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. And what we did, we named the team after a fruit. We became the Savannah Bananas. We came up with a senior citizen dance team called the Banana Nanas. We came up with a male cheerleading team called the Mananas, which is now just referred to as the Dad Bod Cheerleading Squad. We thought of everything that we could do to have fun. Even our mascot, we named him Split. We went all in on this brand because we had to create attention. And once people started talking about us, then they got to realize that we care about every single touch point for them in creating this fans first experience. And lo and behold, few years later, we've sold out every single game. We have a wait list for tickets in the thousands, and we've been so fortunate to create almost a national phenomenon about a little small baseball team here in Savannah. Every company has friction points, has these little frustrations that from the outside you might not notice. But once you put yourself in your customer's shoes, first you go through the exact process. How easy is it to buy from you? How easy is it to find things on your website? How easy is is it to talk to someone on your staff? These are all little frustrations. How quickly does someone get back to you? When you look at all of these and start mapping, you're like, You are losing customers every single day, and you don't even realize it. And for us, that's what we had to start mapping. And how do you do it? One thing that we did is we went undercover. We actually created Undercover Fan because we can go through the entire process, but not till you actually put yourself in the customer's shoes do you really realize every little frustration. Every innovation for us starts with what are those frustrations for the customers? What are those frustration points? And so when you look at from our experience top down, everything we try to question everything on the experience. So for instance, every ballpark used to you go to, you buy your tickets, you get a six dollar hot dog, an eight dollar burger, a ten dollar drink. It adds up. You get nickel and dime'd. At the bananas experience, everything is all inclusive. All your hot dogs, your burgers, your chicken sandwiches, your soda, your water, your popcorn, you name it, everything. Because that's a frustration point we eliminated. If you go to our ballpark, yes, you will see a break dancing first base coach dancing in the middle of the game. You will see that we have four stages at our stadium. It's not just on the field. There's performances everywhere, from circus acts, from the Banana Nana senior citizen dance team, to even a team wrestler at our ballpark, to even a professional high fiver. Yes. We hired a six year old professional high fiver to high five every fan in the stadium. Does it make any sense? Not really. But for us, it's about having fun and showing our fans that we care. So when you walk into the ballpark, you'll feel different. I think that's a question every single business should ask. How are you making your customers feel? You making them feel anything? Is it special? And we think about that when they come into the ballpark to when they leave and they're greeted with our twenty piece pep band playing Rocky music and final countdown as they're walking out to their cars at the end of the night. I'll never forget everyone on our staff. Every game, they go undercover. So we have someone that parks with the fans. They walk in with the fans. They sit with the fans. They eat with the fans. They stay till the end of the night with the fans. And at the end of the game, we discuss what are all those things that happened during the game, the things that were great fans' first moments and those things that were frustrations. And I'll never forget when I went undercover and I pulled into our parking lot. And as I'm pulling in, my car bottomed out in the parking lot. It hit a big pothole. I was like, talk about a terrible first impression. But I never knew that. And I think how many things as a business owner, I didn't know that there was a pothole in our parking. That was a simple little friction point that we need to put ourselves in our customers' shoes to realize how do we start fixing the experience, and every experience needs to be fixed. This is an ongoing challenge that we look at every single day. So start there. Start. What are those friction points? What are those frustrations? Eliminate the aggravate, the things that might aggravate you in the process. And so for us, we just looked at the game of baseball, the baseball typical experience, and said, you know what? There's so many things that are slightly frustrating that are gonna deter customers every single day. And once we did that, it became very clear on the direction that we needed to go and to create a remarkable experience.
