From WXXI news.

This is connections.

I'm Evan Dawson.

Our connection this hour was made in 2016 with a small independent baseball team called the Savannah Bananas.

If you know about the bananas, there's a good chance that you're already a superfan.

Maybe you've traveled to see their road show in person.

Maybe you went to Syracuse a couple of Septembers ago.

Maybe you've gone further afield.

If you've never heard of the Savannah bananas, get ready for maybe the single most successful business and marketing story in the past decade in this country.

Back in 2016, the Savannah Bananas were a collegiate summer baseball team.

They weren't affiliated with Major League Baseball, and they're not now.

They weren't a minor league team.

They were a struggling summer league team, like the kind you would find right now in Batavia, Geneva, Auburn.

And the bananas were for sale.

Jesse and Emily Cole were 20 somethings who took a shot and bought the team, sleeping on air mattresses and trying to find a way to make it more appealing for fans.

And so they developed a new brand of baseball called Banana Bowl.

Games would be a maximum two hours long.

If a fan catches a foul ball, it counts as an out.

Bunting and mound visits were banned.

If the hitter walked, he could take off running and the defense couldn't get him out until all nine fielders had touched the ball.

Essentially, the coaches looked at everything that made baseball boring or last too long.

And they changed it.

They brought the fans closer to the game.

Within a few years, they took their brand of entertainment to other cities, and by then the players were doing dance routines.

Even the umpire has dance moves.

The center fielder can catch a fly ball while doing a backflip.

One hitter comes to the plate on stilts.

They're traveling.

Show went to one city, then 33 cities, then 100.

Last year they sold out Fenway Park.

This year they're playing an NFL football stadiums, and they have a 500,000 person wait list for tickets.

Forbes recently speculated that if the calls want to sell the team, they could conceivably put a price tag around $1 billion a billion with a B.

But the Cole say they're not going to sell.

They won't raise ticket prices just because they can.

They won't charge shipping on merchandise.

They won't take any outside investors.

The result is a certified phenomenon, and it has other franchises asking, what can we do differently?

It has other businesses asking what can we do differently?

Major League Baseball adopted a pitch clock in an effort to shorten its games, largely in response to the success of Banana Bowl.

And now the story of the bananas is being taught in business classrooms in Rochester, in Chicago and Miami and everywhere.

What's the real lesson?

I've been wondering, is the story of the Savannah bananas an example of conscious capitalism, or is it something else?

Why is it so unusual for a business to resist raising prices and bringing in investors and selling as fast as possible?

Why isn't that more common?

Would this approach work in more business sectors?

Or are the bananas a kind of unicorn?

There is one man who can help answer those questions.

Andrew Brady is the co-founder of the Rochester chapter of Conscious Capitalism.

He's the CEO of the Accelerate team, and it's great to have you back in studio.

No pressure.

You're going to answer at all this.

It sounds like a lot of pressure.

And the first time I've been here on video too.

So a little extra if you're watching on YouTube.

Andrew has the best duds of anybody who's been in the studio this week.

No offense to all the other guests, but man, do you look good.

Appreciate it.

It looks kind of ridiculous how good you look compared to me.

You're showing me up.

And Andrew is the co-founder of the the Rochester chapter of Conscious Capitalism, which is what, by the way, what's conscious capitalism?

Yeah.

So conscious capitalism is based on the principles of organizations that have a higher purpose beyond just making profits.

So certainly we can, you know, talk about how that, you know, comes to fruition with the, with the bananas, but, you know, you need to keep the lights on to, to have the business.

You got to pay the bills.

But the purpose of the company can and maybe even should go beyond that.

And it engages employees at a higher level.

When there's something beyond profits, it gets the community to support them.

It gets more, you know, customers that are that are there for the purpose and trying to align their their purchases with the dollars that they spend with their values.

And, and so purpose is a big piece of it.

And then also a stakeholder integration.

So rather than prioritizing just the stockholders or just the owners, these organizations that are trying to think about what impact are we having on our customers, our employees, the communities that we're a part of the environment, really all of these different, stakeholders that really, in the long run, need to thrive for the organization to thrive.

And when you focus just on the stockholders, you can make a few tweaks here and there.

You know, you can cut your research and development, or you can cut the, you know, headcount of your employees or whatever.

But a lot of those things are really short term focused, and they end up hurting the business in the long run.

And so these organizations, by having this longer term perspective and really by thinking about the impacts that they're having on all of those stakeholders, they, actually are more successful financially in the long run as well.

Ironically.

Have you found that conscious capitalism tends to be easier in practice for smaller companies, or can it scale?

It can scale.

There's, Paul Polman at Unilever was trying to, to bring it into into Unilever, really in some ways inspired by, Ben and Jerry's, which they acquired and had more of a conscious spirit.

But it is very difficult, you know, once things get, you know, corporatized.

And it's no longer me and my buddies, you know, working out of the garage, sort of a startup mentality.

And you have to formalize some processes and, and also, you know, when you no longer know everybody that's working at the organization or you don't know the people of the other communities that you're a part of.

I think for small businesses, they naturally care about their communities because they're they're seeing their employees, you know, at the grocery store or on the soccer field or things like that.

And so, you know, being a part of the community, seeing those, those human beings as human beings rather than numbers on a spreadsheet or, you know, cost to be cut, it is, I won't say easier because it because it is a challenge for any company to truly put their purpose above profits, when it really matters.

