He turned a broke team into a billion dollars

Shaan Puri

Alright, this episode is a *Billy of the Week*. Sam and I are so inspired by this one story, this one entrepreneur. I'm almost, like, slightly intimidated, Sam, by the story. It's like, "Oh my god — the bar has been raised for what I need to go do."

Sam Parr

The person we talked about — I pray this reaches them, and I pray that they come on the pod. After listening to this, you're going to agree that **we have to get them**.

Shaan Puri

Amen.

Sam Parr

Also, in the **last two minutes** of this podcast, we need you guys to listen. We left you guys a message.

Shaan Puri

Yes. Alright—enjoy. This is the most inspiring business that I saw when I was looking in 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."**

Sam Parr

And I *want* to be like him.

Shaan Puri

I don't even think I've ever had that thought before. Right? There are a lot of people who hate billionaires—I'm not like that at all. I think it's great when someone creates a successful business. But I've never heard a story and thought, "Goddamn, we need to give..." It's like, "If there was a *Nobel Prize for Business*, we need to give it to this guy."

Sam Parr

This guy we're going to talk about—it's one of those stories that I think I know all about. Then I go and *deep dive*, and I'm like, "so much better than I thought."

Shaan Puri

Yeah, *so much more to know.*</FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

It's also another one of those stories where I almost didn't want to talk about it, because I thought, like, "oh, everyone has talked about it." But it's just *too good*, and there's more to it than I even realized.</FormattedResponse>

Shaan Puri

And I want to have them on, so I was like, "Should we sell the whole story?" But... well, whatever. Gotta do it. Okay, here we go. We're talking about **Savannah Bananas**. This is a business in baseball. This story is pretty incredible. So should we tell it from beginning, middle, to end? Or where—where should I start here? </FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

Yeah, let's give — let's give an **origin story**, then where they are now.

Shaan Puri

Okay. Actually, I'll start with where they are now, then we'll go to the origin story. Where they are now is the most impressive metric: they have a **3 million-person waiting list** to buy tickets to their events. You can't buy a ticket if you want to—you basically have to win the lottery to go to their event now. This is a business that's probably worth close to a billion dollars, I would say based on what I can tell, and it's about **$100 million** in revenue.

Sam Parr

"I think they do between $70 million and $100 million in revenue—that's my guess. I don't know what that would be worth, but it's definitely plausible that it will be worth **$1 billion** soon, if it's not already."

Shaan Puri

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

Sam Parr

It's called the **Cape Cod Summer League**. It's like the premier summer league for amateur baseball players.

Shaan Puri

**"Premier"** is so generous. That's like saying, "We're the premier podcast of the world." Think of it like baseball: Major League Baseball, then Triple‑A, Double‑A, Single‑A, then another level — and under all of that is the college summer league.

Sam Parr

Does me filming this from my bedroom not scream *premier*?

Shaan Puri

Sam is in, like, his mother's bedroom or something—I don't know what's going on. He's playing, and then, basically, as he moves up in competition he's benched. He's not good enough to play; there are better players. While he's sitting on the bench he realizes, "Man, the sport I loved and I've, you know, built my life around, had so much fun doing... when you're watching it's pretty boring." It's really fun for the ten guys out there, but damn, "baseball's pretty boring to watch." </FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

He said one story. He goes, "I'm on the team, and I'm supposed to be, like, in it, and this is *so* boring. What is going on?"

Shaan Puri

Yeah, so he just has this thought, this realization. Anyways, he gets his first job as a general manager for a college summer league team. It's called the **Gastonia Grizzlies** — nothing, we're not even at the **Savannah Bananas** yet. He begins to manage this team. Now you might think, "How's this young kid get to be the GM of a college summer league team?" Well, the team averaged 200 fans per game and had like $268 in the checking account. So, you know, this team was basically on the brink and was struggling. He comes on; he's not even going to get paid at the beginning, and he's going to be the manager of the team. So he immediately starts *hustling*, like any entrepreneur does. He starts thinking, "Alright, how are we going to turn this around? We gotta get fans to come to the game, buy tickets, sell some merch — what are we going to do? How are we actually going to get this to work?" He starts doing a bunch of things and getting innovative. By day he's working this job, and by night he's reading books about Disney and P.T. Barnum, and, you know, the WWE and the UFC and Apple. Then he looks at things like the Grateful Dead and the Beatles — how did they build their fan base? He starts trying things. He starts trying all kinds of funny promotions: "Hey, how about a fan comes out and throws out the first pitch?" "What if we do this promotion — dollar hot dogs?" Little things like that. And it starts to work. I'll fast forward: he basically starts to turn around the Gastonia Grizzlies — turns it from a team that's about to go out of business to a small amount of cash flow. But again, this is a summer league team: they play about 30 games, it's only in the summer, and there's only so much they're going to be able to do. But he's, you know, he's doing well... he's doing well with...

Sam Parr

But he had good ideas. There was a "dig to China" night, and I read about this—or listened to it on the *Acquired* podcast. They're like, "So, what did you do?" He was like, "Well, I put a ticket to China, or like a gift certificate or something like that to buy a..."

Shaan Puri

"Like a one-way ticket."

