What Is Personal FinanceJesse Cole and his wife, Emily, bought the Savannah Bananas, a collegiate summer league baseball team, in 2016 for a reported sum in the low hundreds of thousands of dollars. Celebrity-net-worth-tracking sites place his estimated net worth in the low millions of dollars today, a figure built from ticket revenue, merchandise, and licensing tied to a franchise that has grown far beyond its original size. Estimates vary by source and change as the business grows.
Starting with a struggling minor team
Before the Bananas, Cole ran a different collegiate summer league team, the Gastonia Grizzlies, where he first tested an entertainment-heavy approach to a sport that mostly sells tickets on the game itself. When he and Emily bought the Savannah team, it was drawing small crowds with a conventional format. Rather than trying to win with better players or a bigger stadium, they rebuilt the product around entertainment, choreographed routines between innings, a pep band, players in costume, alongside the baseball itself, and branded the whole thing "Banana Ball."
Growth through product, not outside capital
The Bananas' growth did not come from venture funding or a wealthy backer. It came from selling out Savannah's small stadium consistently enough to build a waiting list, then building an audience online, particularly on platforms like TikTok, where clips of the team's routines and stunts reached far beyond anyone able to attend a game in person. That online audience turned into a national touring schedule, with the team now playing in major stadiums across the country to sell-out crowds. The business scaled by reinvesting revenue and attention back into a product people wanted to see, not by raising money to grow faster than demand supported.
The transferable lesson
Most small businesses don't have a path to national attention, but Cole's approach illustrates a pattern worth borrowing at any scale: identify what makes a product forgettable within its category, ordinary minor-league baseball games, and change the parts that are changeable rather than trying to compete on the parts that aren't, budget, roster talent, stadium size. Consistent reinvestment of early revenue into the product, rather than early extraction of profit, is also part of the story. Building a business is one route to net worth alongside a salaried career, and the two aren't mutually exclusive. Investing basics for beginners covers how income from either source gets put to work over time.
To see how a business's value fits into a broader net worth picture, see what net worth means and how to calculate yours.
Public net worth figures for Jesse Cole are estimates from celebrity-net-worth-tracking sites. They vary by source and change as the business grows. Nothing in this article is financial advice about any specific investment.