Always be the challenger

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/8ad8bb5010a0fc98

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In a few hours we get to see thousands of people that had this game populist.
And they're waiting outside, they're wearing their gear.
As soon as they see us, they start jumping up and down or getting excited to high five us.
And that's not just players and cast.
That's our staff.
They get exciting. Oh, you work for the team?
And if you can find Matt.
And continue to build that and talk about what matters most. It's not about the money, it's not about the sales, not about the revenue.
It's not even about the growth.
It's about the amazing moments that you get to create every day.
And feel that?
It's the most contagious thing in the world.
This is Masters of Scale. I'm Jeff Furman, your host this week on the show, Jesse Cole. The name you may not know off the bat.
But Jesse is the founder of the Savannah Bananas and Fans First Entertainment, and if you've turned on ESPN in the last year, you've seen the man in the yellow suit. That's Jesse. He's part PT Parnum, part Walt Disney, and he's scaling a whole new kind of sport with his fast-paced circus style version of professional baseball.
Jesse's relentless dedication to his fans offers important insights for anyone in the business of delighting customers, which really should be all of us.
We are on location today. We are uh recording live at Angel Stadium where the Savannah Bananas and the Indianapolis clowns are playing tonight. And we are with the greatest showman on earth.
Jesse Cole, welcome to Masters of Scale. Excited to be with you guys. Been a big fan of the show for
When it first launched. So we've shared the episodes with so much of our team. So many people on our team has been great. Well, we're we're huge fans, but you do. And and I we were just talking before we we turn the mics and cameras on about how you all been capturing content kind of dream style for a long time now.
We're producing a movie of the bananas and fame first.
We might open on you leading the crowd and seeing poll plays yellow. Can you set the stage for us so you can open that show there? Well, as someone who grew up uh south of Boston, a huge Red Sox fan, my dad and I, you know, we went to so many games, back point tickets for five dollars, and sit out on the bleachers and uh you know, I was a shy introvert kid growing up and my dad
you know, had the opportunity to win this challenge for me to become an honorary bad boy. And so when I was five years old, I saw my first ever Red Sox game, but I was in the dugout before the game.
But I was sitting by myself and one player came over and sat down next to me and it was Hall of Fame at least. Yeah.
And he spent twenty minutes with me, this shy, introverted five year old kid. He didn't have to.
And that moment changed everything for me because I saw him as this larger than life picture. I saw the Red Sox now as this larger than life team. And I vowed to one day play at Fenway Park.
And so I put everything I can into my baseball career. It was fortunate to have professional scouts watching me and a division one scholarship and then tore everything my shoulder and then ended my career just like that.
I was on the
And so that dream of playing a federal was over.
At least I'm not.
Until we started in the front office and how to make baseball fun and what people don't realize it's spent ten years with this team in Gastonia, North Carolina that no one knew about just trying to craft
what we were doing to get people excited about coming to a baseball game before we started the Savannah.
And then we started the bananas, failed miserably, lost everything, and then after many years made it successful, took the show on the road.
And was able to uh sell out Fenway Park with thirty seven thousand fans and
Uh everyone singing yellow and
Lighting up the sky.
And it was a moment I'll never forget. And what happened was I got some coaching jobs.
But I also got this opportunity to be an intern.
For a college summer baseball team. And why would you want that? And I was like, Well, it's right down the road. Let's just try at the front office.
And I realized immediately that and the front office you could actually
create a lot of the experience that happens for parents. And I started to get
Ideas of wow, we could change this about the game. This is more than what if we had this what about music here. And so immediately as an intern
I started to get the idea of what it was like to work in the front office and then I got offered a job as a general manager at twenty three years old. Outside of a legendary Facebook front office man.
When it was your yours ball back. Yeah. The best things back in the fifties. But minor league and column summer league is where we've seen at least some experimentation in baseball.