But but, it does get more difficult as you scale.

And that's actually sometimes some of the things that I'm working with, organizations that the accelerate team is figuring out how to, as you're scaling, because there's a lot of, growing pains when it, when an organization is growing.

And if you think about the corporate culture as a lot of the unspoken norms and agreements and ways that we are interacting with each other, every individual that you bring into your organization inevitably is going to become a coauthor of your culture.

And if they don't believe in the purpose, if they're not aligned with the purpose, if they're not, you know, seeing that in there, not just on the fancy page on the website about our purpose and our values, but really seeing that every day.

Then, they're going to get cynical about it or they're they're going to, you know, possibly be taking away from that culture by by adding them to the organization.

So listeners, as we kind of get specific with this example, the Savannah bananas, I am curious to know, first of all, if you've seen the bananas in person, and if you have any thoughts you want to share on that, you can call the program.

It's 844295 talk toll free 8442958255263 WXXI.

If you're in Rochester, 2639994 or email the program connections at I talk.

But this is not just a conversation about the bananas.

It's a conversation about the things that frustrate you about business, and about why things are so slow to change, and about whether it's a smart idea for businesses to change.

And a good example for me is I, you know, I bought a shirt online recently.

I try to buy clothes in person still, just because I'm a weird shape and it's hard to buy online.

But, you know, there's a baby at home.

I don't have time to do anything.

Andrew.

So I buy the shirt and I see the price of the shirt.

And by the time that the final bill of the shirt that I'm about to put a credit card charge through, it's like 60% higher with fees and not just shipping, but the kinds of like, you know, I don't know what like what is like a handler's fee and like.

Like what?

Like who are these handlers like what is happening?

Why am I paying all these extra fees?

And then but I'm like lazy.

I'm like, I'm at the finish line.

I don't want to, okay?

And I'm annoyed and I'm frustrated and I'm already angry at the business before I bought their product.

Right.

And I think people can relate to this in so many ways.

All of the relationships that we have when we're making purchases of clothing, of online goods, when you're maybe doing holiday shopping, it always feels like there's a bait and switch in some way.

And that's not good for your relationship with the company.

Exactly.

I imagine starting starting a relationship in that way with feeling like you are feeling like you got conned.

Yeah.

And that's the way that, as you were telling that story, I was thinking of airlines, right?

Like you do the search on.

I'm trying to find the cheapest airline flight.

And then once you actually get to it, they're trying to upcharge you.

If you want to bring a bag.

And then if you want to sit, if you want to sit with people that you know and all these sorts of things and, and then they're counting on the fact that you're not going to go back and go through all of those ten steps with the other airline and see if the actual final price is higher, because they just had that kind of advertised price that they were, trying to sell you on.

And by the way, maybe the team can fact check me in real time here because I don't want to speak out of school.

But I think I saw this week that the Trump administration is wiping out rules that I think probably passed during the Biden era.

That said, if you get rerouted or if something gets screwed up on your flight, the airline has to compensate you.

In some ways, I think they no longer have to do that.

I'll correct that if I'm wrong.

But yeah, I mean, that's how so many relationships start with this negative flavor.

This feeling like you're just trying to squeeze me for every little bit that you can and you don't really care about me, the consumer.

That's pretty common in the business world.

Nobody teaches that in business school.

I'm pretty sure it.

Right.

Well, you know, they they always there's actually been some interesting studies and this is a little outdated.

So I'm actually hoping that the that some of this evidence has changed.

But there's, there is evidence that people go into business school with more of a purpose driven mindset, wanting to create a business that's going to have a positive impact and then essentially gets beaten out of them over the years that they're in business school and they and they come out more focused on, you know, pleasing the shareholders and making the quarterly numbers and all those sorts of things that are purely financially focused and and usually growth focus, too.

I think that's that's one of the, real things that we have to contend with.

There's a there's a woman named Kate Raworth, and she wrote a book called Donut Economics, and she talks about how we have these economies that are built to have to grow, whether or not it makes us thrive.

And what we should be doing is trying to have an economy that makes us thrive, whether or not it grows, almost being agnostic to to the growth aspect of it and, and really thinking about, you know, how that has an impact, how unlimited growth or, or the, you know, marriage of unlimited growth has an impact on sustainability and on and on the planet.

You know, thinking about the ways that you know, is this growth actually, you know, yes, maybe you're getting you're boosting your stock price and somebody's probably getting a bonus.

But there's so many, so many systems in place and incentives in place that really have organizations not able to, to align with their purpose.

All right.

So, I've got a I already see the phone ringing.

So let me get a little bit of feedback from listeners.

And then we're going to hear from, I'm going to listen to some sound coming up here from Jesse called the owner of this fan of bananas about their business philosophy.

Hi, this is Bill in Rochester.

First in the phone.

Hey, Bill, go ahead.

I have an, the phrase triple bottom line was used in the past quite a bit.

And I wonder if it's falling out of favor, because what you seem to be talking about is it seems to be the same thing.

Triple bottom line.

All right.

Bill, thank you for that.

Andrew Brady triple.

Bottom line, he says, yeah, all very aligned.

Similar ethos triple bottom line being people, planet and profit.

And try and trying to balance all of those and, and also you know trying to find win win wins.

You know, not not maybe trading off one of those bottom lines for another, but trying to find ways where the people, the planet and the profit can all thrive.

