In each episode of The GameDay Playbook presented by FanFood, Rob Cressy discusses how leaders are transforming the sports and live entertainment industry by leveraging technology to enhance the fan experience and operate gameday more efficiently.
Jesse Cole, Owner of the Savannah Bananas and author of Find Your Yellow Tux, joins Rob Cressy to talk about his fan first mindset. Why has the opportunity for teams and brands to engage their fans and get them to care about you never been greater? Why is it so important to look at every consumer touchpoint? What would he do if appointed as the Commissioner of Sports? How and why did the Savannah Bananas hire a professional high fiver? Why is MLB missing the boat right now?
To see how your restaurant, establishment, or venue can benefit from FanFood’s platform please get in touch here.
Listen to the Gameday Playbook on:
Rob Cressy: (00:04)
Welcome to the GameDay Playbook, presented by FanFood. A discussion around how leaders are transforming the sports and live entertainment industry by leveraging technology to enhance the fan experience and operate game day more efficiently. I’m your host, Rob Cressy and joining me today is Jesse Cole owner of the Savannah Bananas and author of the book, “Find Your Yellow Tux.” He was also on episode 12 of this show. I highly recommend you go back and listen to this. Jesse, super excited to have you back on.
Jesse Cole: (00:39)
I’m pumped to be back with you, man. This is great. Twice on the same show. Let’s do it. This one better to be better though. That’s the key. It has to be better. A lot of pressure on you, my friend.
Rob Cressy: (00:48)
There’s a 100% chance this would be better because yesterday when I was thinking about this, I write a script for every episode. And I was like, do I even want to write a script for this episode with you? Because there’s so much on my mind right now around fan engagement. When I think fan engagement, I think to the man who believes in fan first and right now the sports world we’ve been without live sports for a while. We’re talking about what are we going to do? Having no fans in the stands, or small amounts of them. So, first off, I want to hear what is your fan first mindset like right now.
Jesse Cole: (01:28)
Nothing’s changed for us? So, since the beginning, it’s easy to not do things that are fans first. It’s easy to not pay attention to the details and the fan experience. It’s easy to do that. It’s hard looking at every single touchpoint. It’s hard to go nonstop entertainment and hire more characters and spend money on a professional high fiver and pet bands and invest in senior citizen dance team and male cheerleading teams. That’s hard. It’s easy to do social media marketing like everyone else, and put out an ad and boost your posts and do digital marketing. That’s easy. The hard stuff, that’s what we’re built for. That’s what fired us up. When this all started happening, I said, this is great guys. Like, what are you talking about, Jesse? I go, guys, all the things that we’ve been dreaming of doing, we’re now going to get to do.
Again, what we’ve realized and everything where we start is what are the problems in your industry and how you change them? How do you do the exact opposite? We call these mirror moments. We’ve had them when we first started many years ago, 15 years ago with our first small little team and baseball is too long, too slow and too boring. We need to make a nonstop entertainment. You can nickel and dime to ballparks. All right, that changed. Let’s make every ticket, all-inclusive. All right. You have ads all over ballparks. We have limited all the ads around the stadium because we don’t believe people wake up in the morning and want to be advertised to. And now the big problem that a lot of people are finally seeing is that if you expect to be successful by just having your live event venue and having 30 games, 50 games, 60 games, you’re in trouble. So this whole 24 seven fan experience we are embracing it, we’re running with it. It’s never been more exciting to be a part of our team. I’ve never seen our group more fired up because we’re digging in and it’s fun to see the results already taken place.
Rob Cressy: (03:10)
I love it. The reason I wanted to have you on is for that exact reason because I’ve resonated so much with so much of you from the first time you and I chatted to me reading your book. I felt like you were just, you’re another version of me that when I see obstacles and everybody else slows down for me, it’s an opportunity to speed up, to innovate, to be different because that’s what we excel at is the creative side of things. You even talked about one of the things that I wanted to jam with you about, the high five kid. I follow you on social media. I highly recommend everyone check out Jesse, whether it’s on LinkedIn, Twitter or on Instagram, Jesse, what’s your handle?
