book bookstore for my own book. And he literally had his book in different sections, business, history, self-help. And he got so much attention. And I heard that story. It was very formative for me because he was 23. He went in a different direction.
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Chapter 5: How can small innovations lead to big changes in business?
And so when I thought about building a banana ball and starting with first our team in Gastonia and then the bananas, I was like, we got to do things on the field that people never seen before. And so the first thing that we said was like, well, everyone expects players to play. What if they actually danced? And so, yeah, it was hard getting the players to dance.
They didn't want to dance in the beginning. But players in the middle of a game dancing, people were like, that's a little bit different. And I saw the reaction to that. And people started talking about, oh, you guys have the players that dance, right? And oh, yeah, you guys did the grandma beauty pageant, right? Oh, you guys did flatulence fun night. Oh, you guys did. And all these crazy things.
That's what they talked about. No one goes home and gets excited. It's like, oh, I had the most normal day today. You want to talk about it? No, no one gets excited about normal. No one gets excited about professional. They get excited about memorable. They get excited about remarkable. So every day I'm chasing those moments and trying to create those moments for everyone we interact with.
And I think that is so important to everyone that's a leader, that's an entrepreneur, that's listening. It doesn't matter your industry. And that's what I learned from Jesse. It's creating those moments that people remember because we've all heard Maya Angelou's quote, right? People don't remember the things that you say. They remember how you make them feel. And I think that is so important.
And you've mastered that. So for the person that's watching or listening and they're like, OK, how do I do that within my business that might have a corporate feel or maybe a retail feel?
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Chapter 6: What role does gratitude play in building a loyal fan base?
And my team can't get up and dance, or at least they think.
Everybody can dance. Even if you can't dance, you can dance. I'll tell you that. I've seen that with hundreds of players. But yes, I know exactly what you're saying. So yeah. I can only go by the framework of what we use. And the framework that we started with was we looked at all the friction points in an experience for every customer that we interact with. I learned this from Walt Disney.
I mean, Walt Disney put himself in his guest's shoes. He said, whenever I go on a ride, I'm always asking what's wrong with this thing and how can we improve? And so, you know, if you look at your industry, you look at what you do and you look at what are all those friction points, what are all those frustration points for the customer?
And then you look at what are all the normal ways of doing things. And so, you know, even to start a list, this is the normal way of doing a podcast. This is the conventional way of selling this. This is the normal way of doing an invoice. This is the normal way of doing voicemail. This is the normal way of doing an email signature. This is the normal way of whatever it is.
Those are micro little ones. And then say, well, what would be something that would be remarkable? fans first is the name of our company. You know, that's the spirit of how we do everything. But there's three words that we talk about regularly and it's, you wouldn't believe. And it's, how do we get our customers, our fans, our team members, everyone we interact with to say, you wouldn't believe
You wouldn't believe what they did today. And so whatever you're doing, how do you create some you wouldn't believe moments? The only way you do that is you look at what are the normal and say, all right, well, what would be something that would be a little bit crazier, a little bit different, a little bit wilder, a little bit more remarkable, a little bit more fun.
Whatever that word that fits into your brand.
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Chapter 7: How does storytelling enhance fan engagement?
Ours is fun. So we look at fun with everything. How do you make it more fun? How do you make baseball fun? How do you make every moment of our social media fun? Those are the things that we look at. So I think it's just a framework. And every day, you've got to take time coming up with ideas. If you just say, oh, I'm going to change it, you've got to work your idea muscle.
Are you working your idea muscle and actually coming up with ideas on things you can do differently in your job, in your industry? If you're not doing it, good luck. You're going to get out of shape. And I mean by you're going to get out of shape, you're not going to be able to come up with a lot of good ideas. And so that's what we think about.
So a follow up question that because I love that and it takes a team to be able to do those things. Right. Because I know how wild and crazy Jesse probably gets in these team meetings where you talk about ideas. And I'm sure now your team has evolved to they're coming up with some of these crazy, cool ideas aligned in that fan first moment, that fan first mantra.
How often do you talk about it? You know, I think you can put some things on your wall and say, this is who we are. This is what we stand for. But how often do you actually talk about it? How often do you live by it?
How often when something goes wrong and it's easy not to do what's best for fans and do what's best for your business, do you actually live by those values and show your team this is who you are? Here's an example. Last year. We, by mistake, sent an email out to our fans.
It was supposed to go out just to 4,000 because there were only a handful of tickets left in Savannah for a chance to buy tickets, the last few tickets in Savannah. Instead of 4,000, we sent it out to 44,000. We offered them all the opportunity to get tickets with time slots.
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Chapter 8: What challenges did Jesse face in the early days of the Bananas?
So I remember I'm flying. I'm going out to give a speech when this is happening. And I land Twitter, Facebook, emails. Everyone's messaging me. How dare you? You said you were going to do this. You weren't going to do this. Literally our time slot was nine o'clock and there were no tickets available. It was Armageddon internally. Like it was Armageddon. Right.
So immediately myself and Jared are present. He's been with us since day one. We get on the phone. We say, what are we going to do? And say immediately apologize. That's the first step right now. And again, that's, you know, that's table stakes. Some people don't do it, but the first thing, so we wrote, I was like, Jared, I want to do this. He's like, no, I want to do it. I'm like, okay.
So Jared wrote an amazing apology letter. And we said, that's not enough. Apologies, one thing that's not enough. So are you going to really stand by it? So what are we going to do? We said we're going to take care of all these people with tickets for this coming tour. What does that equal? Six million dollar loss for the company.
Over one hundred thousand plus tickets that we took care of for people. And so what we did is after we offered that to them, they had their opportunity to come to any game they want, Fenway Park, Yankee Stadium, anywhere. And we have a demand of over 4.2 million people on our lottery list. So this is just basically throwing away 6 million. But we said, we're going to do it.
We got everyone on our team on a Zoom. And we immediately said, turn your cameras on. This is why we're doing this. And then what happened, those first few games that people had tickets, they weren't showing up at the high rate that we usually get. We get 95% redemption, but because they were free tickets for them, it was down to like 75%. And I was like, that's unacceptable.
We have millions of people that want to code our games. So we start messaging them off. So finally we said, we will buy back your tickets so we can sell them. Buy back tickets they never even paid for. So now we're offering free money to these people. Literally, you know, Two hundred, three hundred dollars to get back their tickets so we can give them to people that are going to come to the game.
Do you stand by your values? Six million dollar loss. Pretty big hit. You go back three, four or five years ago. That's more revenue than total company brought in. Right. But it's fans first. And that's what we're going to do. And that's how we're going to make those decisions. So give examples, give stories, share how you do it. And you've got to do it every single day. And that makes the impact.
Love it, brother. Love it. And you just said something about stories. And I tell people all the time, like there's there's three storytellers I know that are great, like Nick Nanton, Damon Johns, an amazing storyteller and Jesse Cole. Right. So how what role does storytelling play in the way that you connect with your fans, your employees and sometimes even your critics?
Yeah.
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