Be Fan Worthy

“Leaders are Repeaters.” ~Jessie Cole, Owner, The Savannah Bananas

Last month I had the opportunity to attend a 6-hour backstage breakout session with the Savannah Bananas leadership team. If you are not familiar with the SB then do a web search and you will see they are an unusual, unique and very popular minor league exhibition baseball team.

This baseball team has become a world-class case study in marketing, customer, and employee experience. Every game the Bananas play is sold out. This is an exhibition team playing in a small stadium that holds just 4,000 fans. They have a waitlist of 550,000 fans hoping to get tickets. Their social media presence has millions of followers, and the team’s reputation lives up to and exceeds the expectations of its fans.

But it wasn’t always like this. I met the owners Jessie and his wife Emily Cole back in 2018 before their team was on ESPN and became a YouTube sensation. Jessie and Emily wanted to make baseball fun and entertaining for the fans, but when they started the stadium was nearly empty for every game. They set out to create a Fans First experience and they have hit a homerun, no a grand slam with their repeated efforts.

Jessie’s and Emily’s solution to getting fans to come to the stadium was this: Stop chasing customers and start creating fans. They repeat this idea every game, on every social media post and in every interview and presentation. They never stop creating new ways to make audience and staff alike feel engaged and appreciated. By consistently repeating their values and expectations, they have made the Savannah Bananas Fan Worthy.

This should be true of every organization that wants good customers and good employees.  The numbers are pretty clear: 79% of the people who leave the workplace say it is the lack of appreciation. Only 12% leave because of pay. As leaders within an organization, it is part of our job to create an environment where people want to work and want to tell others about. We must be a repeater of the ideas, the character, and the values we want to see in the workplace. We bring energy; we bring appreciation, and we have a lot of influence on our culture.

And we all know it can be frustrating when people don’t “get it.” Some people, usually the consistently negative ones, won’t understand that by showing appreciation to them, they in turn should show appreciation to others; that by investing time and energy in them, they should invest time and energy in the job, customers, and other employees. That’s how good workplace culture is built.  I get frustrated when people don’t catch on and repeat what I feel is important. I know you get frustrated too. Jessie and Emily have demonstrated how important it is to be a repeater.

For me, I have learned new ways to show my gratitude, I didn’t stop showing it just because of one negative person. As I kept being a repeater of our department values, I found that a team member who didn’t align with our work ethic, meaning they didn’t want to do the work or would do as little as possible, would adjust and become engaged or leave. I had to be consistent, I had to be a repeater as a leader.

Today I continue to watch and gain inspiration from great leaders like Robert Khayat, Dan Cathy and the Coles, who set the vision, talk about where the company is going and then live it. They don’t stop, they repeat it.

Never stop repeating the important stuff and always work to be Fan Worthy,

Jeff