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When I see someone in need (and I mean both definitions of “in need”—a destitute person with a disability is one example; my mother-in-law carrying groceries in from her car is another), I have a tendency to do nothing. Sometimes, I don’t do nothing—sometimes, I’ll pretend I didn’t see them until the window of convenience for lending a hand has shut. Then, I make some vague gesture as if to say, “Oops, sorry, maybe next time.” I’m not a sociopath; at least I don’t think I am. I do feel a prickle of veritable pity; I don’t do anything about it. Why? Perhaps because the prickle is, in fact, a tendency itself, a deeper, far nobler tendency than the one I obey—the reaction I feel, the action I stifle. What I lack is not the encouragement but the courage.



It’s possible that I’ve never spoken to a man with more courage of this sort than Tim Tebow, the <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/top-50-success-changemakers/">philanthropist</a> and former NFL quarterback who has faced years of scrutiny for being outspoken about his Christian faith. Yet, he remains steadfast in his convictions—now channeling that same resolve into his foundation, which serves the MVP (most vulnerable people) of the world in more than 100 countries through his international charitable foundation. It’s just as possible that the only woman I’ve met with the same extraordinary courage is Tim’s wife, Demi-Leigh Tebow, the winner of Miss Universe 2017, who has dedicated her life to serving the millions of people trapped in and rescued from the global human trafficking operation through her international campaign and alongside her husband’s organization.



“Goodness can come from one simple act of obedience,” Demi tells me. For the Tebows, obedience is courage. It’s acting on the faith that what (or who) pricks our hearts is greater than our zone of interest, our day or our career. As Tim puts it, it’s about living a life of significance over a life of success.







“Success is about you. Significance is about other people,” he says. “Which are you chasing?”



Anyone who loves American football—and has since at least the aughts—remembers “Tebowmania.” Tim’s college and NFL career (brief as it was) is synonymous with the miracles that defined it.



Historical miracles, like his becoming the first sophomore to ever win the Heisman Trophy after a historic season as quarterback with the Florida Gators in 2007.



Cultural miracles, like when some 90 million people Googled “John 3:16” during the 2009 BCS championship game to find out why Tim had the verse stenciled in his eye black.



Athletic miracles, like the 2012 AFC wild card playoff when Tim stunned Pittsburgh’s defense with a madcap 80-yard touchdown pass to Demaryius Thomas on the very first play of overtime, sealing a win for the heavily unfavored Denver Broncos.



And, most inexplicably, statistical miracles: In that same Broncos-Steelers game, Tim totaled 316 passing yards with an average of 31.6 yards per completion. Pittsburgh’s time of possession was 31 minutes and 6 seconds. The game’s Nielsen ratings on CBS peaked at 31.6. Big Ben Roethlisberger even threw an interception on 3rd-and-16. And it all happened three years to the day after the college national championship game when Tim and “John 3:16” went viral.



“I really believe that sports can be a catalyst for so much good, so much inspiration, for encouragement, for people to rally together,” Tim says. “[But] I hope I don’t end my life saying, ‘The most I gave was for a game.’”



One could say Tim’s life even started miraculously. His family was on a mission trip in a remote village in the Philippines when his mom was hospitalized with amoebic dysentery. They discovered she was pregnant with Tim while she was comatose and facing severe complications that threatened both their lives. After several arduous months, end-to-end with white-knuckled prayers that the physicians’ grim prognosis would prove wrong, Pam and Bob Tebow celebrated little Timmy’s safe arrival in August 1987. The mystified doctors couldn’t explain how he’d hung on by a placental thread. The overjoyed Tebows, who’d hung on by a prayer, could.



Tim was the fifth and final Tebow kid, the “miracle baby” of the family. When he came home, his 9-year-old sister was so enthusiastic about the new baby that she gave herself a literal hernia from carrying Tim around so often. “There were so many people [who] thought they were Mom and Dad,” Tim laughs. Suffice it to say, all five kids had lots in common growing up in Jacksonville, Florida, as caregivers, as missionaries, as classmates (the Tebow kids were homeschooled) and, of course, as athletes (middle-schooler Tim parroted his elder brother’s college baseball and football workouts). The Tebow household was founded on care, prayer, teaching and motivating. No doubt that foundation contributed to the work ethic of a first-round NFL draft pick, but Tim has another take on what fashioned him into the success story he is today.



Tim returned to the Philippines for a mission trip when he was 15, and there he met a boy named Sherwin. Sherwin was born with backward feet; the other villagers considered him a throwaway, an outcast, a curse. (This phenomenon, by the way, is as common in the remote cultures of Filipino jungles as on the sidewalks of Washington, D.C. It’s like I confessed in my opener: How many times have you and I walked past Sherwin? How many cultural curses do we perpetuate daily, when we glance at someone, pity them and move on?)



“I just knew that he wasn’t cursed to God,” Tim says. “I also knew God was pricking my heart, saying, ‘Yeah, but what are you going to do about it?’ Meaning, ‘[How] are your actions going to show what he’s worth to you?’”



That extraordinary moment laid the groundwork for Tim’s true success story, a vocation that both preceded and outlived his NFL career. He started the <a href="https://timtebowfoundation.org/about" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Tim Tebow Foundation (TTF)</a> in 2010 immediately after graduating college. Sherwin was at the forefront of Tim’s mind when he wrote the nonprofit’s mission statement: “To bring Faith, Hope and Love to those needing a brighter day in their darkest hour of need.”