Sam Parr

"Yeah, and they were like, 'So did anyone take it?' He's like, 'Well no — it was a *one-way ticket* and there was no accommodation, and so no one actually went.' But basically after that..." [transcript cuts off]

Shaan Puri

"Game fan got to come out of crowd and dig to China."

Sam Parr

Yeah, so he does things like that. Then he organized a "grandma beauty pageant" contest—he did cute stuff like that.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, and it actually starts to work. He turns around attendance and decides, "I'm gonna do anything I can to make noise." So he asks, how do I hijack existing news stories? At the time there was a big scandal around HGH — human growth hormone — and he's like, okay, we need to get in on this story. So he says, "We fired our mascot, the grizzly bear, for taking BGH — bear growth hormone." He's just doing anything he can to drum up interest, and it starts to work. He basically spends about ten years tinkering and experimenting with these things before anything really breaks. He says, "I had one media story cover me in my first ten years," but he got to experiment, he got to try things. Along the way, he ends up meeting his future wife. How did he do that? He says, "I need to... I wanna network and get to know people in minor league baseball," the one rung up from where he was. So he decides to host a free seminar and gets minor league baseball people to come. He's telling them all about grandma beauty pageants and bear growth hormone and the dig to China, and they're like, what the hell is this guy talking about? But he says, "Hey, we turned attendance from 200 fans a game to a few thousand people per game — we 10x our average game attendance." They think, okay, maybe this guy's not so crazy. There was a woman there from Cal Ripken Baseball who calls one of her employees and says, "Emily, I just met your future husband." Emily is like, what? "I just met this guy — he's as crazy and passionate and nuts about baseball as you are. You gotta meet him. Just call him, talk business." They do, he ends up hiring her, and for the first year they're totally professional. Eventually they start dating. He proposes to her at one of the games, on the field. She says yes. She's like, "Oh, I'm gonna plan a weekend trip to Savannah, Georgia — we'll just have fun there." They go from South Carolina to Georgia. Her idea of romance is, "Let's go check out this minor league baseball stadium." They check it out and are blown away — it's like Field of Dreams. They walk in and say, "This is an incredible place. I can feel the history. It feels like Babe Ruth played here. This is incredible. We gotta have a stadium like this." They approach the stadium owner and ask, "Is there any availability?" The owner says, "No — we rent it out to this minor league baseball team." They reply, "Okay, if anything ever changes, if they ever leave, call me." The owner says, "Alright, sure." Sure enough, about a year later the minor league team goes to the city and demands a new stadium — they want a $35,000,000 stadium. The mayor says, "Dude, you're a minor league baseball team. We're not giving you a $35,000,000 stadium." So they pack up and leave. They call this guy, he comes, and he basically cuts a deal: he signs a $20,000-a-year lease to create a team in Savannah, Georgia.

Sam Parr

Alright, so a lot of people will talk about how you need a million dollars and three years of experience to start a business—*nonsense*. If you listen to at least one episode of this podcast, you know that is completely not true. My last company, The Hustle, we grew it to something like $17 or $18 million in revenue. I started it with, like, $300. My current company, Hampton, does over $10 million in revenue. I started it with actually no money—maybe $29 or something like that. Nothing. So you don't actually need investors to start a company. You don't need a fancy business plan. But what you do need is systems that actually work. In my old company, The Hustle, we put together five proven business models that you could start right now today with under $1,000. These are models that, if you do them correctly, can make money this week. You can get it right now—you can scan the QR code or click the link in the description. Now, back to the show: Have you been to a minor league game like this?

Shaan Puri

"I've never been to a minor. Have you?"

Sam Parr

Yeah. I—I went to the Cape Cod League. The games I've been to... to say that "you're buying a team" is a little ambitious. It's *very* grassroots. It's just bleachers.</FormattedResponse>

Shaan Puri

You're missing the things that **high school** had. **High school** has—my kid is playing—that's a pretty strong draw.

Sam Parr

That's why you're...

Shaan Puri

I'm gonna go, right? That's why I'm going. And then colleges — I go here; it's us. *Minor League Baseball* doesn't have either of those advantages, right?

Sam Parr

Yeah, no — it's pretty whack. I mean, you really have to care about baseball. While all this is going on, we've had Dan from Overtime on, and he's kind of explained that basically basketball and football have "killed it" lately because they understand highlight reels and action. They're doing a really good job of telling some stories. Baseball doesn't. Over the last 15 years, as social media has gotten popular, baseball has absolutely been left behind a bit. You know, it's supposed to be *America's pastime*, but it's not really America's pastime at the moment, in my opinion. It's the past—definitely the past. It's a pastime for sure.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, just, like, put space like 5 times between those two words.</FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

So, yeah — it's ambitious to say that he was buying something. I think he said, when he bought the team, he was like, "we bought it." But it's really just seller financing, meaning the guy essentially gave it to me, and I gave him a small percentage of the profits, which were basically none.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, exactly. I think that was maybe the first team, and this team—well, they kind of created one. They didn't buy an existing team; they created one as part of the **Coastal Plain League**, but they owed the league a few hundred thousand dollars to start the expansion team. He had a bit of a reputation from the Grizzlies, so he had something that allowed him to convince the stadium to give him the lease and the league to give him a team. But now he had to make it happen. It didn't start well. In the first few months he said he "literally sold two tickets." He said it was awful—they couldn't give the tickets away. So he tried to host a fan event and promote it: knocking on doors, going on the radio, doing everything to promote this fan event for the new Savannah minor league baseball team. It wasn't called the *Savannah Bananas* yet. So few people showed up to the fan event that the conference center didn't even charge him for the food; they felt so bad.