Jesse Cole: (03:55)
Oh, geez. It’s just @YellowTuxJesse. Anywhere you search Yellow Tux Jesse you’ll find me. I don’t get asked my handle much, but thank you for that.
Rob Cressy: (04:02)
As part of that, I watched a video about this little kid. I think he’s in the single digits. Coming in, it may have been his first day as the high five kid. And what in the world do you do when you’re the high five kid and no one’s allowed to touch each other? I absolutely loved the video because I am a team high five. I high five everyone. Because if you think about it, oftentimes in situations, sometimes you might get in between that, do we hug or not phase, especially if it’s someone of the opposite gender and it can be kind of weird, but you know what is never weird? Rolling in with a high five because energy is transferable. I see this kid and he comes into work the first day and he’s air high fiving everyone. And it made me feel so good because it was so creative on why we high five and how you can keep doing it. So, when everybody else says we can’t touch each other, what does the Savannah Bananas say? Boom, here comes this kid coming into work. I also really appreciated the storytelling of this as somebody who’s a creative and a creator. I love the way the narrative was shot. So, I wanted to give you kudos then. Can you just explain a little bit more about the mindset of the high five kids?
Jesse Cole: (05:23)
Yeah. So, last year we set a, alright, you know, let’s continue to think about those first impressions that people face when people come into our stadium. So, yes, as we’ve talked before, we have the Parking Penguins that people dressed up in penguin costumes, parking your cars and giving you freezy pops, and you walk by and say, stay cool today. Then we have our players greeting fans. Then we have our ticket takers in banana costumes ripping your banana-shaped tickets. Then we have the pep band. It’s all about that first impression. We said we need a high fiver. I remember people said, what do you mean a high fiver? Someone’s sole job is to give high fives to fans. And they go really? I go, yeah, we’re going to pay for it. You’re like what? So, we literally put out a post saying we’re for a professional high fiver.
No one wanted the job. We couldn’t find anyone. This was last year. Finally, two days before the opening day, a six-year-old walks into our stadium with his mother. And he comes in just high fiving everyone in our office. I said, kid, you got the job. He was pumped. We got him his jersey. He put high as his last name and then five as his number. The first night he’s got a ticker that keeps track of how many people he’s high fiving, and he said he got 1800 his first night of high-fives. He says he needs to take breaks after a while because he needs a snack. So, he gets a hot dog in between the high fiving and he had hand sanitizer. So, this year he was like, what are we going to do? He thought his job was in jeopardy.
So, he came up with an idea and we showed this in a video. It came about the idea. He goes, I’m going to be the air high fiber. So that’s his job. And the thing is, we pay him. It’s probably breaking every child labor law there is in the world, but we pay them. We pay his mother, we figure it out. But my point is we spend $0 million in marketing, but we invest in a six-year-old to high five. Even during COVID where we had to cut our capacity by 50% taken a huge hit, but we’re playing, we are still investing in that six-year-old because the experience is everything. That’s where we put our investment. Colton is fired up to hopefully give 2000 plus air high fives every single night.
Rob Cressy: (07:11)
All right. So let’s, let’s keep this same mindset. Let’s talk about this just from a general brand or company level. I love the way that you think about the team side of things, but someone listening to this says, Rob, Jesse, I don’t work for a team, I work for a company and maybe we’re working from home right now. How can we take the same mindset or concept of the high five kid and translate that over to the general business world to say, alright, how can we deliver this exceptional experience in a unique way?