TTF launched as simply orphan care outreach, but (in the characteristic Tebow technique) it came off the snap with astonishing momentum. A year later, the organization announced it was building a hospital specializing in pediatric orthopedic surgeries in the Philippines. The clinic opened its doors, and a year later, TTF launched <a href="https://timtebowfoundation.org/night-to-shine/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Night to Shine</a>, an annual, extravagant prom-night experience for anyone 14 and up living with disabilities. Today, it’s a worldwide movement—in 2025 alone, more than 800 Night to Shine events were held in 63 different countries. More than 600,000 people with special needs have had their Night to Shine since 2015, each participant receiving a red-carpet welcome and each participant ending the evening being crowned king or queen. Tim fondly recalls the night of the very first dance back in 2015, in North Carolina, standing apart from the crowd and watching the lights and royal revelry.



“I had tears coming down the sides of my face. I knew there was something special with this, and this was exactly what I was supposed to do,” he says. He reflects for a moment, then adds, “What does ‘purpose’ mean? The reason something is done, used, created or exists. When you feel like you get to <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/go-straight-for-the-joy-and-follow-your-purpose/">live in your purpose</a>, like part of the reason I was created and exist was for this—that’s a very special moment.”



On the other side of the world, Demi-Leigh Nel-Peters was on her way to being crowned Miss Universe. The universe is a somewhat bigger province than what she was used to: Demi grew up on the Western Cape of South Africa in Sedgefield, a little town with one traffic light and the motto, “The tortoise sets the pace.” Some of her most cherished childhood memories are of farmers markets and beach walks there, of sunny small-town days before she learned, in a hard way, of the ubiquitous darkness that comes with the universe.



Some three months after Demi was crowned Miss South Africa in 2017, she was driving through a high-end part of Johannesburg, along a busy avenue. It was early summer and a little after 5 p.m., so still daylight. As she stopped at a red light, five men surrounded her car. One man pointed a gun at her head. When she tried giving up her car and exiting, he pushed her back into the seat saying, “You’re going with us.” Suddenly, everything from the self-defense workshops her dad had insisted she annually take sprung to mind. She dealt her attacker a blow to the throat, scrambled out of the car and ran.



“I never, ever want to victimize myself. I don’t know what the goal of my perpetrators were,” Demi says. But the implications of the carjacking exposed her to a horrifically pervasive evil, one that most people, including her at the time, are shockingly ignorant of despite its enormity. The modern slavery and human trafficking industry generates somewhere between at least $150 and $250 billion in illicit profits every year. And it’s growing: The United Nations reports that between 2016 and 2021, the global estimate of people trapped in forced labor or forced marriages rose from 40 to 50 million.



And Demi learned an even bleaker truth that day, the truth of the axiom that all that’s necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.



“I ran up that avenue in my six-inch high heels, and I started knocking on car window after car window,” Demi says. “I don’t know if you believe this, but nobody would stop to help me. That was probably the most horrific part of the story, was knocking, asking for help. People had their car windows open. They could literally hear what I was saying. They could hear my voice. They could see the terror in my eyes. And nobody would stop to help.”



It was a 19-year-old girl who eventually rolled down her window and took Demi to safety. “She showed me what it meant to truly be willing to be interrupted, to be a part of something that’s maybe bigger than just yourself,” Demi says. That “simple act of obedience” was simply to not ignore a problem—and it encouraged Demi to not remain idle herself. She used her providentially timed platform as Miss South Africa (and, shortly thereafter, as Miss Universe) to launch <a href="https://demitebow.com/unbreakable/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Unbreakable</a>, a campaign effort that has since empowered thousands of women internationally with hands-on self-defense workshops and helped open the blinds on the global human trafficking crisis.



“[God] will never waste pain that’s given to him,” Demi says. “I think that incident is one where [he showed] me, ‘If you’re willing to let me have this pain, I can turn that into purpose.’”



Demi passed on her Miss Universe crown in 2018, a deposition that she describes in her 2024 book, <a href="https://amzn.to/4c3qTg0" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">A Crown That Lasts</a>, as letting go of a false identity and gaining new courage and true purpose: fighting for those who can’t fight for themselves. And yet it shouldn’t require a gun to our head to open our eyes to evil. Nor should it require a terror-stricken knocking on our window for us to offer assistance. Often, it simply requires conviction of the unseen, faith in the pricking of our hearts.



It doesn’t take a <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/rohn-begin-with-gratitude-and-watch-the-miracles-flow-your-way/">miracle</a> to do what you were created to do. But it does take what Tim calls “a courage of conviction”—a movement of faith—to understand what that purpose is. Often, our convictions are curved in on ourselves. What’s called “self-realization” is usually just a nice name for self-indulgence: “I’m competitive, so I’ll devote myself to a game.” “I work hard, so someone else ought to do it.” “I’m resting, so I will not stand up.” Until we stop “following our hearts” and start following the “pricking,” it’s no good pretending our convictions (i.e., our purpose, our success) are anything but the products and servants of our own inert egos.