What did you try? What worked? What didn't work? Share that point of the journey. I was twenty three years old. It was two months into my job as a general manager. I wasn't able to pay myself. There was no money. There was two hundred sixty eight dollars in the bank account when we started.
And there was no money. The team had lost over a hundred thousand dollars the previous year. Wow. So I had saved money uh, you know, in college, I had scholarship. So I was living off that and it was two months in and went to the vet conference. So the vet conference is Mike Vec and he brings together minor league operators and they talk about ideas. It's all about ideas.
So my mind starts just seeing like
We gotta think a different way.
I started reading about PC Barn and Walt Disney. And I said, You know, let's do the things that are just a little bit different. You know, you have beauty patches, but what if we had a grandma beauty patch?
And so we actually got grandmas from a senior citizen home and had a grandma beauty pageant, which
Not go exactly as we plan, but it was it was what happened. Well, I mean Gertrude stole the show. She was eighty seven years old. Well, first of all, they showed up late because I you know I should have expected that. The first question we did uh Gertrude, if you could be on the cover of one magazine, what would it be and why? She goes, Of course.
Why boy. And I was like, This is a front of a live crowd. She'd be seven years old. No one should be thinking about that. And that's how it opened. So
We did that. I mean we had flatulence fun nights, like woody cushion giveaways. We had Sluke underwear nights. Yeah, we had uh garbage can notch up, which we're still doing Savannah, like which
Five orders of nachos, three hamburgers, three hot dogs. It's heartstoppingly delicious. Still can't get a cardiologist to sponsor it, but all these things we started thinking about how do we do things. And that's where the experimentation lap started in gas start.
It's one thing to say, I'm gonna take the blinders off. Yeah, to actually generate the ideas for the Grandma Beauty contest or whatever else it may be. We had nothing to lose. See how people realize they always put so much weight on
Failure. They put so much weight on an idea. When we first started, you do something, who cares? It might not go right. So we just kept doing all these different ideas. And so now we we've developed kind of a system on how we
generate our best ideas. You know, we follow a Saturday live model and we generate ideas on a Tuesday all day idea sessions, then we have a table read and we start doing rehearsals and we go through all that to have a brand new show every week.
And I think when you take out the weight of that.
And just say we're gonna try things.
You find out a lot more gold. You find gold because you're you're doing more.
You learn more by it the more you do.
And so
Henry Ford says she learn by doing. And so we're just constantly doing things.
Well so back in the day, the first ten years of Yastonia
There was no one covering us. There was no social media. We were just testing things. And you watch other fans react and you try it again.
There's so many people right now who are working at companies. It could be massive, you know, fourteen fifty companies were at Rail Spit or Lose Stage Startups.
We've had a plan.
Yeah. And whether it's because of AI, you know other exogenous forces, external forces are coming in and
forcing them to have to think different. When you talk these folks, make them to you what do you say to them about how to inject that
Let's go with it, you know, into a process so that you take away that fear of failure and actually give yourself freedom to experiment. Yeah, we had a plan.
We were a college summer baseball team.
And then the plan changed.
Because we watched what our fans were doing. We watched as fans were leaving games. No matter how much entertainment we had, how much dancing, celebrations, crazy moments, surprises. Our plan was to get baseball. Why were they leaving room? Because the game's too long.
It's too slow. It's too boring for people. It's a late night, you're taking your kids home.
No one wants a three or four hour show.
So we saw that. We literally videotaped it, we're taking pictures and watching every thirty minutes.
But no one told us.
That hey, we want a faster show.
But they act.
And so we had a plan. Everyone's so focused off it on their current customers.
We love our fans more than anything. I I will put us up against any company in the long home should love our fans.
But we're also thinking about our future fates.
Where are fans don't want in three or five years? And you can see little things they react to.
What time do they show up? When they leave.
How do they react to the thing with your original music?
We put things on social media. We put millions of things on social media. You can respond right away.