Jesse Cole: (07:45)
You look at every touchpoint and we’ve had to do this. You know, this is 15 years of trial and error and experimenting. So, whatever business you’re in, think about every single touchpoint that you have with your customer and ask yourself this question. A. What makes us different from this touchpoint? B. How does it make our customers feel? It’s the reason why, when someone buys a ticket from us, they get an email with a video that starts with me saying, congrats. You just made the best decision of your day. Right now as your ticket order came in, a high priority siren went off at our stadium and our Bananiacs ran to the ticket laboratory to produce your tickets. And then a Banana Nana slowly walked in and hand-selected your tickets and placed them on a silk pillow. We raised the silk pillow up in the air and saying, Nah [inaudible] to celebrate the birth of a new fan. And now we’re walking your tickets to our Baltz where there is maximum security ready for you to go bananas. Now, Rob, that could have had just an email and say, here’s your payment confirmation, or it could be something fun. We’ve even taken it out to the level that our invoices are written fun. Congrats. The day is finally here and we make it like it’s the biggest day you’ve been waiting for your entire life. We wrote this entire monologue of excitement that it’s bananas payday. It’s sitting back, sipping on a slippery banana drink, you’re a chariot awaits you. We have fun with it. Each one on our staff writes a different invoice. So, for whatever company you’re in, think about whether it’s your email signature, whether it’s your voicemail, whether it’s your hold music.
I mean our voicemail, we have a young intern sing, Savannah banana, you’ve reached the Savannah Bananas banana. People are like, what is going on? Our hold music is ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, banana phone, and people call and ask to be put on hold every two weeks. We’re like really? They’re like, yeah, we want to see if it’s really that’s her hold music. Now, we’re a fun brand. That’s who we are. Not every brand has to be fun, but not every brand has to be professional. Think, do people really go home and start saying, Oh, I met the most professional person today. Oh, I interacted with the most professional company. We want different. We want unique. We want refreshing. And that’s where we look at every single touchpoint.
Rob Cressy: (09:45)
I absolutely love it because here’s something that I hear often. Rob, why should I create a podcast, care about social media, do a newsletter. One thing that so many companies fail to realize is they think this is a to-do list. Man, I got to go and create the podcast, but what they fail to realize, and even after talking so often, sometimes they just still don’t get, is every opportunity is an opportunity to create a positive brand interaction and everything you do is an opportunity for you to engage with your audience. So, when we look at the podcast, why would we create a podcast, Rob? That seems like a lot of work. It seems like a lot of time. Yeah, if that’s the way that you think about it. Go ahead and put yourself in the seat of your audience. So often I think do brands have these touchpoints? So, let’s think about it.
Jesse Cole: (10:46)
One note on that, Rob. One of the best lessons I’ve learned from Disney and again, learn to get outside of your own industry. Learn from outside the industry. It’s why we took our whole team to Disney before the COVID and everything. I mean, we learn from outside the industry, one of the best lessons from Disney is, everything speaks. Everything speaks. So, literally if there’s trash outside your store, if there’s trash outside. How the cars are parked. You know, is the sign crooked. The bathrooms soap out. Is there anything? Everything you do speaks and especially a podcast. That’s the one point now, I believe that people don’t necessarily buy corporate brands, especially in small businesses. They buy the people behind the brands. What do you believe? What do you stand for? Fight that crusade and have people find those beliefs and they will gravitate towards you. It’s why during the virus and all the times like our team, we do cooking with bananas. We do lives inside our people’s homes, Facebook lives. We do a live music trivia with our announcer, which most people can you name an announcer from like a small level team? No, but you got to get people to see the people. Do people know what you actually believe and for. So I think everything speaks. Especially if you could control the voice, might as well do it.
Rob Cressy: (12:00)
Well, of course, and that’s the key because there’s going to be a good amount of people who find this podcast because of a tweet or maybe they saw an Instagram photo or something on LinkedIn. So, then maybe they go, Rob and Jesse spoke a little bit together, but imagine how we can make them feel right now when you can hear us speaking and you can feel this heartbeat and you can feel the transfer of energy. This transfer of energy is your opportunity to get your fan to feel that way about your brand. So, my action item for this for everyone listening is think of all the touchpoints like Jesse talked about and then reevaluate it from your perspective. This has literally been my entire marketing mindset as long as I’ve run my company.