Tim and Demi had <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/how-to-discover-your-life-purpose-8-steps/">outward-oriented purposes</a> in common long before meeting in 2018, when Tim emailed Demi to invite her little sister Franje to attend a Night to Shine event. Franje was born without a cerebellum (a congenital condition so rare it’s only been reported a dozen or so times) and was disabled her entire life before passing away in 2019 at 13. Demi says Franje has been her biggest motivator, that her life was full of “beautiful God-wink moments” that have more purpose than she’ll ever understand, like that horrific afternoon in Johannesburg. “I met my husband because he invited my sister to prom and not me,” Demi laughs, but it truly was Franje who crystallized their individual purposes into one.



Since their 2020 wedding, the Tebows have stood as a united front in a world often too self-interested to notice those in need. Demi doesn’t wear a crown anymore. Tim doesn’t play professional sports. But now their lives are a joint service in chasing significance over success. Together, they’re advocating for individuals with special needs, providing care and support for orphaned and vulnerable children, serving children with profound medical needs and fighting against human trafficking and child exploitation. Demi continues to spread messages of fostering kindness and living with purpose through writing, having released a children’s book, <a href="https://amzn.to/4l4xFGw" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Princess Paris Finds Her Purpose</a>, in April. Not only have they found courage in one another but in the work they do.



“Our team finds babies in trash cans and dumpsters and cold rivers. It’s hard to go through those moments,” Demi says. “[But] I hope that my heart never goes cold to those things because that allows you to embrace that burden. It allows you to work with urgency and not to just operate on your timeline but to operate on the timeline of the people we get to serve.”&nbsp;



Once we have the courage to listen to the pricking of our hearts (and the faith that it’s there), the pricking does not cease. It is not an itch you can scratch with success. No, once you take courage, the next prickle will be more intense, more significant—and so on for the rest of your life. “To this day, I think I’ve given more effort, energy, intensity, focus, all of that to a game. But I hope I get the chance to change that,” Tim says. “It’s not that the game’s bad. I loved the game. I still love the game. It’s just, if you love the game, but you say you love people—especially [those in darkness]—even more, what would you be willing to do for them?”



This article originally appeared in the <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/subscriptions/">July/August 2025 issue</a> of SUCCESS magazine. Photo by Bianca Pierre

Tim and Demi-Leigh Tebow are redefining success through faith, courage and service—from NFL fame to global anti-trafficking missions.

Tim and Demi-Leigh Tebow are redefining success through faith, courage and service—from NFL fame to global anti-trafficking missions. | SUCCESS

It Doesn’t Take a Miracle, Just Faith

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Tim & Demi-Leigh Tebow on Purpose, Faith & Impact | SUCCESS

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Patrick J. Reardon

Tim and Cindy Dodd of PEMA. Outbound marketing and client acquisition team

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“Successful” doesn’t begin to describe <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/timissocial" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Tim</a> and <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/cindymdodd" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Cindy Dodd</a>, although they are. Definitively so. Their company, <a href="http://pema.io" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">PEMA.io</a>, has a 97% success rate with more than 700 online service providers, who they’ve helped close sales worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in a matter of months. But success—like a sale or a new client—is an end result, and the Dodds are just getting started.



“Ambitious” is a better adjective for PEMA’s founders and their small team. The company’s central value is, in fact, “resolved to win.” It’s the tenet that PEMA was founded upon, lives by and shares with its clients.



In the cold, cold world of outbound marketing, PEMA has broken from the pack saturated with self-proclaimed gurus who offer sales strategies and training courses. Tim and Cindy cut to the chase: acquiring clients rather than simply generating leads.



“Lead generation is pointless if you don’t have a really solid sales process to convert those leads into paying clients,” Cindy says. For example, PEMA can send a hundred really good leads—ideal targets, in fact—to one company, and they don’t close them. “And we can send a hundred leads to another company, and [they’re] their ideal target, and they’re able to close 20 or 30% of them. The difference between the two is a very dialed-in sales process that’s focused on client acquisition versus just lead generation,” Cindy explains.



PEMA is that dialed-in process focused on <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/how-to-make-sales-your-top-priority/">client acquisition</a>. The system generates qualified, vetted sales meetings so you can be on calls and signing up clients within days of installation. It addresses the full sales cycle, from when someone says “yes” to a call till the day they ink the deal.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-outbound-marketing-principles-and-client-acquisition">Outbound marketing principles and client acquisition</h2>



In the last six years, the Dodds have executed more than 100 million reach-outs to customers in every industry from fashion and banking to food and beverage. In that time, they’ve acquired a trove of data on human behavior principles, on what works and what doesn’t. That data is 90% of what PEMA’s outbound process is built on, they say.



“Persuasion techniques come and go. Human behavior principles are unchanging,” Tim says. “Scalability for customers is all about repeating the processes and the principles that are pretty unchanging.” PEMA installs those.



PEMA’s origins date back to when Tim was running a car detailing shop in Kansas City. He became so skilled at SEO that his shop was receiving 20 to 30 calls a day, but when he tried to transition this talent into the B2B space and launch his own SEO agency, he discovered that the move was harder than he thought.







“I was a little disillusioned about the sales cycle, lead generation and client acquisition in the B2B space,” he says. “[Great marketing agencies] might do a great job at getting customers for their customers, but a lot of them have an incredibly difficult challenge to get their own customers.”



Realizing he wasn’t alone in this disillusionment, that other B2B entrepreneurs didn’t understand the industry, Tim started building out a way to address that gap. The result was the foundation of what he and Cindy call PEMA 1.0.