It's not oh the album likes it. No, do your fans like it.
And if our fans like it, they will tell you that.
And so I think the reality is not about what are our plans. It's you need to put more things out there and share with the world and find out what they like and what they don't like.
Companies are afraid of doing that because they're afraid of the perception of what people will think.
I don't care the point what people think. We're gonna fail every day. We do silly and crazy promotions. Every day, baseball traditionals criticize us.
We're not for that.
Who are you for? If you're trying to grow a business, you're trying to create customers. You put more out there and see if they like it.
Don't do surveys.
Just actually go do it.
And that's what Walt Disney believed in. And that's what we try to do as well.
You could easily be um the most successful front office person in summer college baseball, baseball, or maybe in major league baseball. Well
You could have been that's a path that was available to you.
Why isn't that the path you would take?
The greatest creators create things that they love.
Often someone that's a creator, they're in a system and they're in a COD and they're creating someone else's dreams, someone's vision, someone board members.
I realize that someone who
play the game and loved playing.
Watching it just was never
truly exciting for me. And I realized that if I stayed into this
box that they put you. These are the rules of the game. This is how you have to play. These are the rules that lead. You better not break the rules or you're going to get fine. If you can
get out of that box and just create things that get you excited.
And you believe if
You get excited about and you love it that other fans and other customers will get excited about it.
That's the world I wanted to live.
And I just believe that something was out there now.
Not your traditional baseball fans will.
That a family would love. That young people would love that. People that just want to go have fun and not take themselves too seriously.
There's the conventional world of sports.
Which we play a little bit in that world.
But
We can't control whether your team wins or loses. Right. But what we can control is the shot.
And if we build the rules, we make the rules of the game. We make the rules of the show.
People can leave and have a great time every single night. That's what we're trying to do. So a lot of entrepreneurs would have built their deck.
They would have gone around and pitched this idea for a a new concept and raised a bunch of money or tried to and go from there. That's not what you start doing.
One city world sort.
Start small dream big. We had this idea, we had this full weekly plain banana ball.
And we did it behind closed doors. We played nine innings and ninety nine minutes and the players said it was the most fun they've ever played, and I watched it.
You couldn't take your eyes. So how do you make that happen? I called my two college coaches and say I got a crack. Can we do this behind closed doors?
They said, sure, Jesse, we'll give it a shot. And we got fired up.
Oh, we said all right.
Let's test
And it didn't work right away. No.
What happened. It never works right away. It always starts as chaos when you first
But it was all right. Well
Is there something here? There's some match.
Do you not want to take your eyes?
I didn't want to blink, so I was like what's gonna happen. Yeah.
So when you just said how do you make people you can't take your you can't leave received or you may miss something you've never seen before based on you're not like an independently wealthy guy spending a trust fund down or something you save a few bucks with scholarship.
How are you even sustaining this while you're trying to get enough
traction or product market fit. And most businesses, a lot of businesses are, hey, we gotta start this, we need to raise capital, or we're gonna have advertisers, sponsors, we gotta get all this. Well
What we were fortunate with college summer baseball, we started a model
Where if we could sell the tickets and get people excited enough to come.
We learn how to be successful by just selling tech. Everyone's like, Oh, I don't know if we need to do that golf event because we lost our sponsor. Well, then the event's not good. If people don't want to pay to come see it.
We had a name product that people wanted to pay and come see in college and baseball. We were selling out every night.
four thousand seats. Yeah. Now this is after only selling two tickets in our first three months.
Running out of money.
My wife and I have a seller house.
Sleeping on an airbag with no.
But we got them to see the show. We said dancing players. We saw fun moments. We saw banana babies, banana bands, all that. People like this is something we've never seen before.
So that started you know small three million dollar business but making money and it's fine. Was there a moment where you rifle to each other and said
This isn't gonna work.
Was there a moment where you lost faith or you just weren't sure you're gonna get there?