So yes, very, very much aligned.

I don't think it's out of favor by any means, but there's, there's a whole constellation of different kind of movements in this, in this ethos.

Okay.

And, when was triple bottom Line more popular?

I mean, like, Bill seems to think it did fall out of favor.

You're saying it's not necessarily out of favor?

I still hear it quite a bit.

Okay.

I've, I I'm not sure.

I'm not sure I'd say that it that it fell out of favor.

I know that it's been been around for at least a decade or two, but I don't know how much farther beyond that.

No, it's a really interesting concept.

Thank you, Bill, for that.

And, just confirming that I was I did hear across the room correctly.

It's a good way to be a journalist.

I heard across the room somewhere.

That's why we've got people fact checking me.

The New York Times and the Hill both habit that the Trump administration is dropping a proposed rule that would have required airlines to provide cash compensation for passengers for flight disruptions caused by the carrier.

That proposal was introduced by the Biden administration in December 2024, and aimed to establish specific payments for delays and cancellations within an airline's control, such as mechanical issues or staffing shortages.

So I we'd have to hear more from the Trump administration about why they thought that shouldn't be in place.

But apparently that's going away now.

So the next time something gets screwed up and your flight gets canceled, don't expect any compensation.

Well, there was another one that came along with some of those.

Those Biden era rules that I believe was you had had to make it as easy to like, unsubscribe from things as it was to subscribe.

And I hope that doesn't fall victim, because that was a fantastic idea.

When you can, you know, they'll take your credit card no matter what.

But then the unsubscribe from, you know, different newspapers or other things.

No, you can't do it.

This is something that is you're under my skin now.

Andrew Brady I spent more time during paternity leave unsubscribing from lists that I had no idea why I was on.

And there's still one on there that if I go to unsubscribe, they'll tell me you've already unsubscribed.

And every day I'm getting four more emails from them.

What is going on here that they think that they could just barrage us, and they think that as consumers, we want that.

Why do we have to spend this much time unsubscribing when we never even subscribed in the first place?

It's if you solve that, you can solve something.

This one really gets me upset.

It's that and then sometimes, you know, I'm trying to, you know, if you have a recurring payment or whatever.

And I think this was the, the, the Biden error rule, something along the lines of, you know, the recurring payment has to be as easy to cancel as it was, because I remember I was, you know, signed up for a newspaper and and they'll take your credit card right on the website 24 hours a day.

But then when you want to unsubscribe, you have to call during business hours, of course, have to be on the line and they're going to try to resell you, upsell you, you know, continue on.

And, my favorite down the unsubscribing is you go, you click unsubscribe.

And then they ask you, are you sure you want to unsubscribe?

And you say, yes.

And then they ask you why.

And then sometimes they make you log back in and then check which things you want to unsubscribe from.

I don't like and then like to unsubscribe from everything that you're a part of.

And I'd like you to never email me again.

And then they'll tell you.

You ever get to unsubscribe where it's like, well, and you may still receive some emails over the next 72 hours as we update our system, 72 weeks.

It's never ending.

We're talking to Andrew Brady, who is the co-founder of the Rochester chapter of Conscious Capitalism.

He's the CEO of the accelerate team, and he's talking to us about not only what conscious capitalism is, but some of the lessons from the story of the Savannah Bananas who came to our area a couple Septembers ago.

It was two years ago this month that I saw them in Syracuse, back when they were, you know, just doing 35 cities and smaller stadiums, and now they're doing NFL stadiums, major league stadiums.

They might go international.

I mean, it's an amazing story.

Forbes has estimated that they could get $1 billion if they wanted to sell.

And I want to listen to some of what the owners had to say.

And on YouTube, white says the bananas.

It's such a silly and fun way for the non-baseball lovers among us to enjoy a game.

And that's what you're going to hear in this clip.

I got a couple clips from Jesse Cole, the owner of the Savannah Bananas, who's talking about why they've been successful.

And they're yes, it's baseball, but it's entertainment.

It's not the Harlem Globetrotters.

It is high skilled.

It's dancing.

It's a lot of music.

It's a lot of movement and action.

It's two hours or less and then you're on your way.

So all of that has been very carefully created.

But then he's going to talk in this first clip that we have about why they haven't leveraged all this success to charge more for a shirt or charge more for ticket prices.

And I want to listen to what he had to say about that.

We pay millions of dollars of our fans taxes.

How much is a ticket?

40 to $60 with no ticket fees, no convenience fees, no service fees.

And we pay your taxes.

Our CFO thinks we're crazy.

Do you want a website right now?

You want to buy $30 shirt, $30, one shift, $30.

What about taxes?

No, because I think a $30 shirt should be $30.

We pay millions in shipping.

We pay millions in taxes.

But again, it's that transparency that I believe creates fans.

Could we do it and maybe don't look at I.

Yes.

But every day we would slowly deteriorate in our way of creating fans and slowly we become like everyone else.

And that's the slow fall that you would have of a great brand.

And I don't want that to happen.

It's Jesse called the Savannah bananas.

What do you hear there, Andrew?

I think the, the slow deterioration, I hadn't heard that that specific clip, but the slow deterioration really resonated with me because I think that's that is what happens.

You know, you you make a few compromises here or there on your purpose or on his.

What for him.