“We call it PEMA 1.0 because Tim grew PEMA really fast,” Cindy says. “He had employees and a team…. He was really good at marketing and sales. But the operations of the company, the <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/how-to-build-a-thriving-culture-at-work/">culture of the team</a>, just weren’t solid. And so, during our honeymoon in 2020, I found out that his company was crashing.”



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-fixing-a-toxic-culture">Fixing a toxic culture</h2>



Although Tim’s ambition had identified a gap in outbound, he had overlooked an internal gap: his company’s culture. He called working at PEMA 1.0 “bad and toxic” and held himself responsible for letting the workplace become so.



“When I first started PEMA 1.0, it grew fast, and I just thought I was, like, ‘The Internet Entrepreneur.’ I thought I had made it. But I did a bad job of building culture,” Tim says. “The business crashed because of my failure as a leader to build the right company and culture and operations.”



That’s where Cindy came in. Her expertise is in people: When she and Tim got married in 2020—in the final months of PEMA 1.0—she was running a successful <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/how-to-become-a-certified-coach/">career coaching</a> business that was helping people land dream jobs, even in an economy crippled by pandemic-induced layoffs. By bringing her talents to the table at PEMA, she and Tim were able to repair the company’s missing link.



“We built it from the grave up,” Cindy says. “I was really good at hiring, recruiting, operations. That was my background. And Tim being really good at marketing and sales, we just had a perfect alignment in our skills. And that is how we got to running what we call PEMA 2.0 together.”



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-pema-2-0">PEMA 2.0</h2>



PEMA 2.0, the PEMA that’s breaking the mold of outbound marketing today, has left everything “toxic and bad” in its dust. Tim and Cindy established a set of company values and only recruit people who are perfectly aligned with those values—particularly those of personal ambition.



“Our mission and this journey that we’re on is to empower each other,” Cindy says. “It’s to empower our team to see them hit their goals. And, ultimately, it’s to win. We talk about that ‘resolve to win.’ We believe it. We don’t know the limits of our potential.”



Tim says that his own professional motivation was transformed along with PEMA. He and Cindy are focused on helping people succeed—financially and professionally—rather than simply “making a bunch of money and being a cool internet entrepreneur.”



“We have teammates in our tribe who are hitting five-year goals in six months. They’re buying rental properties to make passive income. They’re buying houses for their parents,” he says. “What drives me every single day is wanting to see these amazing people… hit their goals. There’s nothing more rewarding.”



Indeed, the Dodds are helping entrepreneurs achieve their goals beyond the PEMA tribe, too, from helping their paying clients secure new clients of their own to providing free marketing strategies on their podcast, <a href="https://www.timandcindydodd.com/">The Takeover with Tim and Cindy</a>, that gives entrepreneurs of every stage the tools to transform ambitions into realities.



This article originally appeared in the <a href="https://store.success.com/by-media/success-magazine-july-august-2024-lilly-singh.html">July/Aug 2024 issue</a> of SUCCESS magazine. Photo by Igor Trifonov/Courtesy of PEMA.

Tim and Cindy Dodd of PEMA share their outbound marketing insights and open up about addressing mistakes and pushing forward. Learn more.

Tim and Cindy Dodd of PEMA share their outbound marketing insights and open up about addressing mistakes and pushing forward. Learn more. | SUCCESS

The Two Halves of Outbound Marketing: Acquiring and Inspiring

PEMA: Ambition in Outbound Marketing | SUCCESS

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Chris Orzechowski does not wear watches. But that didn’t stop him from writing copy for the luxury timepiece brand Filippo Loreti in 2016, a campaign that raked in more than $5 million in just 30 days to become the 18th largest Kickstarter campaign&nbsp; at the time.



His secret: Before writing a word, he bought a watch and became the customer he was trying to connect with. He learned what features to ask about, what benefits to look for and how the purchase made him feel. He understood the journey, the sale and the product—he understood the customer.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-chris-orzechowski-where-the-two-ends-of-email-marketing-meet">Chris Orzechowski: Where the two ends of email marketing meet</h2>



Nowadays, Orzechowski is one of the most sought-after email copywriters in the e-commerce world—but he’s also an <a href="https://theemailcopywriter.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">expert in the back end of email marketing</a>. In less than a decade, he’s helped more than 200 brands earn over $100 million via email campaigns and automated email flows and coached thousands of e-commerce brand owners to scale their businesses with his strategies.



His expertise revolves around connecting the front end of your business (such as your product and copy) with the back end (such as your email lists and automations) to make them work with each other. When the two ends meet, growth can be astronomical.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-the-back-end-revenue-per-subscriber-and-email-automation">The back end: Revenue per subscriber and email automation</h2>



On average, brands are making around $2.80 for every dollar they spend on social media ads. Not a bad turnaround—but compare that to the average $36-to-$40 <a href="https://www.omnisend.com/blog/email-marketing-roi/#:~:text=Before%20you%20start%20out%20measuring,ROI%20you%20should%20be%20targeting." target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">return on investment</a> (ROI) for email marketing and you’ll start to understand why Chris Orzechowski is all-in on the latter.



“The thing that I love about email so much is [it’s] mostly free besides your software fee each month,” he says. “But [also that] it’s instant. You could send an email out, and within five minutes, money’s coming in. Talk about having control over your cash flow, over your business, over your future, over your destiny—that’s pretty cool.”