It’s like, why would you ever work with me? Because I’m your target demographic, and you would say, Rob, what would you like us to create? I’m like, I don’t know, let me create it and this is what it is. But so often a brand thinks like a brand. They say, buy what we’re selling, buy what you’re selling, but everything has become a commodity. You can buy anything from anywhere at any time. So, now when you give people a reason to care and that’s exactly what you do
Jesse Cole: (13:10)
Well, thank you. I think it’s so key now more than ever to make sure you’re a 24/7 brand. To make sure that people can interact with you at any time. The best feeling for me in the world is when I’m sleeping and I wake up and I find that merchandise, people are watching our videos. There’s food going out.
There’s all these things happening. When your brand doesn’t sleep, that’s when you can build something that’s really powerful and enduring. I think right now, especially, you gotta think you can’t just be selling things when you put out an email selling things or you put on an ad selling things. You need to keep building that brand so much that people are looking to buy from you 24 seven. They’re not looking to respond just when you want to sell something. That’s a huge key. I’ll tell you a lot of sports teams still are working through that. It’s like here, here’s our tickets. Go buy it. Here’s a 25% deal on merchandise. Go buy it. There’s a reason why we do no sales and no discounts ever on anything because we don’t want to devalue the product. The product is the same value all the time, but just make sure everything else you’re doing has value so people want to find ways to buy from you. That’s what happened during this. We literally started selling our moonshine, our Slippery Banana, doing a drive-through in the middle of a shelter in place, quarantine, that people were driving to our ballpark to get it. They were saying, wait, what are you guys selling? I’ll take it. And they sold out in 23 minutes back to back to back weeks because people were like, I just want to buy something from you because you’ve been putting out so much content. And I’m a fan. Fans never leave. Customers are transactional. If you’re marketing like everyone else, you’re in trouble because at one bad instance, one bad experience they’ll leave, but we’ve made so many mistakes. Our networks have shut down. We’ve made all you can eat which was a disaster when we first started, but fans keep coming back because you keep showing up for them. How are you showing up for them? And you got me fired up right now.
Rob Cressy: (14:45)
I love it. But Jesse, we don’t have the time. We don’t have the resources. We don’t have a budget. We don’t have the money. We can’t do those things. What do you say to that?
Jesse Cole: (14:55)
Yeah, I’d say then your customers don’t have the time to buy from you. If you don’t have the time to put in, to be there for your customers and be there and give without wanting anything in return. This fires me up where it’s like, Hey I’ll give you a webinar if you give me your email. I’ll give you this, if you give me this, I’ll give you this for that. Quid pro quo, quid pro quo, quid pro quo. Just give. Give! It’s why I was so fortunate to have so many great mentors that challenged me to write more thank you letters and why I started the thank you letter and I’ve written 1500 thank you letters without asking for anything in return. It’s why I will never say no to a podcast because I love sharing this. It gets me excited. And you give, I don’t want it.
He said you have anything to promote at the end of the podcast. No, just go out and do it. Go out, give a great experience. That is when enough for me. I think I get fired because everyone says, what is the ROI? What is the ROI? I tell our people and say like, let’s start focusing more on the ROP, return on purpose, the purpose for what you’re doing. The meaning behind what you’re doing. What drives you? What makes you feel like you’re making a difference every day? And that is what fires me up. Then if you take care of that, the bottom line, the revenues, the sales, they take care of themselves. That’s why right now we’re so fortunate that even cutting our capacity by 50% for COVID and all the challenges we’re going through, we’re in a great standing where most teams are either going under, folding or having to let go, people, we’ve actually been hiring and we’ve been giving bonuses. That makes me so proud because we’ve been doing the same thing showing up over and over and over again.
Rob Cressy: (16:21)
And Jesse, I have to give you credit because when we first spoke, I don’t know if it was a year or two ago or whatever it was, you ended up sending me a thank you letter as well as a book. And it’s something that had an indelible mark on me and I never forgot it. I certainly paid it forward. With everything that’s been going on in the world the last few months, I sat back at the end of May and I thought, all right, what can I do? Because everyone’s like, you need to be able to live in action. It’s just not enough just to speak or do nothing. And I’m like, all right, well, I know the lane that I’m good at a spreading positivity. I’m the leader of the team, good vibes. And right now, unfortunately, there’s a lot of distractions in hate and anger and things coming at us that are really taking people from the goals and what they want to accomplish.