Sam Parr

Oh my God.

Shaan Puri

How poorly the event went. Basically, these guys **ran out of money**, so they're on the brink.</FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

"These guys being the husband."

Shaan Puri

Him and his wife—sorry, him and his wife—they're running out of money. His wife is like, "Alright, let's sell the house," and he's like, "What?" She says, "Yeah, let's do it. *We are all in.*" So they sell their house and move into a garage that's been turned into a studio apartment. They sleep on a twin air mattress and a twin mattress. They were sleeping in socks every night—like, "you know, nobody sleeps in socks," but they had to. They used all their savings and just tried to keep the team alive. He kept going because he would read books, and he'd say things like, "Walt Disney went bankrupt with his—like, I forgot what it was called—'Laugh-O-Gram' or whatever his thing was called." He also mentioned, "P.T. Barnum struggled." He framed it as, "This is just our struggle era. This is our struggle season. We will do this."

Sam Parr

"We gotta coin that term: this is our **struggle season**."

Shaan Puri

Yeah, exactly — he's in the **pain cave**. He decides the first thing they need to do is come up with a team name. So they do a naming contest and he goes to the community to get them on board. The community didn't really like them. They had lost their minor league baseball team and instead got another team, the Savannah baseball team. He's trying to win the community back, so he holds a naming contest. A 62-year-old nurse submits the name "Bananas." Most submissions were standard names like the Pirates — nothing out of the ordinary. The nurse's submission was "Savannah Bananas." He likes it, but everyone else says, "No, you can't do that." He starts defending it and brainstorming how to use the name. He says, "We have the Bananas — that's our dance team. It's a bunch of grandmas, Bananas." He jokes about other ideas like "the Mananas" and keeps coming up with ways to make the brand work. A lot of this story comes from the Acquired podcast — they did a great job interviewing him, so shout-out to our friends at Acquired. They were skimpy on everything, sleeping on an air mattress, but he believed the brand would matter. He goes to a design agency; they quote him $12,000. He says, "Me and my wife live off $40 a week right now, so I don't have... I don't have a thousand; I definitely don't have twelve of those thousands." The agency says, "Dude, we can't do that. Just make a simple logo; we'll do it ourselves." But he insists, "No, no, no — this is going to be the logo we print on everything. I have to find a way to do this." He ends up paying for the logo and is so proud of it. It's kind of amazing, because years later the brand takes off. They do tens of millions — like $2,030,000,000 a year — in merch sales, and the brand has totally taken off.

Sam Parr

Is it the same logo?

Shaan Puri

I don't know if it's the exact same or if they touched it up, but the core of it is the same. So anyway, he starts doing—and he starts basically coming up with all these different ways to make baseball less boring. So what does he actually do? He studies the end-to-end experience of an event. First, when you buy the ticket you see the ticket price is whatever—$80—but then at checkout it's like $98 because of fees and taxes. The **Savannah Bananas**: here's what we do — it's a "flat $25 ticket and we pay your taxes." So you pay $25, and they pay the taxes. They now pay millions of dollars a year just covering the sales tax for their fans, which is kind of amazing, but it says something about what they represent. I think their company name is even called **"Fan First"**—you know, LLC, **Fan First Entertainment**, or something like that [speaker unsure about the exact company name]—and that became the north star.

Sam Parr

He's got this quote where he was like, "I read that in order to get big muscles you gotta, you know, flex your muscles and work out every day." I needed ideas. So I had this thing where I was like—I think he said, starting in 2016, right when the **Savannah Bananas** got going—"I'm gonna **write down 10 new ideas every single day**." It's easy to do three or five a day, but once you get to six, seven, eight, nine, ten, you really have to start working hard. I needed to **flex that muscle** every day because I needed really good ideas all the time to figure out how to make this great. And I think around this time when he's doing... </FormattedResponse>

Shaan Puri

Let me give you the exact quote on that, so he goes: > "I started an idea book in 2016. I had ten ideas a day— a lot of bad ideas; eighty percent terrible. But you gotta work your *idea muscle*. And by the way, everybody says the same thing. We went to the **MrBeast** podcast we did. Every day I would wake up and I would come up with twenty, thirty, forty YouTube video ideas. I just realized that the idea of what the video is about is the most important thing, so I'm gonna think of more ideas. I'm gonna open up a dictionary, a thesaurus, go to a random page—whatever word I pick, I'm gonna brainstorm it." On the podcast we did with him, we pulled up a random word generator and started putting in random words. He started coming up with video ideas on the spot. He's like, "I've been doing this since I was twelve."