As rewarding as instant results are, email marketing is about the long game—retaining customers, keeping the iron hot and compounding sales. When you make a front-end sale, that should cue back-end development—whether someone bought something or just indicated interest, there’s work to be done and money to be earned. So while ROI is the big-picture metric, Orzechowski prefers to assess the health of a business’s retention program in monthly revenue per subscriber (RPS).



“Most [money] is not made on the front end. Most of it’s made on the back end,” he adds. “So, if you are neglecting this [metric] and you have a low earnings-per-subscriber, that means you probably have immediate revenue opportunities within the back end of the business through the retention program.”



“<a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/4-ways-to-attract-more-business-opportunities/">Opportunity</a>” is the key word here. A low RPS does not indicate that you have a poor business, product or list of customers. Instead, it tells you that there are holes in the bucket and that you are leaving money on the table.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-chris-orzechowski-s-book-scale-while-you-sleep">Chris Orzechowski’s book: Scale While You Sleep</h2>



Orzechowski has an easy solution to this back-end problem: automated email sequencing. Whether that’s a post-purchase sequence to win a customer back after the churn or an abandoned cart sequence to remind them of their interest, automated email flows are simple integrations that permanently seal the holes you may not even know were dripping.&nbsp;



(Chris Orzechowski’s book <a href="https://amzn.to/3TG2F2D" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Scale While You Sleep</a> delves into his nine favorite automated email sequences that immediately boost RPS and ROI. It’s only 100 pages long and available on Amazon.)



“Build out your abandonment sequences first,” he recommends. “People who have indicated that they’re interested in buying, those are the hottest people and those are the lowest-hanging pieces of fruit.”



The best part of email automations is their longevity and low maintenance—Orzechowski says he built automations for clients back in 2017 that are still producing sales today, seven years after the clients paid him once. Talk about exponential growth in ROI over time.



For any emailers who are worried about “harassing” their customers with too many emails (a common and understandable worry), Orzechowski points out that multimillion-dollar brands are multimillion-dollar brands because they don’t share that concern. They’re not sending one newsletter a month—that’s money on the table. They’re sending several in a week—that’s money in the bank.



“Maybe success leaves clues,” Orzechowski says.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-the-front-end-email-copywriting">The front end: Email copywriting</h2>



Chris Orzechowski’s other zone of genius is, of course, copywriting. Tracking the success of something subjective like writing sounds harder than tracking something objective like click-through rates. But Orzechowski says the two are inextricably linked.



“When it comes to copy, it’s simply a matter of [saying], ‘What numbers and metrics are low that we think we can improve upon?’” he says.



More often than not, the poor metrics you’re measuring are reflections of the buyer’s objections or hesitancies. Good copywriting (coupled with informed sequencing, of course) can address those head-on.



“The funny thing is most copy is just making a big promise and then handling the objections that are standing in the way of the sale,” Orzechowski says. “[Copywriting is] just taking [the] same conversation that happens in a face-to-face, belly-to-belly scenario and putting the words on the paper. That’s where the best copywriters excel at—they can capture the essence of that conversation better than anyone else.”



That’s also his go-to advice for the copywriters he hires, coaches and mentors: It’s all about understanding the buyer’s journey from discovery to hitting the “buy” button. Writing effective copy requires immersing yourself in their specific needs, questions and concerns—like Orzechowski did for Filippo Loreti with record-shattering success.



“People don’t ever do this, and that’s why they struggle. They don’t understand the context of a specific market. They don’t understand the mindset of that market because they aren’t that market,” Orzechowski says. “You have to go out and actually become the customer. You have to be Daniel Day-Lewis. You have to be a method actor here.”



Orcheowski’s latest book, <a href="https://amzn.to/4aitQHQ" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The Moat</a>, walks founders through email, copywriting, customer acquisition offers and everything else businesses need to grow and scale their brand.



This article originally appeared in the <a href="https://store.success.com/by-media/success-magazine-may-june-2024-tony-robbins.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">May/June 2024</a> issue of SUCCESS magazine. Photo courtesy of Chris Orzechowski

Email expert Chris Orzechowski has helped 200-plus brands scale their businesses through email campaigns. Read for some of his trade secrets.

Email expert Chris Orzechowski has helped 200-plus brands scale their businesses through email campaigns. Read for some of his trade secrets. | SUCCESS

Email Copywriter Chris Orzechowski Divulges Some of His Email Marketing Trade Secrets

Chris Orzechowski Shares Email Marketing Trade Secrets

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Brittany Loney PhD founder and director of the Elite Cognition and Human Optimization (ECHO) program, which is part of Core One, and that teaches how to optimize your day according to circadian rhythm and productivity.

What does your average workday look like? Is it spent jumping from one task to the next? Are your only breaks from the computer trips to the coffeepot? Does one day differ from the next? If so, do you think that aiming for a structured, optimized workday is a fantastical waste of time? And if so, did you know there’s an entire field of cognitive science called chronobiology that would disagree with you?



Brittany Loney, Ph.D., is the founder and director of the <a href="https://coreone.com/hello-world/#:~:text=Elite%20Cognition%20and%20Human%20Optimization%20(ECHO)%20Program&amp;text=Integrating%20the%20sciences%20of%20high,Defense%20and%20inter%2Dagency%20partners." target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Elite Cognition and Human Optimization (ECHO) program</a>, a training program designed to put a brain-centered approach on human performance. The ECHO program is part of <a href="https://coreone.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Core One</a>, a consultancy that works with government and military organizations to create productive, mission-ready cultures. Within that scope, ECHO’s mission is to improve cognitive performance with field-tested tactics and research-based strategies.