We wouldn't let ourselves go there.
We couldn't.
We were a million dollars plus in debt. We just got married. We have to go on. There's no other option.
So what's the inflection point then when you've sold the house on the air mattress.
Have to be some moments your wife and you were looking at each other can more.
Yeah. Deep breath. We didn't sleep at all. Yeah.
We didn't say we walk the streets just thinking.
And we just have say
Get to that first show.
Mm. Get to that first show.
It's like my dad, you know, it's probably get you next to that.
And you forget about what happened in the last abat, get to your next abat.
And that's and then swing hard in case you hit it.
And so we said we're gonna get to that opening night.
We're gonna swim hard.
banana nanos went out and danced in the porn rain because it was a rain delay. And we had the players doing dances and what am I watching?
But it created intention. They were saying they saw some. So from that point we started selling it every day.
Well, so the business became at a four thousand seat state. So we already had a little bit of a cushion saying, Hey, we can experiment.
Let's go take this on the road. We have Penske truck that we just
Packed all our stuff in. We didn't know how to set up merchandise. We didn't know the logistics.
We didn't know how to do sound systems at other stadiums. We didn't know any of it.
But we said can we get enough people excited to come see it?
At least sold it out.
We failed miserably the first night's sound went out.
Yeah, Anthem Center didn't show up, but enough good happen.
That's the next Atron and Great Show.
And I knew like that.
We had a surprise firework show. We had the fans stayed an hour plus after the game. They didn't want to leave.
Which normally games you want to leave. And I said, This is it. And so the next year go to seven cities, then thirty three, then Major League Stadium, then football stadium. You just keep expanding after you start doing
Still ahead, more with Jesse Cole on how he uses social media to superchar growth.
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It strikes me that twenty years ago this would have been a heck of a lot harder to do in part because you just didn't have the range of social media. So hard off take that in real life experience so special and translate it on social media on digital. What was that?
Well we spend zero dollars on the market.
We invest on the experience. So most people, I think, when they think about marketing is like you gotta go promote something to get people to want to buy something or take on a certain
What we think about is how do you make your experience so remarkable?
that you capture that and just share that. So but PC Barton, one of the greatest promoters of all time, he said something terrible happens without promotion.
Nothing.
And so I think without social media great challenge.
But yes, now social media we can amplify.
But you still have to create something truly remarkable.
And that's what we try to do every night.
You've referenced B. T. Barnum, you've referenced Walt Disney, there are elements of Vince McMahon and WWE here. There are elements of Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead. When you're looking at these folks who've innovated and created these extraordinary
Fan friendly experiences. How are you determining what what's going to work for you? What to draw from them?
When you're researching, you're reading about these folks, folks, what what are you looking to latch on to?
You start with the best in their industry. So the Grateful Dead. They were the most fan friendly band of their
They let the fans record every single night. You know, they create a newsletter for them. They were speaking directly with them. They brought in their own sound because they wanted to be better. Like they were obsessed with communicating directly with the fans. They started selling their own tickets for fans, the fan clubs, all of that. So we said, All right, how do we do that? So we have 40,000 K Club members.
that get access to all of our tickets for the ship's special meeting grades. That could be well over a hundred thousand, but we're still learning that every year and slowly growing it. I spent a couple of years at the NFL. Ring the digital meeting grid. Yes.
There is perhaps no organization more zealous about controlling its right than the National Football League and they've built a pretty darn good business doing it. Yeah.
You guys would defend the first approach. You'll do an ESPN deal, you do a CW deal.
You'll keep the rights to bring games on YouTube for free globally. When you're balancing that driving revenue and creating that fan experience means you're still a business, right? I mean we're a healthy list.
So how are you striking that balance? Is it always fan first? Are there moments where you go
Oi.
If ESPN's with ten X the dollars they're gonna give us, I'm not gonna live stream every day. Is that even a discussion?
Fans first, always.
We started this company the fans first.