You know that fans first and, you do a couple little things here and there, and then you go a little bit further down the road, and eventually you're no longer, you're no longer living your purpose whatsoever.

And then they, they wonder why, you know, the fans no longer are showing up.

And so I think that really having to make every decision, by running it across your values, in your purpose, that's how these conscious businesses thrive by by really staying connected to that.

Now, I don't need mean to poke a hole in some of what he's saying about shipping, but if it says $30 for a shirt on their website and you pay $30, exactly, you're not charged taxes and you're not charging a shipping fee, effectively what they're charging you is something like $18 for the shirt or $20 for the shirt.

And the shipping fee then is whatever it is.

But, you know, they're not necessarily just paying your taxes.

They're just charging you less and showing you the full price.

People want to see the full price, Andrew.

People want to see it in medicine.

People don't know what a hip replacement cost.

Amen.

People don't know what labor and delivery costs.

People don't know how much is going to come out of insurance and how much is out of pocket.

People get really frustrated when they don't feel like they're they're given a straight story about what they are about to pay.

And that is a very I think this this is an observation that Jesse Cole had when they bought this team and they said, we're going to do this this way and people are going to like it.

Well, it should be obvious across the business sector.

All they asked was what frustrates people the most and fix it, right?

I mean, like that that shouldn't be high, high level stuff.

But it's rare for some reason why, you know, that's a that's a great question.

I think that's for so for so many people, you know, they, they have we all we all you know, the, the fish doesn't recognize in water.

Right.

So we all have these assumptions that we make, and we think that's the way that the business needs to be run.

And sometimes that's why an upstart like this needs to come shake things up and make make decisions that show you that there, there can be a different way.

I've actually I was thinking about, while I was on my way here.

There's something called the basketball tournament.

I don't know if you've you've heard of it, but they basically I, I've been to many of the basketball tournament games.

They started, I want to say close to ten years ago.

And it was, a summer tournament, you know, when there wasn't, there wasn't a whole lot else going on.

And what they did was create a lot of teams that were alumni of different colleges.

And I'm a Syracuse basketball fan.

And so there is what they called Bay Himes Army, you know, a from Jim Boeheim is the coach, but it wasn't affiliated with Syracuse or anything.

But they had these players and they put on a tournament and they had a single elimination tournament with $1 million prize for the winning team, and they got all these great players to be able to, you know, come show up for the chance of winning $1 million.

And they did some different things to they.

One of the things that I liked the best, they had what they call the Elam ending.

And so with four minutes left on the clock, whoever is that the team with the highest score.

So say it's, you know, 90 to 80 at that point, they say, okay, the winning the winning score is going to be 97 points.

They just add seven to that to the higher score.

So rather than the last few minutes of the game, trying to do all these fouls and do all these things that, you know, annoy the fans and the game never ends, they're like, no, the winning score is going to be 97, so there's no reason to have to do all this crazy fouling at the end of the game, slowing the game down.

The worst part of the fans.

Exactly.

And so they did the exact same thing.

And they've now you know, they over the years they ended up getting on ESPN now.

So they they're on the they stream on ESPN.

The the jackpot has has only risen.

The level of play is only risen.

And so sometimes it takes certain things like that.

And maybe you do see like you know, he's the Jesse the guy from Savannah bananas has been very diplomatic in saying that some of the things that the MLB did to speed up the game weren't inspired by him, necessarily, but they were they they they definitely saw heard the footsteps, so to speak.

And they were like, oh, we should we should make some changes.

Now, I'm glad you bring up the basketball example because as a basketball fan myself, the worst part of the fan experience is the last two minutes of the game, when it should be the most exciting for all the frustrating reasons you just described, well, you just described somebody who looked at that and said, what are we going to do to fix this?

Jesse Cole did the same thing with the Savannah bananas.

He said people don't like blowouts in baseball games.

I mean, it's boring at the end, so every inning is worth one point.

So if you win an inning, you get a point and you could walk off an inning.

I mean, if you don't score in the top of the first and you get a home run in the bottom of the first, that's the end of the inning.

You win the inning one nothing.

Then in the last inning, all the points convert to runs.

So now if it was a five game, well now it's A50 game.

But you can put a rally together and get close.

You can get there.

Now if it was 4 to 2 in points and you couldn't get an extra point to win the game, now it's A42 game with runs.

So every game is close.

It always comes down to the end.

That's a very smart way of doing it entertainment wise.

If you're a baseball purist, you might not like it, but I you know, Joel, I just got an email from Joel who says even what you just described does sound like the Harlem Globetrotters.

It is.

I mean, it is a lot like a baseball version of the Globetrotters with more competition.

It's not pre-scripted.

The bananas don't always win.

In fact, when I was there, they lost and the quality of the play is really, really high.

It just happens to be done with flips and some trick plays, and sometimes a hitter on stilts and sometimes a dance routine at home plate.

But it's pretty impressive.

It's just a version of asking what doesn't work about an existing business model.

How do we fix that?

And that doesn't just exist in sports, right?

You can think of think of the airlines.

Why is nobody said what frustrates people the most about flying?

We're going to be the one airline that doesn't do that, and we're going to advertise that we won't do it this way or we will do it a different way.

You could do that in almost any business, could you?

You would think so.

You know, there there are those, those types of opportunities and actually one of the things is the you know, sometimes it's a it has to be an upstart.

It has to be kind of someone coming in from the outside.