You know what I committed to doing is doubling down on gratitude. So, every day in June, at least once a day, I am saying thank you to at least one person in a heartfelt way. I’m doing that because it spreads positivity in the world and there’s a greater chance of that person paying it forward. But guess what else happens? It’s inevitable that when you say thank you to someone, they’re going to show you that gratitude right back to you. So, today, Jesse, I’m using my thank you on you because you inspire me from the first time that we’ve spoken to each of the subsequent podcasts and the fact that you send thank you letters, and I was on the receiving end. Little did you know the way that I would take this and run with it both those months and years ago, as well as to this exact moment. So, I want to recognize that in you and say, thank you.
Jesse Cole: (18:04)
Well, thank you, man. That was, that was nice. I’ve never gotten this, this sincere of a thank you on up on a podcast, but you know, I appreciate that. It feels good. It feels good to be grateful. It feels good to be optimistic and it feels good to make other people feel good. Mark Sanborn, the author of the Fred Factor and he’s written a few books, great international bestsellers, speaker, all that jazz. He came out to a game this past year and I went and sat next to him and he looked at me, he goes, Jesse, it’s so simple. I watch you guys. I watch your team. I watch your players. When you guys give fun, you have fun. And I never thought of it like that. So everyone says, go have fun. Just go have fun.
Give fun. When you give fun to others, when you give positivity to others, when you give optimism to others, when you give gratitude to others, you have all those traits as well. And so that’s kind of what I tell myself every day it was, I walked through a door, you know, bring the energy, bring the fun and go all out. You know, I just, when I give that, then I know it comes back with reciprocal as well. So, thank you for that. You made me feel good and now you’re making me want to give more of it as well. So this love, this has turned into a love fest. I don’t know if anyone’s still listening, but spread the love, I guess is the message.
Rob Cressy: (19:10)
But that’s a great thing. Here’s an action item for the listener that if Jesse and I are both spreading this positivity and saying thank you to others, as well as. Whether it’s handwritten notes or just in person, do the same thing and experience it for yourself. Maybe just say, once a day for the next seven days, I’m going to give a heartfelt thank you because you know, who’s not giving a heartfelt, thank you? The large majority of the world. This can be your friends, your family members, your husband, or wife, or boyfriend, or girlfriend, someone in the service industry, someone you don’t even know because you’re right. Love the act of giving it and receiving it, it’s pretty much the same because when you cultivate it yourself and you give it, that’s the exact same feeling there. So let’s rinse and repeat this
Jesse Cole: (19:56)
And I’ll give a hack. I hate the term hack because there’s real, no hacks to gratitude. You’ve got to put the time and effort, but here’s something that I learned to do. We all can have YouTube accounts. What I do every day is I’ll take my phone and I’ll do a little quick selfie video to someone. Hey, thinking about you, thank you so much for this book, this message you sent so-and-so and send a video to someone. If you don’t have their cell phone number, you can literally put it unlisted on YouTube, send them a link to it. That I probably sent hundreds of those. And I’ll tell you, you know, we have, we call people, we miss them instead of leaving a voicemail, send a video and put it in their text in the text message. It is unbelievable, the difference that it makes. And when I get a video, you can feel how much they feel about you and what their feelings are. I think that’s much different than any kind of text, any type of voicemail, any type of email.
Rob Cressy: (20:43)
Here’s actually what I learned. I love that you said that because that has been such a big part of my strategy because when COVID happened, all of a sudden, the face to face interactions that I was used to saying thank you to others weren’t as opportunistic. So, I did that exact same thing. I would find the people when I would send them a video message. And guess what the beauty of this is? One, how many video messages do we receive in our text or DMS? None. But here’s the real thing that I learned. We really don’t know what’s going on in other people’s lives. All of a sudden this resounding thing kept coming back to me, Rob, thank you so much. You don’t realize how much of an impact this made on me. I unfortunately found that some of my friends had family members pass away from various things.
