After the first few years in Gastonia and seeing fans just come out in bigger numbers than we imagine and actually walking around the stands and watching the fans' reaction, they were laughing and having more fun at the show, the fun, the promotions, the entertainment than they were necessarily the baseball. And I realized we were on to something. And the question that all of us as entrepreneurs and people in business ask is, well, what's the next step? And so for us, it became, can we make this bigger? Can we grow something special? Can we make a bigger impact? And so we made the decision to take our show that was with a small little team in Gastonia, North Carolina, and bring it to even a bigger opportunity in Savannah, Georgia, where there was professional baseball, a much higher level than us, here for ninety years. We said we're gonna take it here and see if it work here. And that was, a huge moment for us because we got put in a position where we felt like we couldn't be so dramatically different. We actually tried being like everyone else, and it's where we failed in the beginning. And there's always polls from the outside saying, no, no, this is the way to do it. This is the way to do it. But you got to think dramatically different. And so we learned that with our initial failure in Savannah. When we came here, we bought a brand new team. We went in outrageous debt and we said, we're going to try this experiment that we learned at Gastonia at this bigger opportunity here in Savannah. And that's where the story became even crazier. Everything with us starts with small bets. It's what we call little experiments. And with our team that was failing, just trying new things, Having the players do choreographed dances was an experiment. You know, coming up with the world's largest tickets that were the size of posters, that was an experiment. Our fans didn't love that one, but it was a very small bet. We started looking at all these different touch points on how to create this unique experience. So for us, that's where it started. And that mirror moment as I call you, you gotta you gotta look at yourself and say, alright. You know, what business are we in, but what business are we really in? But what are those frustrations? What are those friction points? And every company needs to look at that exact thing because the reality is all of us at some point are doing things that our customers don't like. When I say if you wanna start, start with stopping doing what your customers hate. Stop the hate. And for us, we realize that people don't like long, slow, boring baseball games. People don't like to be nickel and dimed at ballparks. People don't like inconvenience fees and ticket fees. And so that was a mere moment for me. I put myself in our customers' shoes, our fans' shoes, and said, you know what? I don't wanna sit through a boring baseball game. I don't want to have to keep pulling money out of my pocket and having to buy things over and over again at the ballpark. I don't want to get hit with fees that don't even make sense. And so I literally said, All right, if I want to be the biggest fan of our product, of our experience, what would that look like? And I think so often we just focus on what we want best as a business and not what's best for the customer. That's the only way you can start creating fans. And for us, it was it was that constant experimenting and testing. Would we like this? Would we enjoy this? And whether it's different promotions at the ballpark, whether it's different ways to speak to our customers and talk with a different language and not always about sales and marketing and advertising. That was part of the long experiment that we learned that if we start doing this baby steps, we're gonna be able to create something that our fans will tell everyone about. We showed up, and it was myself, my wife, our twenty four year old president, and three twenty two year olds. And as we showed up to Savannah, we were so excited, but the city wasn't as excited for us. We were a low level college summer baseball team. The former team had cut the phone lines, cut the Internet lines. We were working in a picnic table trying to call the community. And we got back into the fear of trying to not stand out, trying to be like everyone else because we were scared of what people would think. And after three months, we sold two total tickets. Just two. It was so bad that a few months later, we got a phone call on Friday afternoon, I'll never forget it, that we had overdrafted our account and we were completely out of money. And it was one of those moments that you'll never forget because the question is, what do you do? Do you try to just push through or do you try to be dramatically different? And my wife turned to me and said, we have to sell our house. We're going all in. And at that point, we said, alright. We're gonna go all in on creating attention and creating this fans first experience that is so different than anyone else.