One of ECHO’s most popular workshops is called Optimal Day. Its purpose is to help people understand their brains’ ebbing and flowing cycles of neuroactivity—what chronobiologists call the circadian rhythm—and use those changing cycles to their advantage depending on the time of day.



“[It’s a] roughly 24-hour rhythm, and it’s based somewhat on the light-dark cycle,” Loney says. “It affects different fluctuations in our body temperature, our hormones, and all of that, and that actually affects what time is best for certain things, because there are actually times associated with optimal performance for mental and physical tasks.”



If your workday starts foggily and ends groggily, Loney’s science-based solution might be for you. Here’s how she formats an <a href="https://www.elite-cognition.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Optimal Day</a>.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-how-to-optimize-your-day-have-an-intentional-morning-nbsp">How to Optimize Your Day: Have an Intentional Morning&nbsp;</h2>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-wake-up-9-a-m">Wake up - 9 a.m.</h3>



Loney says that your morning offers the most “controllable” time you’ll have in any day, which means that’s the time to be the most intentional with your habits. Instead of checking your email or Instagram the moment you wake up, fall into <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/the-simple-secret-to-productive-mornings/">a productive morning routine</a> that helps set the tone for a productive day.



“Think about what that routine looks like for you,” she says. “It could be podcasts; it could be a workout; it could be a quick walk with a pet. I do cold showers in the morning and get a nice little dopamine kick. Then, I listen to a three- to five-minute [reflection] from the Heroic app to get my mind right. Some people listen to a religious reading, like a devotional, that type of thing. But really, it’s getting intentional about your morning.”



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-cognitive-prime-time">Cognitive Prime Time</h2>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-9-a-m-1-p-m">9 a.m. - 1 p.m.</h3>



Your brain becomes fully awake around 9 a.m., the beginning of your “cognitive prime time.” This is when your body temperature and hormones put your brain in the optimal state for focusing on complex, mental work—or, what Loney calls “deep work”—such as writing, analyzing or strategizing. This four-hour period consists of a recurring ultradian rhythm, which is like a 90-minute mental sprint followed by a five- to 20-minute mental recovery. Loney recommends developing a habit she calls “deep work sprints” that can help you make the most of the first half of your workday.



“What most people do is they try to work through the entire cognitive prime time, like four hours straight,” she says. “Well, what happens is your brain cannot maintain that depth of focus for that long unless you’ve trained it over many, many years to be able to do that. And the cap for deep work each day is about four hours. So we recommend every 90 minutes to <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/3-ways-to-make-a-breath-break-part-of-your-daily-routine/">take some sort of break</a>.”



What you do during this break is critical. If you’re browsing social media or checking emails, that’s not mental recovery—that’s like trying to rest your muscles by doing pushups in between bench presses. Loney suggests physical activities, such as a short walk around the office or a few body weight workouts, to give your brain (and eyes) a break while also preparing your mind for the next 90-minute deep work sprint.



Achieving optimal productivity during your deep work sprints depends on “not just doing things the right way, but doing the right things,” Loney says. She recommends two strategies:



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-the-pareto-principle">The Pareto Principle</h3>



Also known as the 80/20 rule, <a href="https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/paretoprinciple.asp" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">the Pareto Principle</a> states that 80% of outcomes come from 20% of causes. In terms of productivity, this means 20% of your efforts produce 80% of your results. Loney encourages people to leverage that statistic to prioritize tasks and distribute their mental energy evenly: “You might have… 20 items on your to-do list,” she says. “Pick the top 20% of those. If it’s 20, you’d have five. Then, out of that success list of five, you’re gonna then pick the top 20% of the five, which means you’re just picking one item—that is your one most important thing for the day, and that should be done during cognitive prime time.”



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-mission-viable-product">Mission Viable Product</h3>



The ECHO program adapted the <a href="https://theleanstartup.com/principles" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Lean Startup’s principle</a> of attaining the “minimum viable product” into what Loney calls the “mission viable product.” To illustrate this principle at work, she uses a delicious example: If you’re tasked with making a doughnut, spend your cognitive prime time on making it edible. An edible doughnut “meets mission.” Although a doughnut with sprinkles might look better, Loney says to add them later in the day since sprinkling is a less complex process—and 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. is all about getting the hard work done. “Get [your product] to MVP status and then move on,” she says, “because the conveyor belt is going.”



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-cognitive-dip">Cognitive Dip</h2>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-1-p-m-3-p-m">1 p.m. - 3 p.m.</h3>



After a morning of hard work, your circadian rhythm slips into the “post-lunch crash,” or what Loney calls the “cognitive dip.” Biologically speaking, this is when your body temperature starts dropping rapidly and puts you in a “sleep gate”—a window of time when your body wants to go to sleep. Since most companies don’t approve of siestas or desk naps, Loney recommends filling these two hours with menial tasks, such as scheduled status meetings, filling out timesheets or archiving old files. Better yet, if possible, take a longer midday break. Loney says she’s worked with top military leaders who have integrated these breaks into their schedules to great success.