One of my friends said, Rob, I’ve been having a really tough time the last week and this literally made my month. You hear that once or twice and all of a sudden you’re like, wait a second. I can actually positively change the world and the people close to me just by randomly doing it because we don’t know from a timing standpoint, but with everything going on right now, you can almost be guaranteed that someone might not be one having a 100% day. But when you send that video to them, you give them the 100% day, just like that.
Jesse Cole: (21:59)
Hundred percent love it, man. Love it.
Rob Cressy: (22:02)
So, Jesse, you said, Rob, how in the world are we going to make this a better podcast episode than last time? And I have the answer to that. And it comes down to one question and you know what that is? I’ve been following you on Twitter and I’m a huge baseball fan. One of the things that have been tough on me is this was the opportunity for baseball that the season should be starting. Everyone’s just clamoring for sports. It’s like, let’s find a way to get baseball there. And right now they’re just dead last in terms of is this season going to happen? What in the world is going on? It hurts me inside as a fan, as a marketer, as a sports fan. So, you know what I’m doing, Jesse, I am naming you the commissioner of sports right now. So, if we oversee the entire sports world, baseball included, and they say sports care, Jesse Cole right now, what are you going to do with baseball? Because I saw you say something to the fact that MLB needs to focus on long term fans and by them not playing right now, they are not giving us as fans a reason to care.
Jesse Cole: (23:14)
It’s such an opportunity right now to break the rules and break the rules in the way things have always been done. Baseball is way too traditional. And the fact that the debate is over money right now is so wrong, is so wrong, and so wrong. Someone needs to stand up and compromise and say, you know what? We’re going to focus on the fans and they’ll take care of the money in the long run. They’ve been, the fans have been rewarding owners and players for decades. It’s time to change it. And it’s time to break down the barrier. This is the most invasive that we’ve seen of baseball and it’s all of the negativity. It’s all about negotiating money. Break down the barriers between the fans, the players, and the owners. Break them down. You know, back in the day, players used to go into the crowd and fans would bake them cookies and they would interact.
Now there are all these walls. We can’t touch the players. Let’s see the behind the scenes. Let’s get to know these fans. It’s why we have created Bananas Insider. And we’re creating a 24 seven network where we have a tire film crew of five or six people, producers that are creating shows and content your round of the behind the scenes. It’s why we are having drones come to cover the games this year. It’s why we’re putting mikes on players this year. It’s why we’re letting fans decide what happens during games this year, including who’s going to pitch, who’s going to pinch-hit. Who’s going to start. We’re doing that because the fans deserve to be a part of the experience right now, major league baseball is known for these negotiations publicly over money. The debate over fans. The debate over the fan experience. If your commissioner, figure it out. Sorry, I get fired up there because I think that they’re, they’re debating over the wrong things and they should be debating over how do they create more fans? Not, how did they create more revenue?
Rob Cressy: (24:54)
I agree because they’re almost trying to put a bandaid on the wrong thing because baseball has seen this precipitous decline everywhere. And for me, when I think about who’s doing things right, right now, you know who that is? Dana White and the UFC. You know why? Because Dana is front and center and he says, I’m going to get freaking fight Island so that we can put on fights because the fans need this, and because I need this. I’m like, standing ovation for Dana White because I feel like he cares about me as the fan. I think about my baseball experience. And if I was to take Wrigley out of the, out of the equation, cause I live in Chicago and Wrigley, it’s the fans that actually make it so good because so often we sit in the bleachers and you’re like, who won?