But there are opportunities for organizations to, you know, shake themselves up a little bit.

And I think I was listening to one of the interviews, it was a podcast with, with Jesse, and he was talking about how they used the, SNL model of people.

They'd have like pitch meetings essentially, where people would be like, well, what if we you've mentioned stilts?

What if we had somebody, you know, hitting on stilts?

Or what if we did XYZ?

And so they were basically workshopping all of the all of the rules and things over the first couple of years of doing it.

And that requires what they call psychological safety, which is a, which is a huge concept.

Amy Edmondson at Harvard is has done a whole career's worth of, of studies on, on psychological safety and how it creates that ability for people to take chances and make risks, and, you know, put themselves out there with, with a different idea because when, when people don't have that sense of psychological safety, which I think is really the root of a lot of this, is nobody wants to have to make a decision or try something if their job could be on the line.

And so they they'll just kind of go along the line and do it the same way, do the bare minimum to just get by, not get noticed, not get fired.

And that's the way that, too many of us float along.

And I truly believe and and some of the work that I've done at accelerate, some of the, or organizations that I've seen with conscious capitalism, shows that there's a whole lot extra effort, what we call discretionary effort, you know, above and beyond that minimum to just get by and not get fired, that people are not only willing to give, but they're eager to give.

Because if I'm going to be spending 40, 50, 60 hours a week anyways at work, I might as well be doing something where I feel like it's filling my cup and and I'm contributing something to my community, or to the world or to the customers.

And, and so people want to give that extra effort.

They want to give their creative ideas.

But if they feel like their, their job might be on the line or they're, you know, promotional opportunities might be on the line, they're they're not going to take those risks.

Really.

There's just so many ideas that are coming to mind for me that I'm just saying, as a consumer, there's so many frustrating things about being a consumer and that just start with the question, what is wrong with this model?

What what upsets people the most?

How do you fix that?

How do you make it better?

How do you and maybe it costs more?

And when you describe employees and psychological safety, you say that a lot of people do want they're hungry to do some of that work if they feel like they're safe to do it right, if they feel like there's not gonna be a penalty for failing.

I think a lot of probably CEOs and a lot of people in management positions would say, oh, we want innovation.

We want people to try all kinds of new things.

But do they?

I mean, how do you bridge that gap of convincing people, no, you actually can you can try this.

And if we fail, that'll be okay.

One of the one of the best examples of this, is Astro Teller, who I know you've, you've had on the show.

He's got it.

He's got a fantastic TEDx talk.

He, kind of runs the I think they call it Google X now, but they're kind of innovation lab where they try all different kinds of things.

And one of the things that they do at it, and Google X is rather than sometimes, again, because we're afraid to fail, we do all these little things.

Okay, let's test out this idea.

Whatever they say.

No.

What is the thing the part of this idea that's most likely not to work.

And let's go at that first so that we can figure out right away, right now whether this idea has any has any legs.

And they, you know, so, so they, they dive right at the problem.

They also have celebrations essentially when, when a project gets killed because they're like, hey, we learned a lot.

And they've actually have all kinds of, stories that they can share of things that they learned in a specific, a specific area that they were trying that may not have worked for that initiative or that that product, product or project.

And then they went on to have those kind of competencies and kind of reformulate them for things in the future.

And so kind of having again, a lot of this comes back to having that long term mentality because in the short run, it's not very efficient.

It's not it's it's gonna quote unquote, waste some, some time and money to try these different sorts of ideas.

But all you need is 1 or 2 of those ideas to, to really knock it out of the park.

And all of a sudden you've got a new business, new business line, new growth opportunities for your organization.

By the way, a little coda to the story of the $30 shirt that I bought that I ended up paying like 51 bucks for it.

It finally arrived.

And guess what?

Didn't fit.

Didn't fit 51 bucks for a $30 shirt that didn't fit.

I was a very happy customer, I can tell you that.

Not very much.

But the one question we have, an answer that we're going to get to on the other side of this only break is if the model that we're talking about, whether it's a Savannah bananas or this kind of work traveling to other business sectors, if it's actually conscious capitalism, to me, it just sounds like good business.

It sounds like a smarter way to think long term about what you are doing, about doing it sustainably and frankly, just smarter.

So why is that conscious capitalism?

Why is that just better business?

We're going to talk to Andrew Brady about that.

He's the founder of the Rochester chapter of Conscious Capitalism.

And wait till you hear what the Savannah Bananas owner said about selling the team.

After Forbes said he could get $1 billion a bill.

Imagine ten years ago, you're a 20 something living on an air mattress, and you bought a dingy team in a stadium that's falling apart that no one has ever heard of.

And nine years later, you could sell that for $1 billion.

Wait till you hear what he said.

We're going to listen to that on the other side of this break.

I'm Evan Dawson.

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This is connections I'm Evan Dawson.

Patrick emails the show to say there will always be somebody who spoils the altruism of a donut economy, which creates a domino effect.

Me first, me first, me first, me first.

So Patrick has a jaundiced view about how most businesses work in capitalism.

We'll get Andrew's taken that coming up here.

And I do want to mention here the fact check from our engineer, Rob Braden, the biggest Arsenal fan I know.

He's a are you gunner?

Is that what you're a gunner?

See, I'm a coffee fan.

I'm a I'm an Everton fan.

I'm a long suffering.

But Rob is an Arsenal fan.