That's who we are. That's what we stand for. It's our mission.
our values.
And as soon as you deter away from that, you're in trouble.
And you'll be
Glorious in the short thing.
And then every day you'll just lose a few fans.
Two, three, four, five.
And time.
And hundreds.
And thousands.
That's my fear.
There's it.
different mindset when you're at a challenger brand than we're at the top. Yeah. But you should always be challenging. How do you maintain that challenger brand mindset as you're getting up there? I'm scared every day.
I'm scared every day.
That
Well we've worked so hard on when we first started sleeping on your bed.
Yeah, we can lose fans. I'm scared that this that we built from nothing.
And now it's
I guess you can call it productive paranoia.
And I have that every day.
Yeah, our show has to get a little bit better. Our experience has to get a little bit better.
our entertainment has to get a little bit better our emergency space has to get a little better our ticket experience has to be a little bit better.
Some people say, Oh, that sounds unhealthy to me, it fires me up. It excites me. I love looking back at where we were last year, looking at where we are this year, and knowing that we're only one percent of the way where we compete.
I know that, I believe that.
Because we're mental on it as we go.
It's gonna be messed up.
Every time we do a new show, it's hard. We have sixteen now.
It's extremely hard trying to at that level. And I don't think most people realize this because the bananas are becoming phenomenon. Can't go on social without seeing you guys. Phenomenal. But you're now sixteen Lee. You've got a season, you've got an end of season. Right. So are you even worrying about diluting the brand by expanding into these other teams? That's a huge fear.
So you have to make every single show so distinct and so unique and so different.
We've invested in each show. So like the party animals, which people don't realize. They have more followers than every major league baseball team on TikTok. Really?
They're selling on major league stadiums.
Without the bananas. Like
Hundred and seventy thousand people joined the list to go see them in Detroit.
Based on those numbers.
We can sell out eight straight nights without the bands. Yeah. The clowns, our newest team, which obviously paying tribute to the Major League team with what they did is unbelievable. I mean, we're bringing Broadway type centers, a brass band that's unbelievable. We have acts, we haven't shared yet, but from Circus Soleil.
I want people every night to see this show. I've never seen that on a baseball. And it's very hard because they're all just getting started. Can they build that brain on their own or how do you think about the bananas? They're creating fans every night.
The local beach coconuts.

Their merchandise is right up there at number two.
Because that brain is so fun that when they start playing at the end of the game, everyone's chanting.
Local beach and coconut.
And so
They can build off each other.
But you have to make it distinct. You have to make it they think oh it's just not one of the dance things where it dropped.
That's a huge
Fear of mine is we gotta continue to come up with new ideas. The Dodgers have a home game tonight. I checked right before we sat down. The very cheapest seat in the stadium is eighty bucks. You guys have kept a very low fixed ticket price.
How do our goal is very simple. It's create famous.
Your goal's to make money. We could charge a lot more.
And we've been told to do that by every consultant one. You could be making this. The average ticket price in the secondary market's over two hundred dollars.
For us it's forty, fifty, and sixty dollars with no ticket these no conveniently pay your taxes.
Dame.
If you're a public company.
They would say there's a hundred million dollars right there. Charge what you should charge. Yeah.
No interest to us.
And we even built a secondary market to deter the whole secondary market. Yep. And it's all face value.
What you
Just cost us money. Yeah. We're literally doing developing, putting all the money into it, taking all the fees. That's all on us.
Just so our fans need to think of at the price that we believe is best. The other thing that I imagine though probably that would be best redundant to get in your business would say is okay, fine, just do it that way, do it your way.
But let's go use this ticketing platform for everyone else. Is that part of the place? Well, yeah, if you follow, I guess if you look at what Amazon did, I think that's great. Bezos and the group built something that can handle their infrastructure and say, wow, a lot of people could use that as well. AWS. AWS, which is the most profitable part of their business, billions of dollars.
