So I grew up, small town south of Boston in Massachusetts, a little town called Scituate, and I fell in love with baseball. It was everything for me. My dad actually bought a baseball facility so I could play ball year round in Massachusetts, and I had one dream, and it was to play professional baseball. And I thought I was making my way towards that dream. I was fortunate to get a full college scholarship. I was talking to professional teams, getting letters from teams. And then all of a sudden, my senior year, just like that, I tore my shoulder and it was over. I had no idea what I was gonna do. And I said, all right, I might as well get into coaching. I love baseball. I might as well get into the passion that I have for the sport and coach. So I coached for a summer, and it's in the Cape Cod League. Some of the best players in the country are here and I've got the best seat in the house. I'm sitting in the dugout next to these players and I realized something very important there. I realized that I loved playing the game, but I didn't love watching the game. It was the same game that I've seen always. And I thought, this is a unique opportunity. We love playing the game, but yet there's an opportunity to sell the game in a different way, to create something unique, experience for fans. So I was fortunate to get an opportunity for an internship at twenty two years old with one of the worst performing teams in the entire country in Spartanburg, South Carolina. And I took that internship, and my job was to sell this game of baseball that I couldn't even watch. But fortunately, I got people excited, and I shared some enthusiasm. And lo and behold, the owner of the team had another team in Gastonia, North Carolina, and he offered me the job as the general manager of the team at twenty three years old. How do you get the job as a GM at twenty three? Well, it's the worst team in the entire country. That's the only way you could get the job because that team was poorly performing worse than I could ever imagine. My first day I walked into the stadium, there was only two hundred fans coming to the games. There was only two hundred and sixty eight dollars in the bank account, and the team had lost a hundred thousand dollars the previous year. They were a failure on every single account. And I remember I said, what am I gonna do? I'm taking over the worst team ever. And so we started calling people in the community. The first day I called ten people, business leaders in the community, and seven people said they never heard of the team. Two said, We'll never work with you. And one just hung up on me. It was the worst first day ever. But I realized there I go, There's a problem. There's a challenge. And so we started talking to fans, and they said they just don't like baseball. And we realized that there was a frustration point there. So I called the owner of the team. I said, Ken, we're no longer gonna be a baseball team. He goes, What do you mean, Jesse? I go, Baseball is not working. We need to be something dramatically different. He goes, What do you have in mind? I go, I think our players should do choreographed dances. I think we should have grandma beauty pageants. I should get in the dunk tank every game. We should serve donut burgers and donut dogs and call them heart stoppingly delicious, and we started coming up with every idea. Luckily, he didn't fire me that day. He said, you know what? We got nothing to lose. And it was that day that we focused on becoming more of a circus than just a baseball team, and we focused on being more of an entertainment company than just a baseball team. And what happened was people started talking. All All of a sudden went from two hundred fans to six hundred fans to a thousand fans to fifteen hundred fans to two thousand fans and started selling out games. And people were saying, what is happening at the ballpark? And it all started with creating this attention and solving some of the frustrations to make people that don't necessarily love baseball love our experience. And again, that was the starting point for us. And, when you look forward, there are a lot of crazy stories, a lot of things we tried, but that's how we learned about fan experience. The future of business is not based on how many customers you have. The future of business is based on how many fans you have. Here's the reality. Customers are transactional. They come and go. But fans never leave. What are you doing to create fans for life? And you need to look at that entire experience from the beginning to end. And that's what we had to do at our ballparks. And that's why fortunately now we spend zero dollars on marketing. But we've been able to sell out every game and have a wait list for tickets in the thousands. It's because of this fans first experience. Every business should be a fans first business and constantly look at how do you turn customers into fans and make your fans your biggest marketers. So what can you win in? And we realized we're gonna create the best show we can in our ballpark, and that's how we started learning about this fans first experience. Create something your fans want. If you're creating something like everyone else, good luck. We couldn't compete in baseball, but we could win in the show. And that's where we decided we're gonna start winning it.