And he says that the team let their fans know, especially American fans.

They're going to cover the Trump tariffs for their fans.

I don't even know what that looks like or what that means, but they're telling their fans if there's any increase in price, we're going to eat it for you.

Why?

That's pretty good business.

Andrew Brady that's not bad.

And the other topic of soccer, number one, I was thinking a lot when I was thinking of the of the Savannah bananas in this conversation of Wrexham of welcome to Rex.

Yeah, I have not I have not watched the show.

I haven't yet.

I've had many people, recommend to me, watching the show and how it's a great example of conscious capitalism because they've literally, you know, taken, you know, a historic but, you know, downtrodden organization in, in a, in a downtrodden area and by being fan first, but also really, from what I've been told, developing a lot in the community, both both a pride in the community.

But also, you know, how that creates an economic engine and people are, you know, able to again, through business.

That's that's the, for conscious capitalism.

It's elevating humanity through business is essentially the purpose statement.

Right.

And so using business to elevate humanity to certainly elevate that community.

And so I want to watch that series.

I have not seen it myself either.

It's it's going around.

It's Ryan Reynolds.

Is that Ryan Reynolds?

Ryan Reynolds, welcome to Wrexham.

Yeah.

So any any anybody listening that can educate us a little bit, call on and tell us a little bit.

Oh well welcome to Welcome to Wrexham.

So let's listen to some of what the, the owner of the Savannah Bananas says about whether he wants to sell the team, about whether he wants outside investors because he and his wife, Emily, are still just the sole owners of this team that, you know, this mega success now and why they are not doing that right now.

Let's listen.

It's your financial backers.

I'm you the sole owner of the whole operation.

Yeah.

It's me.

It's my wife.

It's fun.

I don't know investors.

No, no, no.

We send out everyone from the start.

Yes, because what do investors want from.

And to get a ham return.

Right.

Our return is the fan experience.

It's a different game.

And so as soon as you get shareholders you get other people involved.

They have different desires, different goals.

Our goal is to create a billion fans.

And so a zero.

And I believe everyone says you've got to raise money to do this.

You got to start a league, you got to get this, you got to get this.

You're getting money.

If you can't create a product that's good enough that your fans will support it, the product's not good enough.

That's Jesse Cole talking to The Athletic before one of the bananas games at Fenway Park.

And so, what do you make?

First of all, when he says the second you have shareholders come in and you have outside investors come in, you have to give up some control.

They will have ideas about how they want the business run, and they're going to exert forces that will change what you are doing.

You've got to be awfully careful when you're when you're giving up that that control.

And you know, from some perspectives bringing in outside, you know, investors that may have a specific skill set that you lack, you know, that there's there's strategic ways to to do that.

And sometimes you know, at the very least, you want to try to make sure that your values aligned and that they're that they're purpose aligned.

But it does become very difficult.

I think the the more important piece that he mentioned was that they want to return.

Right.

And so that money that they're putting in, they're expecting that it's going to lead to growth, which is going to create a return for them.

And I think that that money that, you know, can come from a venture capitalist or other types of investors is kind of it's almost like steroid growth, right?

You're getting you're getting that immediate boost and that immediate impact.

But what is it really doing to the long term health of of your body or of your company when you're taking that, that steroid?

That's going to that's going to boost your growth.

And so being able to now there are some great examples of going in, in, in other directions, KKR, which is which is a private equity firm, which is private equity is a just an industry that is one of the the least conscious.

And in my, in my estimation.

But there's a, a guy at KKR, his name is Pete Stavros, and he is he noticed how conscious companies specifically in this case, employee owned companies, had higher levels of growth and more engagement and all sorts of things.

And so he's actually with KKR starting a whole line of their organization where they take over the companies that they take over, they give employee ownership.

They create this conscious capitalism, conscious culture where they're psychological safety, where where people have real financial stake ownership in the in the organization.

They're able to grow the business faster or turn the business around.

And then when they sell, the employees end up getting, you know, a piece of that pie.

And so that's a case where at least in this one, one small example, there's a way for for employees to win.

But again, you have to be very cautious when you're, when you're bringing on anybody from the outside that's going to have some kind of voting control, make sure that they align with your values and that they align with your with your conscious purpose.

So how do you listen to your customers better?

John in Rochester has an idea on that.

Hey, John, go ahead.

Christy, what ever happened to successful versus Bloomberg suggestion boxes for you people's experience and wisdom.

Yeah.

Just so John, the idea of a suggestion box, I think a lot of companies would say, well, that's what social media is now we hear directly from people.

It's criticism.

It's praise, it's gratitude, it's anger.

And I think that was true in the earlier days of, say, Twitter, before Twitter became whatever it is now.

You know, I saw a number of companies respond to complaints that were good faith complaints in ways that I thought were very savvy and very quick and very direct.

Now, of course, social media is just a place where everyone is angry all the time and everyone wants to yell at you and dunk on you, and no one can show any sincerity.

I mean, I don't mean to be too cynical, but I do think John's larger point is how do companies hear people?

So they've got to choose how are we taking in what our customers want?

Whether you're a clothing company, whether you're an airline, whether you're the Savannah bananas, what do you suggest companies do to better listen to people?

Yeah, well, part of it is, you know, that you need to empower the frontline employees.

You know, oftentimes it's the customer service person that is literally talking to a frustrated, you know, customer that is going to know some of those frustrations we're talking about earlier.