Yeah, I think
There's a world where our ticketing platform that we have built
Yeah, our secondary marketplace could be used, but right now we got
Getting to a point where we're so great for our fans.
It's almost that perfect for our hands that we want to put it on turn.
That's gonna be a long way. Again, our goals aren't to make a lot of money. Our goals are to create the best experience. I get that. And also the more money you make, especially if you're not charging fans for it, the more you can offer it.
Right. Yeah. I mean honestly that's that's a lot like we're investing a lot more on our show. Millions of dollars, our broadcast.
We invest.
thirteen million dollars this year, which we're not getting that. Like it's free on YouTube. So that's part of our ethos. We will invest more again, another basos. They continue to invest.
For the long game.
We're learning.
How to do a broadcast at a high level. We have sixteen
full time truck drivers that are driving our trucks around the country.
with all of our equipment and merchandise. We didn't know how to do a trucking logistics company, but we have to now.
Because we're in seventy five stadiums all in forty five states. And soon we'll be international.
We have no idea how to do that. You're building a a fan experience. All of a sudden you're building technology, a ticketing platform, you're building a logistics company with the trucking. When a new challenge like that comes up, how are you thinking what to do? Well, depends on what part of the business. So like w you know, I think we learned this again.
You look at Walt Disney and Royd Disney. Walt was focused on all the creative and Roy was focused on all the operation. How you pay for it. Yeah, we have amazing presidents for the lessons day one, Jared Orton.
He is
Go on the operations and figure it out. He always finds a way.
No, his mindset is we'll figure it out.
We don't know, but we'll figure it out. And it's gonna be messy. It'll cost us a little bit more as we figure it out, but eventually we'll get I'm focused on how do we create show? What's our next step? What's our next event that's gonna be larger than life? What's our original music that we're creating, what's the next media thing we're doing? I spend all my time.
He spends all his time focused on how do we actually take care of our fans and make
Yes. There are
A lot of leaders running consumer businesses who would love
to have a little bit of your system. Brian Worlap was my boss at the NFL. He's now running the PGA tour.
Brian calls and Jesse.
One note.
Yeah.

At the PGA tour? Yeah.
I'd break the rules.
Let's dream to have fun.
Let golfers have fun.
People want to connect.
Yeah, they wanna connect in a way.
It's okay to celebrate.
Okay to F.
Why don't the golfers come through high fiving all the fans more? Why don't they actually have some entrances? Why isn't there an entrance music as a golfer comes out? Why does it have to always be quiet? Uh uh you know, again, there's obviously movies and
Have Gilmore and all talking about that and there's a world now where I think people are looking for entertainment nonstop.
We have seen amazing ball shots. We have seen one runs.
We've seen touchdowns. Doesn't take away from sport. It's amazing to watch.
But you haven't seen
Yeah, have as much fun.
Yeah.
And whether you're a golfer, whether you're a footballer
It's like
football channel that said, Hey, we're gonna have
Touchdown Sellys, we're all good. Like celebrate.
Have fun.
You know, that's good. And that's become a part of our society now.
That didn't hurt the game.
It added to the game.
So why don't you embrace that if you're in golf. It's like embrace those moments. Let's just do this one.
Target.
We're gonna have music pumping.
We're gonna have live bands.
We're gonna have entrances, we're gonna have certain walk ups, we're gonna have celebrities doing singing. It is gonna be the most fun golf tournament of the world.
Just test it for once.
Fall?

But you might draw a whole new audience that you'd be surprised and they'd come out at the time of their life.
Let me go to the other end of the spectrum. Um
Reed Hoffman is the co-founder of LinkedIn. Uh a lot of it is not known where the party happens. If you're giving one product note to LinkedIn right now, what are you asking them to do or change to make it?
More fun, more content friendly.
