The (Improbable) Story of Savannah Bananas' Rise to a $1B Empire

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
You gotta create attention first. If people don't know who you are, good luck trying to create something.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:04)
You guys have a multi-million-person wait list for tickets. On TikTok, you have 10 times more followers than the New York Yankees.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:11)
Ideas are more valuable than anything. Whatever's normal, do the exact opposite. No one comes home and said, oh, did you hear this thing? It's so normal. You get excited about remarkable, unforgettable.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:20)
You're one of our Mount Rushmore type of guys because you're playing the game on extreme hard mode, and I respect you for it.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:26)
It's way harder than I thought.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:28)
So we completely ran out of money. We had nothing left. And then Emily turned to me and said, we have to sell our house. So we sold our house.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:33)
Did you have conversations of wanting to quit?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:34)
I mean, it was brutal. What's up, guys?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:47)
Oh my God, it's Jesse Cole. What's up?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:51)
How are you guys doing?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:52)
We almost wore the same thing today.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:54)
You should have. You should have. There's a lot more going around these days. I think I'm keeping them in business.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:59)
When did you start the yellow suit, yellow hat? What was the day?

**SPEAKER_1** (1:02)
What was the conversation? That's the crazy thing. People didn't even realize that. It was before the Bananas. That's the wild thing. Oh, yeah, man, we had a team and you talk about First Million. We had a team in Gastonia. So I was I was wearing this before because of PT Barnum, inspired by him, not just to be the same same regular host like everyone else.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:19)
So do you know what you're getting into at all with this?

**SPEAKER_1** (1:22)
Well, I know I've listened to your show and I'm ready. I'm ready to rock. I love the one with the to the owner of the jazz. That was an interesting that was more of a sit down.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:32)
When I was hanging out with him, I was telling him a bunch of Savanah Bananas anecdotes. I was like, you got to you got to do this. You got to do this. You got to get the grandmas on the court.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:40)
Or he loves hearing all the other things he should do.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:42)
Yeah, that's probably what he liked, Shaan. You probably like that.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:46)
No, it was very well done and very well produced as well. You guys did a great job with that.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:49)
Well, thanks, man. Well, we're excited to have you here because you are one of our entrepreneurial Mount Rushmore type of guys because you took some...
It's about the gap. It's about the gap of going from nothing to something. And the way how far you went with nothing to something incredible is pretty remarkable. Just to give people a sense, I mean, I don't know a soul in my life who wanted to go watch exhibition or minor league baseball. That was not even a thing. And yet, you guys have a multi-million person wait list for tickets. You guys have, I just looked this morning on TikTok, you have 10 times more followers than the New York Yankees. And so just accomplishing that kind of blows my mind. And I want you to come on here and I want you to tell your story. I want you to teach us kind of how you think, because I think the way you think and how that's been applied to baseball could be applied to many other types of businesses. I think that's the real gift you're gonna kind of give the entrepreneurial world.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:47)
Yeah, we'll fire it up. Let's jam.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:50)
All right, so Sam, where should we start? Start at the start?

**SPEAKER_3** (2:52)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, let's spend, but we'll keep it a little bit abbreviated because you've done a lot of amazing podcasts. We've talked about it, but yeah, do set the context a little bit. Like 10, 15 years ago, where were you?

**SPEAKER_1** (3:02)
Yeah, well, I started as a 23-year-old general manager with the team in Gastonia, North Carolina. And so it was college summer baseball, which is a low level of baseball. So that's where I started with this. And yeah, that team only had 200 fans coming to the games, $268 in the bank account. I couldn't pay myself for literally three months. It was December, I think, I was able to take my first paycheck, which I was making $27,500. So I wasn't making a lot of money regardless. But that's where I started. And so I was learning how to make college summer baseball exciting and entertaining. And I did that for years, and no one knew anything. But we were just experimenting and trying new things. That's really kind of learned the ideas of making baseball more fun and adding new things to the show.