Sam Parr

Dude, this is awesome. I think what I didn't realize was that, around this time when it got going, it was a real baseball team. They're still playing normal baseball. But then he was like, "Okay — what is boring about this?" He said, "Can you believe that this is supposed to be an athletic sport and you can *walk* someone? Like, they could just walk to base. That's ridiculous." He added, "I brought my stopwatch and I timed how long it took a pitch — you know, for the pitcher to get going and then for a strike or a hit to happen. I noticed that the batters can step out of the box. Ridiculous — that took 27 seconds every time." He starts nailing the experience down perfectly. It's sort of like when you own a baseball team and you're like, "Oh no, it ain't broke; we're not gonna fix it — just don't worry about any of that nonsense." He was like, "No, no, no. It's all broken. Everything is broken. We have to figure this actually."

Shaan Puri

The more accurate thing is: it's broken. But that's always the— "That's the way we've always done it."

Sam Parr

And so he comes up with all these crazy ideas, and I didn't realize all of the rules. But it was something like: **foul balls caught by fans count as being out**. *Walks are...* the fourth ball is—you still have to sprint, and I think you can get called out if you don't sprint.

Shaan Puri

The defense has to — they throw the ball among all the defenders. Basically, all the defenders have to touch the ball in order, in between a walk. You know what I mean?

Sam Parr

"That's crazy."

Shaan Puri

If you bunt, you're ejected, because there's nothing *wimpier* than a bunt.

Sam Parr

And then he also says games have to be capped at two hours. On that podcast he was like, "Everyone said it had to be two and a half hours, it had to be this," and he's like, "No—children need to be home and in bed by this time. This is a family event; therefore, it has to be a strict two hours." He called the whole thing *banana ball*—I didn't realize it had a name—and so at first I was like, "Yeah..."

Shaan Puri

Now they have that kind of their own format of a game, basically, and they have their own league and all this. So it definitely elevated over time. But yeah, he did all those things. He also would do things like—his team would basically... it started off with him watching security footage after the game. He thought, "Oh, I could use the cameras in the stadium and I could see when people leave; I could see when they get bored; I could see when they go to the concessions; I could see how long the concessions take." So he started furiously watching security footage to understand the fan experience. Now today he has a team that basically takes a snapshot of all the bleachers—every, like, I forgot what interval—every ten minutes, fifteen minutes or something like that, in order to see when people get bored, when they get disengaged, when they leave. He uses that, then he reverses gears: "Okay, what's going on in the game right now and how do I do that better?" Not to use MrBeast again, but he did. Remember when we were sitting there and he was showing us the same thing about his videos? He said, "Here's the **retention curve**," and pointed out, "see this dip." We were like, "Yeah, so what—it's a little wiggle." He said, "No, no, no—that dip is like 3,000,000 people stopped watching the video." He said, "That dip—this dip—this is horror. This is the worst thing in the world: this dip." We asked, "What is that?" He said, "That's the **ad read**." He's like, "So we need to make our ad read as entertaining as the content."

Sam Parr

And the takeaway that I had with MrBeast, then, as well as what I had with this guy, is: you say to yourself, "When I get big, I'll worry about that stuff." **It's the other way — it's the other way around.** You worry about that stuff, and then you get big.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, there’s a—do you remember the Steve Jobs quote about his product strategy? He used to say everything had to be **"insanely great."** If you've talked to people who worked with Steve Jobs, they say he used to always say that phrase. Normally, when people hear **"insanely great"** they focus on the word *great* and think, "Yeah, I'm going to do that," because who can disagree with great? Who doesn't want great? But it's the *insane* part that's the price tag. When you look at the thing, you have to ask yourself: are you willing to be kind of *insane* about the level of detail? Steve Jobs basically said they weren't shipping the Macintosh because the inside casing of the machine was not finished. People protested, "Steve, nobody's ever going to see the inside." He replied, "But we saw it." So, "we're not shipping this until it's finished." It's a little insane, right? You're trying to do insane things. When they were doing the iPhone, there are lots of stories about the touch keyboard. They said, "Steve, we'll put a little keyboard on there like the BlackBerry." He said, "No—we're not doing the keyboard." They replied, "But Steve, you know... we could do a digital keyboard, but it's not so great." He said, "No. We need to make it, and it needs to be in sandy gray." They thought, "We don't even know if this is technically possible." He said, "We're not just trying to be lazy here, but that's what we're doing, so you gotta figure it out—that's the job." In short: it's the *insane* part of **"insanely great"** that actually matters.

Sam Parr

Well, I had two takeaways from reading about this guy. The first one is... I mean, I run a business; you run businesses. The hard part is whether to be a dictator or like an elected official. Do you just tell people, "This is what we are doing — get on board," or do you delegate and say, "Let's surface some of the best ideas and we'll figure out what to do"? This guy does not seem to take the latter route. He seems to have a vision and says, "This is what we're doing — how wonderful is this? Let's do it." Often, when you have a company, people shit on ideas and list all the reasons why we can't do something. And you know the phrase, "Do you just want a yes man or what?" — I'm like, **yeah, I do**. I want a **yes man**. That's all I want. That's what this guy kinda did. Dude, have you heard some of his other stories? There's this guy Jesse — he's got layers and layers of little stories. For example, I think at the game — I've actually never been to a game — but I think at the game they have the 11 rules. He said, "We picked 11 because K — which stands for strikeout and potassium, and K is the eleventh letter in the alphabet." There's all this weird symbolism. If I told an employee that, they'd be like, "Dude, can you just leave my office and let me design this logo?"

