Fans First

Stage One: The First Impression

if you are not a fan of what you do, you will never do it to your full potential. And the world is missing out on what you can bring.

he teaches his staff the FORD concept to build connections with customers. With every customer, team members should ask about their family, occupation, recreation, and dreams.

So many of us overthink. We tinker with our business strategy behind closed doors like mad scientists, trying to make our creation perfect before we reveal it to the world. But here’s the rub: it’s never perfect. A better strategy is to start before you are ready.

There’s no better stage than the one you make for your fans. Not only is it a great way to break down the barriers between us and them, but it also serves as that final reminder that this is not your typical baseball game, and we are not your typical baseball team—and that anything can happen during the show.

There are a lot of reasons for these failures. But ultimately, their fundamental problem was the same: instead of delighting their fans, they were chasing customers. That’s the wrong target. Customers are transactional. Customers come and go. Customers can be replaced. Customers aren’t enough, even millions of them. Employees aren’t enough, even th

Microfrictions are the little details that chafe and scratch at fans, even if the fans don’t realize it. They

Scripting the fan experience is a living, breathing exercise. Map it out, but don’t write it in stone. We iterate all of our scripts, adding something new to the experience each time. Every time, we ask, “Is that the best fan experience? Is that still creating fans? Have we just sunk into normalcy here?” This is how we blend creativity and spontane

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.