🍌 Emily Cole: Owner and Director of Fun at Savannah Bananas

Emphasize fun at work. Take your employees on a cruise. Create mission aligned organization nonprofit program.

Nov 16, 2023

🎉 The importance of fun at work
🛳️ Why you should take your employees and fans on a cruise
🙏 How to create a nonprofit program aligned with your mission

What inspired you to co-found The Savannah Bananas?

My husband, Jesse, and I had been working in the baseball industry for many years and observed two disappointing trends. First, people would go to sporting events, but leave halfway through games. But, people don't go to the movies and leave halfway through, so we started wondering why this was happening. Second, we were worried that Little League numbers were declining with more kids playing soccer. We wanted to reverse these trends.

We realized that not everybody can sit through an entire baseball game so we started thinking about how we could broaden our demographics to make more people interested in the sport. That’s how our idea of making baseball more of an entertainment experience began. First, we slowly started introducing players' dancing and getting feedback from watching the reactions of our fans. We just started doing more crazy stunts to have fun on the field and create more joy in the world. All those dreams and years of working led to the Savannah Bananas!

How do you build culture and communications internally?

Our company is called Fans First Entertainment. What most of the outside world thinks when we say this is that we're talking about the people who are sitting in the seats watching the events, but for us we look internally at our biggest fans — the people who work in our organization.

As a leadership group, we have to make sure that we're taking care of them first so that they can then in turn take care of the fans who come to the games. It starts with a unique hiring process — people who join us really want to be here. We encourage our team to help us come up with the crazy ideas with us during brainstorms. There’s a ritual of starting games with a talk about our culture and goals. We like to say that every game is someone’s first game. Here’s Jesse sharing that story with our team before a game.

Our people are here to make a difference. We are continuously doing things that we feel keep people happy — we are quick to recognize them in front of their peers. We reserve 1% of our budget to surprise and delight our crew. Sometimes that means somebody's bucket list trip when they've done something epic or if they've been with us for a long time, we recognize them in a special way.

What can we learn from The Savannah Bananas and apply to how others build work culture?

First, my husband and I are married and running a company together. We love each other and every single person who we’ve brought into our Fans First Family, and we're not afraid to say it. I say “I love you” to everyone on our staff.

We are there for each other's big moments in life and we're there to support each other through the hard times. We’re also there for the fun times — we go on vacation together! Having that love for each other can help strengthen an organization and that's one of the things that I believe really helps our culture. We call ourselves a work family because we truly treat each other that way.

When we first started, Jesse asked what my goal was going to be for our teams. What I said then is what stands now — I just want to create fun for people. That manifests in many ways through our work and even our job titles — Leader, Ninjas or Gurus instead of Managers and Directors. Everyone gets to pick their own. (Editor’s note: Shout out to Taylor, the Executive Rockstar for her support in setting up this interview).

And we’re always learning from our fans. It’s not only about doing surveys but by watching their habits. I encourage everyone to listen and get started, don’t wait. Turn on the camera and start telling your story. You'll probably have two likes in the beginning, but you will become a better storyteller every time you do it.

What's one project you're most proud of over the years?

Some people believe when that clock strikes five, you're done with work, but for us, it's just not like that — a lot of it is because our industry is more of a lifestyle with events at night and games on weekends.

We take our team on trips — we've done cruises multiple times with our staff. If we had just stayed within those work walls together, we wouldn’t have gotten to know our people as well as we do. I will always remember how impactful it was for our entire organization to just get out and have that fun together.

We just recently announced a one-of-a-kind experience like this with our fans. Next year, we’re inviting everyone to join us on a cruise together.

How have you incorporated giving back into your work?

We're always trying to do great things for the world, and we think that by creating joy at our events that's an awesome feeling. People can have fun, hang out with their family and their friends and live in the moment. We also feel this responsibility that we have this platform now since we have grown to this size of sharing positivity in the world, making an impact and leading by example.

Jesse and I are foster parents. Our games are filled with families and the idea of supporting foster care has been in the back of our minds for years. We started Bananas Foster — the perfect name for our brand and our mission — to speak up and take a stand on this topic that’s not really talked about publicly.

We are recognizing amazing people who are already making a difference in the foster care world and educating and inspiring people who might not know about it to get involved. At every game, we highlight and celebrate a foster family on the field in front of everybody and tell a little bit about their story.

Our crowd is so supportive and many people don’t know this is going on in their community. Our main goal is to get more people involved and get more foster families so that everything else in the system can be better supported.

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