Two Ways of Thinking About Putting Fans First
This essay first appeared in the July 16, 2025 edition of Wonder Work. For a complete list of annotated sources, please visit the original post. Subscribe to Wonder Work here and get the next issue directly in your inbox.
Two men have revolutionized their respective industries by obsessing over the people they serve. Jesse Cole went from managing the worst team in baseball to owning a franchise that has sold out every game since their inaugural season, with a waitlist of more than 2 million fans. Will Guidara transformed Eleven Madison Park from a struggling two-star brasserie into 2017’s best restaurant in the world.
Both men built their success on the same foundation: putting fans first. But their approaches could not be more different. Jesse Cole is a revolutionary who has created a legion of fans through joyful disruption; Will Guidara is a perfectionist, winning fans through meticulous elevation. Which method should you copy? Neither, friend. But there’s much to learn from both.
“No one who ever changed the game did so by being reasonable.”
The Revolutionary: Jesse Cole's Joyful Disruption
Jesse Cole spent his entire life playing baseball until a shoulder injury ended his career trajectory to the Major Leagues. At 23 years old, he was the new general manager of the Gastonia Grizzlies, a summer league team that attracted about 200 fans per game. It should have been fun, but Jesse was bored. The fans were bored. Finally, he asked himself, “why does this feel like a job at the DMV when it should feel like Disneyland?” That was the day Jesse decided to stop trying to build a better baseball team and instead build something … unforgettable. Jesse "looked at every part of the game that was slow and boring” and began devising new rules that would make the game play faster and more exciting. His solution wasn't to perfect existing baseball — it was to invent something entirely new.
Banana Ball features rules designed to "remove the boring play from the game": no stepping out of the batter's box (it's a strike), no bunting (you're ejected), fans catching foul balls counts as an out, and a two-hour time limit with no new innings after 1 hour and 50 minutes. Each rule prioritizes the fan experience over baseball orthodoxy.
Photo of the Savannah Bananas via LA Times
The Revolutionary: Jesse Cole's Joyful Disruption
Jesse Cole spent his entire life playing baseball until a shoulder injury ended his career trajectory to the Major Leagues. At 23 years old, he was the new general manager of the Gastonia Grizzlies, a summer league team that attracted about 200 fans per game. It should have been fun, but Jesse was bored. The fans were bored. Finally, he asked himself, “why does this feel like a job at the DMV when it should feel like Disneyland?” That was the day Jesse decided to stop trying to build a better baseball team and instead build something … unforgettable. Jesse "looked at every part of the game that was slow and boring” and began devising new rules that would make the game play faster and more exciting. His solution wasn't to perfect existing baseball — it was to invent something entirely new.
Banana Ball features rules designed to "remove the boring play from the game": no stepping out of the batter's box (it's a strike), no bunting (you're ejected), fans catching foul balls counts as an out, and a two-hour time limit with no new innings after 1 hour and 50 minutes. Each rule prioritizes the fan experience over baseball orthodoxy.
Cole's Philosophy: Break the Rules to Serve People Better
After years of trial and error, Cole landed on the mantra, “Fans First. Entertain Always.” Every night, Jesse dons the bright yellow tuxedo to welcome fans to “the Greatest Show in Sports.” But this isn't just about entertainment — it's about systematic transformation. Cole doesn't want to make baseball better; he wants to replace it with something that actually serves families, casual fans, and anyone who has found traditional baseball slow or inaccessible.
The results speak to the power of revolutionary thinking: 98% of fans stay until the last pitch, which is, uh, not normal at most minor league games. They've gone from playing in front of empty stadiums to selling out 74,000-seat NFL stadiums on their world tour. (The Albuquerque game sold out before I could get tickets. Again.)
“If we had money pouring in and plenty of resources, we might have been tempted to go with the status quo. With no money, we had to go with the capital we did have: each other. We had to outthink, not outspend.”
The Accessibility Factor
Cole's revolution is fundamentally democratizing. Ticket pricing is all-inclusive with no hidden fees, and the goal is to make the experience joyful for families and casual fans. His innovation scales: every Banana Ball game follows the same rule set that prioritizes fun over tradition. The Bananas now play exhibition games exclusively, and Cole’s empire has expanded to include three more teams: The Party Animals, The Firefighters, and the Texas Tailgaters. Other independent and collegiate league teams like the Florence Y’alls, the Charleston Dirty Birds, and the Madison Night Mares are starting to adapt the Bananas “fan first” family entertainment philosophy.
As Cole explains: "If we'd had money pouring in and plenty of resources, we might have been tempted to go with the status quo. With no money, we had to go with the capital we did have: each other. We had to outthink, not outspend." Constraints forced creativity, leading to a completely reimagined product.
The Perfectionist: Will Guidara's Meticulous Elevation
Will Guidara looked at fine dining and saw unlimited potential for transcendence. Rather than breaking the rules of hospitality, he decided to perfect them beyond recognition. His goal was to be "unreasonable in pursuit of people" while continuing to "strive for excellence" within the existing framework of fine dining.
