Why rules were made to be broken

One of my favorite business examples right now is trumping my usual conversations around Disney or Apple. It’s the Savannah Bananas.

If you don’t know them, the Savannah Bananas are a baseball team that started out at the bottom of the bottom. Jesse Cole and his wife took their life savings and bought the Savannah Sand Gnats, a little-known minor league team. Jesse had been a baseball player himself but his career was cut short by an arm injury. So he and his wife decided to take a big swing. They renamed the team the Savannah Bananas.

At first, people hated it. Locals booed them at parades and threw things at them. But Jesse knew he needed to stand out. He wanted people in the stands, so he made one bold move right away: one ticket price included everything. Admission, food, drinks. You didn’t have to think about it. That got more fans through the gates.

The problem was people were still leaving early. So Jesse studied the footage and found that most people walked out around the two-hour mark. His solution? No game would last longer than two hours. That meant rewriting the rules of baseball. Fans could catch a foul ball and it counted as an out. No bunting. No stepping out of the batter’s box. They even reworked how scoring worked, inning by inning. Traditionalists lost their minds. Jesse didn’t care. He wasn’t trying to save baseball. He was trying to make people love coming to the ballpark.

Now, the Savannah Bananas are selling out football stadiums. They now have a waiting list in the millions just to get tickets. Their social media following is bigger than most major league teams. And yes, Jesse has even launched his own league: Banana Ball.

So what does this have to do with you?

Sometimes you have to break the rules of your industry. Just because things have always been done a certain way doesn’t mean they should keep being done that way. Look at orthodontics. Clear aligners disrupted the market in the early 2000s. Same-day starts in the 2010s shook up the patient experience. Now we’re seeing 3D printed brackets and new aligner technologies changing the landscape again.

The Savannah Bananas prove that people don’t just want a product. They want an experience worth sticking around for. They want to feel part of something fun, fresh, and different.

So here’s my challenge to you this week:
Where can you add more personality, excitement, and disruption into your business?
How can you make people want to stay until the very end?
And what could be your version of “Banana Ball” that makes you unforgettable?

Proactive, Productive, and Profitable,
Dino