He turned a broke team into a billion dollars

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
All right, this episode is a Billy of the Week. Me and Sam are so inspired by this one story, this one entrepreneur. I'm almost slightly intimidated, Sam, by this story. It's like, oh my God, the bar has been raised of what I need to go do.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:13)
The person who we talked about, I pray this makes it to them, and I pray that they come on the pod. And after listening to this, you're gonna agree that we have to get them on.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:20)
Amen.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:21)
Also, the last two minutes of this podcast, we need you guys to listen. We left you guys a message.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:27)
Yes. All right, enjoy. This is the most inspiring business that I saw when I was looking at the world of sports. There's a lot of things that made a lot of money. This one not only makes a lot of money, I literally in my notes wrote down in all caps, this guy deserves a billion dollars.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:51)
I want to be like him.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:53)
I don't even think I've ever had that thought before, right? Like, you know, there's a lot of people who hate billionaires. I'm not like that at all. I think it's great, you know, create a successful business. But I've never heard a story and thought, God damn, we need to give. It's like if there was a Nobel Prize for business, we need to give it to this guy.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:07)
This guy we're going to talk about, it's one of these stories that I think I know all about it. And then I go in like deep dive and I'm like, so much better than I thought.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:15)
Yeah, so much more to know.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:17)
It's also another one of those stories where I almost didn't want to talk about it because I thought that like, oh, everyone has talked about it, but it's just too good. And there's more to it than I even realized.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:27)
And I want to have them on, so I was like, should we sell the whole story? But whatever, gotta do it. Okay, here we go. We're talking about Savannah Bananas. So this is a business in baseball. This story is pretty incredible. So should we tell it from beginning, middle to end, or where should I start here?

**SPEAKER_2** (1:41)
Yeah, let's give an origin story of where they are now.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:45)
Okay, actually I'll start with the where they are now and then we'll go to the origin story. So the where they are now is the most impressive metric. They have a three million person waiting list to buy tickets to their events. You can't buy it if you want to. You basically have to win the lottery in order to go to their event now. And that's kind of amazing. This is a business that's probably worth close to a billion dollars, I would say, based on what I could tell. And it's about a hundred million in revenue.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:10)
I think they do between seventy and a hundred million in revenue is my guess. I don't know what that would be worth, but it's definitely plausible that it will be worth a billion dollars soon if it's not already.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:19)
It's got more social, they have more followers on TikTok and social media that follow their brand, their team than every single professional baseball team, including the Yankees and the Red Sox and the Dodgers combined. All MLB teams combined, these guys have more engagement.
It's a very, very impressive business. Okay, so what's the origin story of the Savannah Bananas? So starts off with this guy, Jesse, and Jesse's the founder. He's himself like a college baseball player. He wants to make it. And I think he gets onto a college summer team or like a minor league team or something.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:56)
Cape Cod, it's called Cape Cod Summer League. It's like the premier summer league for amateur baseball players.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:01)
And premier is so generous. That's like saying we're the premier podcast of the world. So there's Major League Baseball, then there's like AAA, AA, Single A, then there's like another thing, and then there's college summer league under all of that.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:16)
Does me filming this from my bedroom not scream premier?

**SPEAKER_1** (3:23)
Yeah, Sam in like his mother's bedroom or something. I don't know what's going on.
So he's playing and then basically as he moves up in competition, he's benched basically. He's like not good enough to play. There's like better players. And he realizes while he's sitting on the bench, he's like, man, the sport I loved and I've built my life around, had so much fun doing. Like, man, when you're watching, it's pretty boring. Like it's really fun for the ten guys out there, but damn, baseball is pretty boring to watch.