Before Guidara wrote Unreasonable Hospitality, before he became a Co-Producer on The Bear, before the conference, the summit, and the TED Talk, Will Guidara was a restaurant guy. Specifically, he was the co-owner of Eleven Madison Park in New York City. In the first year after Guidara and Daniel Humm bought Eleven Madison Park from Danny Meyer, it earned three Michelin stars. Five years later, it was named The Best Restaurant in the World. How did he do it?
Unlike Cole, Guidara’s path to success did not involve stiltwalkers or geriatric cheerleaders, but he was inspired by a ballpark classic: the hot dog. When Guidara overheard European tourists in the Eleven Madison dining room lamenting that they hadn't tried a New York hot dog, he "dashed outside to a nearby cart to buy a hot dog, convinced a chef accustomed to preparing four-star meals to serve it and delivered a $2 hot dog with Michelin-level garnishes to a table of unsuspecting tourists." Guidara frequently tells this now-famous story on podcasts and in speaking gigs. “I brought out what we in New York, call a dirty water dog. And I explained it. I said, ‘Hey, I wanna make sure you don't go home with any culinary regrets. Here's that hotdog’, and they freaked out and kind of systemizing that is what led to everything that came from there.”
Photo of Eleven Madison Park via New York Times
Guidara's Philosophy: Elevate Every Detail to Create Transcendence
Guidara follows the "One-Inch Rule," a concept emphasizing the importance of attention to detail and staying present through the final stages of any task, particularly in service-oriented environments. As Guidara instituted the rule for his team, he instructed them to put plates down gently in front of guests, as that was "the final inch in a long chain of people who invested many hours of work into the experience." The One-Inch Rule is a reminder to stay present and follow through to the very last step.
In addition to sweating the small stuff, Guidara’s team created "Dreamweavers." Dreamweavers are people dedicated to delighting customers through "improvisational hospitality" that relies on listening to customers at every step of their journey, including "eavesdropping on a table, and responding to something overheard." As a result of this service espionage, Dreamweavers have whisked off a family who had never seen snow "via limo to Central Park for a few hours of fun" and created "a replica of a beach in a couple's private dining room, after their tropical vacation flight was canceled".
The Personalization Factor
Guidara states: "if what you're trying to do is give people a sense of genuine belonging, one size fits one". Each gesture is unique and non-replicable. "No one had ever reacted to anything I served them better than they reacted to that hot dog," Guidara said, not because the dirty water dog reached new gastronomic heights, but because it was exactly what those specific people needed in that specific moment.
While Jesse Cole credits resource restraint for his team’s creativity, Guidara’s approach requires lots of resources: Eleven Madison Park operates with a $500 per-plate price point, enabling the kind of bespoke experiences that define unreasonable hospitality. But within that context, the focus remains entirely on how to make each person feel seen, known, and cared for.
Two Experiments: Test One or Both Approaches
To understand which path resonates with you — revolutionary disruption or meticulous perfection — try experimenting with both approaches in your own life this week.
The Disruption Test: Identify one process, tradition, or "way we've always done things" in your work or personal life that consistently frustrates the people you serve. Instead of trying to improve it, ask: "What if we completely started over? What would we create if our only goal was to serve these people better?" Spend 20 minutes designing something entirely new, ignoring all existing constraints and conventions.
The Elevation Test: Choose one routine interaction you have with others — a weekly team meeting, client on-boarding, or even family dinner. For one week, pay obsessive attention to every tiny detail of that experience. Ask yourself: "How could I make this single moment more thoughtful, more present, more precisely calibrated to what this specific person needs right now?" Focus on execution, not innovation.
Different Paths to the Same Truth
What's remarkable about Cole and Guidara isn't just their category-busting success, it's how their completely different approaches reveal the flexibility of putting people first. Cole's path requires courage to disrupt and reimagine. Guidara's path requires discipline to perfect and elevate. Both require the fundamental commitment to care more about the people you serve than about industry norms.
Cole asks the revolutionary question: "What if . . . ?" and has found that simple question "can turn the most ho-hum, run-of-the-mill experience into something completely new." Guidara focuses on intentionality: "Intention means every decision from the most obviously significant to the seemingly mundane matters."
Different personalities, same principle: Both men discovered that when you genuinely put others first, they become your marketing department, your advocates, your ambassadors. There's profound freedom in recognizing you don't have to choose between revolution and perfection. The question isn't which approach is "right" — it's which approach serves your specific people in your specific context. Sometimes the most radical act is burning everything down and starting over. Sometimes it's taking what exists and executing it with such care that it becomes transcendent.
The Wonder of Authentic Service
Both stories remind us that genuine service isn't a marketing strategy—it's a way of being in the world. In the seventh inning of the Savannah Bananas' very first game, when 18-year-old Logan Moody walked up to the stands to deliver a signed baseball to a woman who had requested one and sat with her family for an entire half inning, bringing her to tears, Jesse realized they were "on to something special.” When Jesse asked Logan about the gesture afterward, the young player simply said, "It's fans first, right?"
That moment crystallized everything: whether you're revolutionizing an industry or perfecting an experience, the magic happens when serving others becomes so natural that even an 18-year-old understands it intuitively.
The Question
Looking at your own work or relationships, are you more naturally drawn to Cole's revolutionary approach (breaking rules to serve people better) or Guidara's perfectionist approach (elevating every detail)? What would change if you experimented with the opposite approach for just one interaction this week?