Shaan Puri

Dude, I feel you. When you have an idea that's a little... unprovable — you can't prove it's right — or it seems like a little much, you start to question it. Maybe it even seems unserious, like we should be focusing on more serious things and this is extra in some way. But you're convinced: *this will be cool if we do it*, *this will be special*, *this will be unique*. The amount of energy it takes to bring people on board is so hard. What I did was change my criteria for who I hire. I realized I could not change myself to turn that switch off, and I can't change the process where I expect to magically change people's minds. So I basically changed my hiring criteria. I used to have the Buffett thing — *energy, intelligence, integrity* — those are the three things you want. I just added a fourth one, which is: *are you down?* By that I mean, are you just down? If we have an idea, are you down to do it? That doesn't mean you say yes to every idea. It just means: sometimes there's no evidence, sometimes this is extra, sometimes this is unproven, sometimes this sounds bad — but we have to try and have some faith that we'll figure it out as we go. Sometimes this sounds way out of our league and we're punching above our weight, but why not try? You've met Ben — he's like the most down guy in the world. I don't know if you've met Diego, but Diego's the same way. There are probably more skilled people than them for certain tasks, sure, but I know they're down. That means I can bring a fragile new idea — like a newborn — around them, and they know how to raise that baby. They're not going to be like, "Oh, what is this?" Those ideas are so fragile. If the other people on your team are not down, it's not that they even shoot your ideas down. It's that you censor yourself. You're like, "I'm not even going to bring it up." There's a part of you that does that, subconsciously. </FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

*For sure.*

Shaan Puri

That just *doesn't even bring the ideas to the table*. It *doesn't have the conviction* to say it, because you kind of know where they're at, right? It's like a friend who's easily offended — you think, "I'm just not even going to bring this up, because I kind of know where this goes."

Sam Parr

It's hard to convince people to do stuff just because... At a company, particularly in tech, you're like, "show me the data," and I'm like, "there is no data, brother." It just feels like the right thing to do, and it's hard to convince people to do that. And, in fact, we should have this guy **Cole** come on the pod and really just talk about **management**. That would be actually quite interesting.

Shaan Puri

Well, I was gonna ask you—you did a pod with the guy from the... what's it called? "Unreasonable Hospitality." What is it called? </FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

It's a good pod. Yeah, so his name is **Will Guidara**. It's going to be such a good podcast. This guy—Will—started as a chef, but he was most famous for owning 11 Madison Avenue. Yeah, it's what it's called, and it was awarded the best restaurant in the world. He became famous for two things. One: he wrote the book *Unreasonable Hospitality*. Two: that book inspired one of the best episodes from the TV show *The Bear*, where the kind of dummy cousin goes to this restaurant to learn how to be a good restaurateur. He starts by polishing the forks; the next step is doing the second-lowest job, then the one up, and they just sweat the details on everything. Will was amazing, and we had this whole podcast—it's going to be out, I think, in two weeks or so. The whole podcast was about how tech companies can do that. His story: he started by overhearing a tourist at his restaurant say, "You know, this trip was amazing. I got all this famous food, but I didn't get to do one thing: I just wanted to get a New York street hot dog." Will, the owner, overheard that, ran outside, bought a $3 hot dog, chopped it up in a really pretty way, put a pretty garnish on it, and served it to the tourists. They were mind-blown. He said, "Oh, that emotion—that is what we are doing from now on." He had a budget at his restaurant to do crazy stuff. Instead of coming in and giving children's crayons, he would give them an **Etch A Sketch**, and he would have the Etch A Sketch waiting at the table—just all these small details that people normally forget to do. He would sweat the details on them. That's the idea of *Unreasonable Hospitality*: go above and beyond for your customers, which is exactly what the **Savannah Bananas** is all about.

Shaan Puri

Our friend **George Mac** has this great phrase: *"They only remember you're weird."* I love that because what he means by that is—if you just do the expected norms, it's like **table stakes**. You get literally zero credit for that. If you don't do them, you get docked, but if you do them you don't get any points on the board yet. It's still love, love, right? You have not actually done anything until you've done something weird. Weird can be really good. It has to be out of the ordinary, and that's all people will remember about you. Whether you're building a personal brand or a product, or you're the **Savannah Bananas** and you say, *"We pay your sales tax"*—that's weird. That's memorable. That's what I'm talking about. It was a decision he made ten years ago to do that. It's a decision that cost him money, but how much did it build in goodwill and brand? How much did it *show*, not tell, that "hey, we actually give a shit about our fans"? Every single sports team will say, "Fans are the most important thing; we really care about our fans," as they gouge the shit out of them, right? The actions and the words go in two different directions. Just by doing something weird—like the statement of paying the sales tax for the fan, or being like, "Hey, you pay this one ticket price and then it's all-you-can-eat concessions when you come in"—doing things that are remarkable, worthy of remark, is what gets you the credit. So you're only remembered for doing what's weird. Did you pick anything else up from that guy? Did it give you an idea of something to do in your business?