It's not'cause it's very easy to just go and do what everyone else does and you see this every yeah, TikTok takes this from Instagram takes this. It's very easy. I wouldn't try to do what everyone else is doing. I would lean in on what makes them different. And love is better than light, because I've heard many times.
Yeah, get
million, two million, five million, ten million to love you as opposed to
Hundreds.
Yeah, kind of like if someone's about to graduate college is coming up to you and saying, Jesse, like what do I do? The entry level jobs are disappearing. I'm really not sure what to do.
What's the piece of advice that you're going to do?
See what gives you energy.
Biggest game changer for me to happen.
But six years into my professional journey, I was with the Gastoni Grizzlies.
And I was doing everything.
I was doing.
Hiring, I was doing sales, I was doing food and bev, I was doing operation every day. I was and then I realized that what were my best days? What did I do during my so
I was coming up with ideas. I was creating. I was sharing. I was on a podcast. I was talking about what we're doing. I was growing. I was learning from some of the best of the best.
And so I created my energy list.
So these are the three things these buckets creating share and wrong.
If I do that every day.
Everything else takes care of itself. Yeah, people always ask me, shop at night.
To me that's the wrong flesh.
It's one thing she happened at all. Mm-hmm.
And so for someone that's graduating high school, graduating college, what gets you fired up?
What gets you excited to do?
Then you could do for hours, time just flies by.
You know, often people are watching the clock in the jobs. What is it that you don't even realize? Like at the ballpark?
It's twelve hours go by. I'm like, Oh my god, this is showtime. Yeah. Because we're doing things that we love around people that we love to do.
That's the difference. And so when I
I just think about that. It's it's one of those things every day that you get truly excited to. Not necessarily a passion.
What gives you energy?
What makes you want to do a little bit more and a little bit more?
Because the truly great people are the ones that work on their craft more than anyone else. They do things that no one else will do.
Because they love it. And that's that's the drive. I have to tell you, I mean anyone who's watched realisting is
Your energy's infectious. Your enthusiasm's infectious. But here's the thing that has struck me.
Same thing for your team.
The people who work around you and I don't mean just the players of the field, I mean Taylor who works in there directly.
There's a spirit.
Which you don't feel at most places. And
I hope you see it. I hope you feel it. It's also important to offer that feedback. It's just there's an energy that you don't get those places. And it's joy.
Yeah.
Yeah. It's joy.
And I think the world needs more of that. And when you
have people run a whole company that were doing it for the right reasons because it brings joy.
'Cause we get to seal it.
In a few hours we get to see thousands of people that
had this game on the list and they're waiting outside. They're wearing their gear. And as soon as they see us, they start jumping up and down and getting excited to high five us. And that's not just players and cast.
That's our staff.
They get exciting. Oh, you work for the team?
That.
And if you can find math and continue to build that and talk about what matters most, it's not about the money, it's not about the sales, not about the revenue, it's not even about the growth.
It's about the amazing moments that you get to create every day.
And feel that?
It's the most contagious thing in the world.
And so that gives me energy. I hope it gives all of our team energy because every day we get to do special things and enjoy.
Well, I I'm I'm confident they were watching what they can joy away from this. Thank you for being so much.
Thanks again to the man in the yellow suit, Jesse Cole, for joining us. Not everyone is bold enough to create something as wacky and wild and just

But the lessons from Jesse's scale journey are essential for all of us.
The one that struck me most watching his team rehears for a show.
Joy.
It's contagious.
It's good for business.
And Lord knows.
We need more of it.
I'm Jeff Berman.
Thank you for listening.
Masters of Scale is a Wait What original. Our executive producer is Eve Tro. Senior Supervising Procer is Trisha Bobida.
Associate Producer is Masha Makatanina. Video editor is Noah Walstein. Senior town executive is Stephanie Stern. Mixing and mastering by the audio boys, Aaron Bastanelli and Brian Pew. Original music by the legendary Ryan Holiday. Our head of podcast is Letal Malad.
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