You’re like, I have no idea. I just had fun sitting with my friends in the feet, in the bleachers. I feel like the majority of games, what’s the reason why I should go? I don’t care what’s going on. But then I think about a Savannah bananas game versus a general baseball game. Why in the world would I ever not choose the Savannah bananas game? Because remember what we said, most people don’t care about the score of the game. Well, if that’s the case, all I have is a seat in overpriced vending, like really is, and I look at what you guys do and it’s so fan first and it just hurts me that you and I can see this from a mile away. But the legacies of baseball is standing in its way from becoming great.
Jesse Cole: (26:25)
I’m not naive enough to realize that, you know, it is big, Major League Baseball. What they’re doing, it’s much bigger. There are so many things that I’m not factoring and I understand that. But that’s the problem in itself. What if major league baseball treated itself like a startup and you’re fighting for every fan. You’re not fighting for every dollar, you’re fighting for every fan.
Make that the fight of the owners. Make that the fight of the commissioner. Make that the fight of every team and every player we’re fighting for every fan and take it personally. Take it personally when fan leaves becoming a baseball fan to become a fan of the UFC or become a fan of gaming or become a fan of any other sports, take it personal. I take it personal. When anyone says they don’t want to come to a Bananas game, I can’t understand why you wouldn’t want to come to a Bananas game. It doesn’t even factor in my mind. My question is that Major League Baseball, they are so focused on the long term ramifications of revenue and money and not the longterm fans. These people that have been baseball fans, what are they going to tell their kids? What are they gonna tell their grandkids?
There’s nostalgia’s not there anymore. It became about money. It became about the wrong reason. So, I think you make a great point and I wish everyone would fight for fans and put themselves in their fan shoes. Just like we do every night, we go undercover as a fan and park with the fans. Walk with the fans. Sit with the fans. I take off the yellow tuxedo and ask them, Hey, what’s the best part of the games? Hey, what are the things you don’t like about the games? Hey, do you stay at the end of the game? Why not? And ask questions. Start asking questions to the fans. Not asking questions of, how do we make more money per game? It’s the wrong question.
Rob Cressy: (27:58)
And that is the commissioner of sports. And that is why I am giving you my vote to be the one who represents the fans. Because as you’re saying all of this, I’m just envisioning a video where insert lawyer-speak. Like, has this happened to you? We will represent you. Hi, I’m Jesse Cole, commissioner of sports. Do you feel like sports leagues and teams don’t care about you as a fan? Yeah, me too. I get it. Come over to our side. We will represent you because we are fans first. We want to make sure to give you the best fan experience possible. I’ll get your vote on November, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Jesse Cole: (28:37)
I’m ready, man. Bring me. I’m ready. I’m ready for it.
Rob Cressy: (28:41)
Jesse. I always have a blast jamming and with you, and here’s how I’m going to leave this. One thing that’s always been a challenge in podcasting is when people give ratings and reviews, it helps more people discover the show, but really what’s the incentive for people to give a rating review because we always hear the same thing. Give us a rating review on iTunes and subscribe. It’s just like, sort of mailed it in. So, I’m like, alright, what can I do to give back to the person who subscribes rates and reviews and you know what I can do, I can show them love on this podcast. So, I want to give a shout out to JSN2427, who gave us five stars that said, “great pod always has fresh and relevant content each week. I always share some of the insights with the rest of my team. Great way to learn about different topics relevant to the sports industry.” I want to say thank you to JSN2427 because if you give us a shout out in a rating and review on iTunes, we will show you some love back on the podcast. So, Jesse, where can everybody connect with you?
Jesse Cole: (29:47)
You search Savannah Bananas or you search Yellow Tux, you’ll find me around. But yeah, let’s hope for the whole sports world that everyone gets back, gets back in a safe way and the innovation takes another level. For all the fans out there, speak up, talk. We need more people to hear what you want. And I think that’s the key.
Rob Cressy: (30:04)
And as always, I would love to hear from you about this episode. Does Jesse get your vote as commissioner of sports? If so, I think you should tweet him and I and FanFood. You can hit up FanFood on Twitter @FanFoodondemand, on Instagram @FanFoodapp or on LinkedIn. And as always, you can hit me up on all social media platforms @RobCressy.