Right?

And those frustrations could be future business opportunities or ways to improve the product to avoid this frustration from ever happening.

There's all kinds of opportunities, but often we have those frontline employees that don't feel empowered, they don't feel like their voices heard.

And so they're like, you know, why bother?

And so the suggestion box and I deal with this a lot with, the organizations that I'm trying to work with, in the, in the leadership development and cultural development work that I do is if you ask employees for suggestions in the suggestion box or you do the engagement survey and then nothing happens, you might as well have never done the survey at all.

Because the next time that you ask, people aren't going to put in the effort to give you any suggestions because, oh, I did this last time.

Nobody listened.

Why bother?

They they're just checking a box to say that they did it, to say that they it's just to pretend like they care.

And, And why would I pour my, blood, sweat and tears into trying to improve this company if nobody cares about what I have to say?

So tell me if I have this right, though.

If we're doing it the Andrew Brady way, you're telling the people we've got to deal with the angry customers you've got, we're going to give you some power to have creative solutions here.

And if we think something that you do goes out of bounds, we'll let you know.

But you're not going to get canned.

We're going to try to make people happy, and we're going to try to fix it, and we're going to let you come up with the solutions on some of that.

Yeah.

Nordstrom is is was well known for this.

There's some other organizations where they basically have their employee handbook is like use your best judgment and and they empower and trust their employees to do those sorts of things.

I remember, early on there's a company called, Zappos that was early on in the, in the movement shoes of kind of just kept them shoes.

Yeah.

Tony Shea was the guy that founded it.

My twin brother love Zappos.

Yeah.

And Zappos.

Yeah.

And they were they were one of those companies where they empower their employees to do whatever it took to to make things right.

There's also, there's some organizations that are really because they, they see those things and they, they don't, they don't wait for that to go five levels up or let the person say, oh, I have to talk to my manager or whatever.

When those things get resolved, you're going to create more loyal customers.

Those those people are probably going to refer or tell people about it.

And in fact, that's one of the ways that the original research around conscious capitalism started, was from a guy named Raj Sisodia was doing this research.

He was a marketing professor, and he was frustrated by how little kind of return organizations were getting on their marketing.

And so he had a he had somebody basically one of his mentors tell him, you know, rather than focus on all these bad examples, what if you looked at the companies that weren't spending as much on marketing, and what are they doing differently?

That's that's working.

And that's how he ended up doing the research that led to his book Firms of Endearment, that led to conscious capitalism, was looking at these organizations because they are building they're maybe slower again, back to the slower controlled growth.

It might be slower to actually build by actually delighting customers, actually having happy employees.

But that's going to be a more sustainable level of growth as well.

So here's an email from Justin who says, Evan, the problem is in the name conscious capitalism.

It's that second word in capitalism.

They will always go off the cliff of greed, eventually the cliff of greed.

Eventually Justin says, so I want to give you some space to respond to that.

But I'm also I want to put it in this context here.

So to Justin's point, eventually, even if you try to do things the way the Andrew's been talking about, eventually the pull for more money, more money, more money, more share police, your shareholders will dominate and your good intentions will fail.

I think the Savannah Bananas is a good example of where that may not be true, because if you bring in shareholders, which they haven't done, if you bring in investors, one of the first things they'll do, which they're already being told by their financial guys, is you're not charging enough for shirts and you're not charging enough for tickets.

30 bucks for a shirt and 50 bucks for a ticket is nowhere close.

People are buying a four pack of tickets and selling two of them for 300 bucks apiece on the secondary market.

The bananas know this.

Jesse Cole knows this as the owner of that franchise, so he knows he can get a lot more.

He knows he can get more for a shirt, a lot more for a shirt, for merchandise, for all kinds of things, for the fan experience.

The shareholders in the finance guys would tell you, you have to do that.

You're going to make a lot more in the next quarter and the next year, in the next five years, and you will for a little while.

But the people who can afford a $70 shirt will probably buy one.

Not going to buy maybe another shirt next year, or maybe if you can afford a $100 ticket, you might go to one game, but you're probably not going next year.

When they're a three hour drive away, you're probably going one time, as opposed to I'm going to follow them.

If they're within a tank of gas, I'm going.

And so for a little while you get this bump.

But then over time, I have to think that that washes away when people go, I got my fill of it.

I got the shirt.

I saw him one time.

I'm not going again.

You know, I could afford it, but it was kind of a lot.

I don't think I'm going to do that again as opposed to this is an experience I can have and I can have it again next year and it'll be a little bit different.

And I love I have a relationship with the brand.

I hate to say that word, but they do, right?

So I have to think that that's a case where to Justin's idea that eventually you go off this cliff.

I think that it's better business not to.

It's better business to say we're not raising prices.

I think you're going to make more money in the long term with that.

Yeah.

And when you when you see that billion dollar price tag in terms of what they think they could sell it for, it's got to be it's got to be a pretty tough decision.

And I don't I you know it'd be hard to fault somebody where like you said.

Yeah.

He mortgages house at one point when he couldn't you know, afford payroll on, on the, on the team in the early days and, and so, when, when they're doing these sorts of, these sorts of short term types of decisions, it's there's always going to be those polls and and to the, the listener is is totally right.

There's always going to be those those short term polls and a lot of the, you know, incentive structures that we have in our, in our lives, in our economy, that that's a big piece of it.