“Often, people will say they don’t have time, and I always tell them if some of the top military leaders in our nation have time, [then] it’s just about priorities and believing it works,” she says. The break doesn’t have to be long. Just getting five to 15 minutes of sunlight between 1-3 p.m. can have a profound impact on your entire day, Loney says, since sunlight will positively adjust your circadian rhythm and maybe even help you sleep better that night.



“Also during this time, <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/how-to-create-an-exercise-routine-that-doesnt-suck/">try to exercise or move</a>,” Loney says. “A brisk walk outside, moderate cardio [for] 10 to 20 minutes if you have it. Just get that body moving and the blood flowing because that will start to mitigate the depth of that 1 to 3 p.m. dip and make you more productive in the afternoon hours.”



For a true Optimal Day, this should also be your last window for coffee. Loney says that your body needs plenty of time to digest caffeine, and drinking coffee or other energy drinks after 3 p.m. can delay your ability to fall asleep that night.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-reboot">Reboot</h2>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-3-p-m-10-p-m">3 p.m. - 10 p.m.</h3>



The last part of your circadian rhythm before bed is called the wake maintenance zone, or as it’s branded in the Optimal Day format, “the reboot.” From 3-10 p.m. your body temperature is rising to the highest point it will be during the day.



“So during this time, what we’re good at mentally is alertness, vigilance, attention to detail and information review,” Loney says. “You don’t have to go do the simple tasks like you do during that 1 to 3 p.m., but they shouldn’t be your most complex tasks, because you’re probably also running into decision fatigue and cognitive fatigue from the day as a whole anyway.”



Loney recommends taking breaks more often in the afternoon than in the morning. While your morning brain works optimally with 90-minute sprints, your brain in the afternoon will work better with 60-minute sprints.



And as the workday winds down, whether at 5 p.m. or later, Loney emphasizes the importance of end-of-day rituals, which demarcate your work life as separate from home life while also giving your brain some much-needed relief after a day of deep work. Her top suggestions:



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-establish-a-work-to-home-transition">Establish a work-to-home transition:</h2>



Your workday needs a hard stop—your brain can’t optimize for home or family life if it’s still in work mode. This habit might be silencing phone notifications on your work email, shutting the door to your home office or listening to a meditative podcast or audiobook on your commute home.



<ul>
<li>Watch the sunset: Loney says that, from an evolutionary standpoint, the setting sun signals your brain that it’s almost time to sleep.</li>
</ul>



<ul>
<li>Avoid caffeine and alcohol: “<a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/business-benefits-of-quitting-drinking/">Even one drink</a> within a few hours of going to sleep will affect your ability to enter deep sleep,” Loney says.</li>
</ul>



<ul>
<li>Have a “digital sunset”: Loney recommends putting your phone or other screens away at least 30 minutes before you go to bed. This helps your mind relax and focus on sleep preparation instead of stressing over tomorrow’s to-do list.</li>
</ul>



Of course, ECHO’s Optimal Day program is simply a systematic guideline. Life isn’t always optimal, so be prepared for unknown factors to disrupt your day—just remember that even a bad day can be optimized, and there’s always another day tomorrow.



“[My day is] not always optimal, but I can always make it a little bit better than just letting the world determine what’s going to happen,” Loney says. “I think that’s the key: Take control of what you can. World will happen. Don’t get mad. Just plan what you can around that. And don’t just say it’s got to be all or nothing.”&nbsp;



This article originally appeared in the <a href="https://store.success.com/by-media/success-magazine-nov-dec-2023-tamron-hall.html">November/December issue</a> of SUCCESS Magazine. Photo courtesy of Brittany Loney, Ph.D.

Did you know there’s a connection between your circadian rhythm and productivity? Read more to learn how to optimize your day naturally.

Did you know there’s a connection between your circadian rhythm and productivity? Read more to learn how to optimize your day naturally. | SUCCESS

The Cognitive Scientist’s Handbook to Working an Optimal Day

How to Optimize Your Day: Circadian Rhythm and Productivity | SUCCESS

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Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia sitting on a doorstep smiling at the camera

Last year, Airbnb guests <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/1193532/airbnb-nights-experiences-booked-worldwide/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">booked nearly 400 million accommodations</a> for vacations, bachelor(ette) parties, temporary housing and other stays. There are <a href="https://news.airbnb.com/airbnb-q4-2022-and-full-year-financial-results/#:~:text=All%20regions%20saw%20significant%20growth,of%20the%20year%2C%20excluding%20China" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">some 6.6 million rental spaces</a> listed on the platform by an online community of over 4 million Airbnb hosts around the world. That’s a lot of spare living space, and a convenient side hustle—the average Airbnb host <a href="https://news.airbnb.com/hosts-in-the-us-earned-22-billion-in-supplemental-income-last-year/#:~:text=The%20typical%20Host%20in%20the,over%20the%20next%2012%20months" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">earned around $14,000</a> in supplemental income in 2022.



“One of the things I love so much about Airbnb is economically empowering people and how much that can do for people in their lives,” says Joe Gebbia, the co-founder of Airbnb, regarding the company's customers. “I’ve always been interested in finding the next novel way to do that.”



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-after-airbnb">After Airbnb</h2>



Incidentally, that “next novel way” is already up and running. In 2022, Gebbia took a seed he’d been cultivating at Airbnb and launched it as an independent startup called Samara. Its first product, simply called Backyard, is a made-to-order studio or one-bedroom accessory dwelling unit (ADU) that homeowners can configure online, like a Tesla. Once you’ve made your design choices, Samara will survey your property, arrange the necessary construction permits, ship the unit to your backyard and install it for you—all within a matter of months.