Sam Parr

Well, he said a couple of things. He said, "Let me tell you two things." One thing that was amazing—he said, "I forget the exact quote, but it was something like, 'Every mistake is an amazing opportunity to blow someone away.'" He explained that people will remember the mistake you make, and then they will remember you going above and beyond to fix it. When he talked about the customer experience, I had an idea, and we're implementing this at Hampton. At Hampton, the way it works is: you apply to join, and three days later we'll review your application and invite you—if you are on paper, if you are in one of our cities, and if you meet the revenue threshold. We will send you an email saying you can sign up to interview with one of our team to see if you're any good or a good fit. We had this idea: what if everyone who applied on Hampton—which is dozens or hundreds of people a day sometimes—received a phone call within ten minutes? Someone would say, "I just saw your application come through. Here's the process. I just want to let you know we see you and this isn't just some form that no one pays attention to. I see you. I'm going to take great care to handle you. You may not get in, but I'm here and I pay attention." That's an example of what it inspired me to do. But the idea that Will had that really inspired me was how you train your staff. He said, "I just have to train my staff like crazy to care about this stuff." He said, "Basically, I'm a propagandist: I have to repeat the same phrases over and over and over to get them to bind to these ideas." This is where the idea came from. It's so funny—you said *insanely great*—that's the exact same thing with *Unreasonable Hospitality*. He said, "Everyone likes hospitality."

Shaan Puri

Right.

Sam Parr

"But the **unreasonable** part is the hard part. That was actually really cool — really wise of you to catch that insane part. That's actually the brilliance with him: it was unreasonable. This is the part we're describing here with **Cole**. It's easy to say these crazy ideas; it's actually hard to be wacky enough to follow through on all of them."

Shaan Puri

Dan Porter — who’s probably our closest friend who’s actually done this — said something similar when he was on the podcast. (I don’t think you were there.) He said: > “If your strategy is something that everybody agrees with, it’s not a strategy.” He explained that if everyone says, “We’re going to have great customer service,” that’s not a strategy. “Cool — you and 100 other companies in your space would all agree that’s a good strategy, so it’s therefore not a strategy at all.” You have to have something that people would disagree with. For example, for Overtime in the first year, “we replied, I think, to a million comments on social.” That’s a strategy that people would disagree with. Some people would say that’s a waste of time, that it’s not worth it. Dan said he was doing it himself — the founder, the CEO. That’s a strategy you could call “stupid” or “foolish.” It doesn’t have to be super foolish; it just has to be something that everybody doesn’t already agree is the thing to do. Same idea with being unreasonable. We all agree we should have great hospitality, but how many people would agree we should be listening for when a guest says, “Oh man, my flight’s out tonight — I haven’t tried the New York hot dogs, I really wanted one,” and then actually leave the kitchen, go get a hot dog from a street vendor, bring it in, break the food code, cut it up, and serve it on a dish? That’s the part others wouldn’t even think of, let alone institutionalize as part of their core strategy. </FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

**Will** gave a really tactical bit that I would be curious to hear **Cole**'s opinion on. **Cole** is the founder of the **Savannah Bananas**. I was like, "Okay, so walk me through the profitability of this." [Unclear fragment in original: "like sounds cole like"]

Shaan Puri

Is that his name? Is that his name, Jesse? Jesse Cole.</FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

**Jesse Cole.** Last name — sorry.</FormattedResponse>

Shaan Puri

"Oh... oh, you're—oh, you're doing the **'last name'** thing. Got it."

Sam Parr

Not on purpose. I wasn't trying to be that cool. Jesse—his name's Jesse, Jesse Cole. He had two first names, or two last names. Will said something like, "How much of your money do you spend on this?" Jesse was like, "Well, I basically allocate **5%**. So if I'm a **20% margin** business, I'm willing to go down to a **15% margin** business. I'm going to use that 5% to do wacky stuff, and I anticipate that it will take most companies six to twelve months to make that money back and for it to prove to be profitable." I'd be curious what this guy says: did it take twelve months for some of these weird norms that he was trying to create within his organization to become established? Did it take twelve months for the customers to catch on, for that story to get out to people, and then to start coming back via more tickets? </FormattedResponse>

Shaan Puri

"I mean, how do you measure showmanship? This guy—this guy's **pure showmanship**. If anyone who listens to this podcast knows me and Sam, we appreciate good showmanship. That's what, literally, this guy is: he's like a modern-day **P.T. Barnum**."

Sam Parr

So where are they now? They're at, like, **100 million** in revenue. And they're like, "I live in Manhattan," and one of their buses drove by yesterday.