And one of the one of the things that I would joke with Raj Sisodia, who started the organization and called it conscious capitalism, he's a marketing professor, and he used the possibly worst marketing brand term because half the people that I talked to about conscious capitalism hate the word conscious.

They're like, no, we're we're for free market.

We're going for the money.

And the other half hate the word capitalism.

And and because, you know, they see, oh, we want to we want to do right by all of our, employees and, and customers and whatever.

But capitalism is, is not a part of that.

And so they see it as an oxymoron.

And where I think there's possibilities when you see all these green shoots of like the, the KKR example of the employee ownership or like the Savannah bananas or like the welcome to Wrexham, all these different examples.

And they do truly see because that's what got conscious capitalism on the map, was that first study showed that the conscious organizations end up beating the S&P 500 by something like 8 or 10 times over a ten year period, and similar things have been shown for companies that are rated as more ethical for B Corp, for employee owned companies, for the companies that are on the Best Workplaces list, they actually do well.

All of those companies in the long run, they end up doing well, but the pull is always against it.

Sometimes it's, being up in going to an IPO or something, right?

And once you're subject to, to Wall Street in the, in the public markets, in fact, the owner of Panera, after several years of Panera being publicly listed, he found that it was so difficult to keep a more conscious, you know, employee centric sort of a vision that he brought it back private because it was so tough to basically feeling like you're swimming upstream and some of those environments.

And so I do think, there is a role to play, number one, for government is a market maker.

Right.

And as much as we talk about free market capitalism, every law that's in place is, is going to be creating different kinds of incentive structures towards either more conscious or less conscious ways of doing business.

And so you can create different laws that maybe they're protecting customers or consumers from, from different things, maybe they're creating minimum wages and those sorts of things.

So I think that when conscious capitalism, I like to see continuous to raise the bar for what capitalism and what business and the market can accomplish in terms of innovation, in terms of, these opportunities.

But then you also do need there is a role for the government to play to.

And if the conscious companies are raising the bar, raising the ceiling, we also need to make sure we're raising the floor of what they minimum level that other organizations can get away with, because there's always going to be some other competitor that comes in some fly by night operator that maybe gives you that knockoff version of whatever, whatever you think you're buying.

And if there's not protection against that, then it makes it a lot harder for the conscious companies to survive.

Let me get Bonnie in Rochester on the phone.

Hello, Bonnie.

Go ahead.

Yeah.

Hi.

Well, one of these, things I would talk about was the fact that, in terms of other models is the issue of, it's, a few minutes ago, somebody mentioned it is, the, idea of, cooperative working and I just want to tell you something.

And this was very frustrating for, for some of us.

But in this example that I quickly try to give you is that, a couple of years ago, our neighborhood, about to gather and we, you know, we always have and we want to talk about.

But one of them was the fact of the aging of housing in Rochester.

And volume houses are 90 years old or 100 years old.

And you know what?

How do you want to keep something?

And not keep it, you know, falling apart.

So we came up with this idea of taking an old building, and you could do this in our neighborhoods, turning it into a business site, and would you would have, worker owned.

I'm going to say that again, worker owned, arrangement.

And they would be hiring people who are skilled in repairs.

And the reason that is also important is because people who have had to rely on, use use of what affairs repairs were available often have limited options.

And, you know, sure, if the person is going to do the job and all this kind of stuff.

So this would help with that issue as well, because what we find with co-ops, is that it's a much more committed, and let me say that word again, unless more committed, situation.

And that is, is extremely important when you're talking about communities.

I just got to jump because we're gonna lose the our.

Bonnie, I appreciate that, but co-ops, what do you think work around what do you think worker on cooperatives are are one model that that has been very successful where it's been where it's been tried again, giving those employees a true stake in the success of the business.

There's, you know, esops are another another model that, gives employees those those ownership stakes and those types of ways to really, again, create that, that sense of shared fate and, and ability to grow with the organization.

And there's so many examples of them and what we hopefully can do.

And thank you for the opportunity to do it here is shine a little bit of a light on how those are having a positive impact on their stakeholders, while also being as successful or more successful in the long run financially.

Joel mentions Patagonia as we wrap here last 30s if I'm a Rochester business, if I'm in Western New York, and I want to learn from the Savannah bananas, what's one important takeaway that I need to have?

I think it's creating that purpose and not making it something that is delivered from the from the leaders, but really, what they call excavating.

Like, you need to really dig into why this company was founded, what we're here for, and create something that feels authentic.

And then every decision that you make, especially the big strategic ones, needs to be run up against your purpose in your values.

Well, I really appreciate the conversation.

If people want to learn more about conscious capitalism, where would you send them?

You can go to conscious capitalism roc.org, and you can also search for the Evolution of Business podcast for all kinds of interviews with local leaders who are doing this in practice.

Does your chapter of conscious capitalism like, hang out and have like conscious beers and stuff like that and have events?

Oh yeah, there's events and we've, you can find more on, on the website about what's coming up.

Andrew Brady is the founder co founder of the Rochester chapter of Conscious Capitalism, CEO of the accelerate team.

Still, having been to a bananas game, I hope they come come soon because I I'm excited now that I'm learning more about it.

We're going to see.

Thank you for being here from the whole team at connections, a wonderful team here.

Just carrying me all week.

Thank you everybody, and we're going to be back with you next week on member supported public media.

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