Shaan Puri

Give you a sense of what's going on. So, the revenues — let's call it an estimate of **$70–$100 million**. I believe the company is probably worth **$500 million to $1 billion**. They own 100% of it. If you just take the low [estimate]: last year 2,000,000 people came to their games — 2,000,000 fans. It basically doubled: it went 500,000 → 1,000,000 → 2,000,000. This year it should be, you know, over 3,000,000 [attendees]. If you just take the lowest possible ticket price, they could have **$25** tickets (their normal tickets are **$35–$40**). At $25 and 2,000,000 attendees, that's **$50,000,000** in just ticket sales. Then you have tens of millions in merch. They have a 3,000,000-person waiting list. They are now doing a world tour. Up till now it was kind of a North America thing, but they've gone from minor league stadiums to the biggest ballparks in the country. I mean, in a two-day span they had 150,000 people watching their games — it's insane what's going on. We talked about the Savannah Bananas two years ago, three years ago — it wasn't like this. He started this thing, I think, with the Gastonia Grizzlies or whatever, like 2008 or something. It's been a long time that this guy's been doing this, which is why I had in all caps: **"This guy deserves a billion dollars."** You do what he did — you deserve a billion dollars.

Sam Parr

It's very inspirational because he definitely has that *everyday guy* type of vibe. I kind of get emotional reading about the story — I'm like, "I'm on your team. I don't care what you do; I'm bought into you." Yeah, and the husband-and-wife bit is really great. I'm all in on this guy.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, **he's amazing**.

Sam Parr

I have a question, though. Do you think this is going to be like **WWE/WWF** — where it becomes a sustained thing that lasts forever — or is this going to be like the **Harlem Globetrotters**, where the *schtick* gets tired?

Shaan Puri

I think both. I think it is the *Harlem Globetrotters*, not *WWE*, but I don't think it needs to end. You know, I take my kids to all kinds of entertainment. We took my kids to *Monster Jam* last weekend.

Sam Parr

Can you explain **Monster Jam** to all of our foreign listeners, please?

Shaan Puri

This is, by the way, **amazing**, because this is normally the type of thing you're explaining to me.

Sam Parr

Hell yeah—please do it.

Shaan Puri

**Monster Jam** Alright, so what is **Monster Jam**? Monster Jam is basically the *best day ever* for any little boy who loves Hot Wheels and trucks. From my count at my son's school, about 50% of the young boys love cars and trucks. Normally you're at home playing with those little two-inch Hot Wheels cars, or maybe a remote-control car. Then suddenly your parents take you to the Oakland Coliseum and you walk in. It's literally a circle of dirt — like a pitcher's mound — just a dirt mound in the middle of the arena. There's nothing else there; it's just that one dirt mound. They have these characters, like the WWE. They bring out eight or ten trucks that kind of come out, and there's Megalodon — he's the shark one — and all the kids are doing the chant, "shark, shark."

Sam Parr

Yeah, *Megalodon*, dude. I was the grave digger for Halloween once.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, my son has a *Grave Digger* thing. I mean, *Grave Digger* is like their undertaker, so he's, like, their *star*, you know? The trucks come out and they're, like, two to three times the size of a Hummer. I don't know—it's big, but not that big. They basically do tricks in the trucks, but they can only do so many tricks: they went up on their back wheels and they went up on their front wheels.

Sam Parr

"Dude, they do **backflips** now."

Shaan Puri

Yeah. They try to do a flip and then halfway they crash out. Then a crew comes out with fire extinguishers and tows the truck away. Now, you know, you're not going to see *Gravedigger* for the rest of the show. Then they have guys come out on dirt bikes and do tricks, which are way cooler as well. So it's this two-hour family event. You take your kids, get a snow cone or popcorn, and they get to see crazy trucks. They're sitting there with earmuffs on because it's too loud, and then they leave. You buy the merch or you buy them a car, and they're super happy — and you're out $400. Okay, so that's what **Monster Jam** is.

Sam Parr

"Dude, a grave-digger—when he goes, it *rattles your soul*. That's how loud it is. It's not just loudness; it's a feeling."

Shaan Puri

"Dude, I have headphones on, too. It's *so* loud, you, the kid." </FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

"You feel it... it's like a train. When it goes by you, you feel the rattle—it's amazing. I'm just Googling it, so... you know, take it with a grain of salt, but I think it says it sells 4 million tickets a year. There's no way — is that true?"

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I believe that. I believe that—wow. I mean, there were probably 10,000 people at the event I was at. They were there for three days, then they went to the next city. It's just a traveling circus of monster trucks, so I don't see any reason why the traveling circus of **Banana Ball** can't be a sustained thing. I do think the category is more like the **Harlem Globetrotters**. It's a family show: you're going to come, have a great two or three hours, be entertained, laugh, and enjoy the dances. There will be some catchy things stuck in your head; you'll remember a few of the characters, and then you'll go home. It's not something you're going to tune into three nights a week like the **NBA**—and that's fine. It doesn't need to be that. It's an amazing live touring show.

Sam Parr

Man, the guy who owns *Monster Jam* also owns the *Barnum and Bailey* circus, and he's listed on *Forbes* as being worth $3 or $4 billion.

Shaan Puri

"Who is he?"

Sam Parr

It's called **Feld Entertainment**. Feld owns **Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus**. They also own **Monster Jam**, **Monster Energy Supercross**, and **Sesame Street Live**. The owner's name is **Kenneth Feld**, and it's a huge **3,000-person company** [according to Wikipedia].

Shaan Puri

Yeah—unbelievable. This is also stuff that's, like, super *AI-proof*, right? Live, out-of-home entertainment is only going to go up. People always crave something that's different than what they have in abundance, which is digital, online entertainment. These things are scarce; there aren't that many. Especially if you can do what WWE has done or what Jammer has done—where you start to become fans of certain players, teams, or characters in the show—that's always going to be an entertaining thing.</FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

By the way, his father started the **Ringling Brothers Circus**, and his son, Kenneth, eventually took it over. That's now—they're the ones who just own *Monster*.

Shaan Puri

Imagine it's the *family business*. The family business is—we run *Monster Jam*. We started the *Ringling Brothers Circus*. At the dinner table, it's like, "What's going on?"

Sam Parr

It's so much better than what we do. Can you, like... or the baseball—like... I wonder about the Cole family, the owners of the Savannah Bananas. I imagine they have children now. I wonder how awesome it is to see your parents do a job like that.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, it's also tough. I mean, you're on the road all the time — it's *live events*. It's *messy*. You don't get to just push a button and say, "Oh, we sent the newsletter to 3 million people," like, "I pushed the button and the ads are running all night," and then...

Sam Parr

When I ran *The Hustle*, we called the send button on, like, the sell-through—or whatever. We would say, "We're gonna click the **money button**. You guys ready? We're gonna click the money button. Click the money button!" We just called it the **money button** because I knew every time I hit send it was at one. We were making like $30 or $40 a day. I was like, "Alright, click the money button—boom." Right? And this guy does not have a money button. He has a **money bus**, where he has to get on the bus for two weeks.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, exactly.

Sam Parr

Yeah, it's a little different—probably a lot more money than what I made. But yeah, it's a **money bus**.

Shaan Puri

Alright, we ended up spending the whole episode on this *fan of bananas*, but that's cool. I think we should just call it that.

Sam Parr

Is that it? Is that the pod, then?

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I think we should all go and brainstorm ideas for the craziest marketing things we could do for our business. I think we should all write down **20** totally out-of-the-box ideas and do that every day for the next **60 days**, until you have three ideas that are attention-getting and unreasonable in some way. </FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

And—alright—so we did this thing called the **"gentleman's agreement,"** by the way, where people would click "like" on our YouTube page if they'd ever watched more than one video of ours. That was the way of paying it forward. I have a request, Sean, for our listeners. You and I have... well, we'll do a two-part one. The first is: if you have a connection to **Jesse Cole**, I want him on the pod. We want him on the pod. I don't have any connections to him. Do you? No? Yeah. So I would love to get him on the pod. If you can help us get him on the pod, that's you fulfilling the gentleman's agreement, and we will thank you. But I think we've got to do a second one now with **Spotify**, right?

Shaan Puri

Yes. People don't know this because you're busy — you have lives, you eat, and you sleep — but we *doubled* on Spotify last month. Spotify is growing like crazy as a podcasting platform. It used to be about 5% of our streams, then 10%, then 15%. Now it's around 25–30% of our streams. It's growing; it's exploding. We added our video to Spotify, so if you have Spotify you can watch the podcast there. There are comments, and we're replying to them. We're really investing in Spotify. We think Spotify is kind of amazing for this, and we would love to grow more on Spotify. So if you like to listen on Spotify — if you listen to music on Spotify, if you have a Spotify account — get on there, type *My First Million*, and click **Follow**. It's just a follow button; it's totally free. Nothing else. But you will have reserved your space in the Gentleman's Hall of Fame, which we are creating.

Sam Parr

**And here's what we'll do:** the Gentleman's Hall of Fame.

Shaan Puri

I didn't know where that sentence was going, and I...

Sam Parr

*Just "Gentleman's Hall of Fame."* It's gonna — in my head, when I think of a Gentleman's Hall of Fame, it's a little bit different than a bunch of nerds clicking a button on their Spotify.

Shaan Puri

"Reporting a gentleman's club, you..."

Sam Parr

Might say a gentleman's club. I thought it was going to look a little different than just a bunch of deck beards clicking like on **Spotify**. But also—leave a comment on **Spotify** for this episode and we'll actually reply to all of them, so long as it's not 5,000. So as long as it's less than 5,000, we'll reply to every single comment, even if it's just "what's up."

Shaan Puri

Just say, "Hold on—would Jesse Cole say, 'As long as it's less than 5,000'?" What were you listening to—the podcast, sir? What kind of... what kind of—not "Savannah-worthy" comment was it? "It's not called *Reasonable Hospitality*, Sam." Yeah.

Sam Parr

But we're going to tiptoe our way in.

Shaan Puri

This is me getting into the pool at the pool party this weekend. Half an hour in, I'm still under the "nipple line," and I'm just like, "Hey — I just take my time. Okay? I just need my time to get in. **I will get in.**"

Sam Parr

Okay. Every comment — seriously, make a comment on *Spotify*, because that actually signals we're testing something. That signals...

Shaan Puri

"Past 5,000, just so Sam gets to taste this."

Sam Parr

That signals that you're listening on **Spotify**, and I think it's going to make us move up in the rankings. I believe last week—or two weeks ago—we were the 35th or so most popular podcast in the world on **Spotify**.

Shaan Puri

All categories.</FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

Categories — not just business. So we're gonna — we're gonna *game the system* in front of everyone. So just **comment on Spotify** and we'll reply. Alright, that's it. That's the pod.