Besides providing homeowners with a sleek in-law suite or home office, ADUs like Backyard also increase property values and can be a source of rental income. Plus, because Backyard powers itself with integrated solar panels, it runs net-zero. Gebbia says Backyard is actually three times as energy efficient as a normal structure of the same size, since any extra energy it produces gets channeled back to the main house.



Backyard is only available in California right now, but Gebbia says expansion to other U.S. states is in the works. After all, extension is the name of Samara’s game.



“Samara is the name of the seed that falls from a tree and comes down like a helicopter,” he says. “It’s a seed with a wing attached to it, which allows it to travel farther from the tree to ensure its survival and success. And we were inspired [to] plant the seeds within Airbnb and now outside Airbnb.”



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-making-joe-gebbia">Making Joe Gebbia</h2>



If Airbnb produced Samara’s seed and Gebbia produced Airbnb, what tree produced him? In analyzing the roots of an entrepreneur worth over $8 billion, whose line of work is propagating communities, one might expect Gebbia’s cultural upbringing to be something out of the ordinary. As it turns out, his childhood was fairly simple.



“It was the middle of the middle class,” he says. “You know, there was nothing fancy or special about our lifestyle. Just loving parents and a loving sister.”



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-growing-grit">Growing grit</h3>



Gebbia grew up during the 1980s in Lawrenceville, Georgia, a town in Atlantan suburbia where the highlight of his summers was watching his dad run in the annual Peachtree Road Race, the world’s largest 10K. The Georgia peach didn’t fall far from the tree—as a teenager, Gebbia discovered his own love of running cross country at Brookwood High School. As an exhausting communal sport in which individual success and the success of the team are mutually dependent, cross country taught Gebbia an important lesson he’s since applied in his adult life.



“It required self-determination at a level unlike anything else,” he says. “The willpower to keep running when your body wants to quit, because it’s sore, it’s achy, it’s tired, it’s out of breath—to find <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/4-ways-to-build-grit-when-you-need-it-most/">the willpower to push through</a> all the reasons to quit. I later would come to understand [this] is an incredible life skill for entrepreneurship. If I crossed the finish line and I could still walk, you knew that was a bad race. I still had energy I could have used to run a faster time.”



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-design-as-a-means-to-solve-problems">Design as a means to solve problems</h3>



A more prominent variable in Gebbia’s growth, however, was art. Gifted with an eye for design, Gebbia credits his teachers for fanning his natural creative flames. At Brookwood, his art teachers regularly modified the curriculum to make classes more challenging for him. It was another lesson in determination.



“Art consumed most of my high school,” he says. “I filled up my semester with art courses.” Brookwood had a “really robust art department” that included an array of disciplines, ranging from drawing and painting to sculpture and graphic design. “And I took all of them,” Gebbia says. “And the teachers were always supportive of me.”



Gebbia says that though his childhood was nothing special, his community made it so. Without the creative motivation he received from his Brookwood teachers, he never would have attended the Rhode Island School of Design, where he encountered even more inspiration from a simple source—this time in the form of a photograph he found in one of his design textbooks. The picture was of a plywood chair designed in 1954 by Charles and Ray Eames, a couple synonymous with 20th-century industrial design.



Industrial design is, as Gebbia defines it, “anything made by man that’s not art or architecture.” It’s the clothes we wear, the phones we talk on, the lights we see with and the cars we drive. It’s the application of an artistic mind in a tactile, at-scale world.



“I really fell in love with this idea that you can channel creativity in other ways than the fine arts,” he says—“that you could solve problems through design and reach a lot of people with your imagination and your creativity… to use design for good, to go solve problems in the world, to make life better for people and for the planet.”



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-airbnb-responds-to-crises">Airbnb responds to crises</h2>



The commercial facet of Airbnb and Samara is about convenient accommodations. And although Airbnb has dominated the short-term rental market, some say it has also contributed to local housing crises in cities and countries throughout the world. But Gebbia is optimistic that Samara will be a salve to communities with housing shortages—he has paid careful attention to the shifts in how people value their homes post-COVID, especially with the work-from-home migration and the increase in multigenerational housing. He anticipates the growth of ADUs (which are unnoticeable in backyards) will not only allow owners to benefit from boosts in rental income and property value, but provide lower cost options for residents without adversely affecting the visual character of a neighborhood.



Accommodating inconveniences is a whole other story. For more than a decade, Airbnb’s online community of hosts has responded to crises around the world by opening their doors rent-free. Gebbia reports that during various disasters, conflicts and tragedies, Airbnb hosts have housed more than 250,000 people in more than 100 countries.



“If there’s people fleeing a wildfire or have to evacuate [due to] a hurricane, or refugees seeking asylum in other countries, our hosts on Airbnb show up,” he says. “[They] offer what’s needed most, which is a safe, comfortable place to stay.”



Building on his userbase’s goodwill to expand its impact, Gebbia made a personal contribution of $5 million in 2020 to launch The Refugee Fund for Airbnb.org, an independent nonprofit with a distinct mission from its dot-com counterpart. By using the C2C platform and community as its foundation, Airbnb.org has fostered a thriving coalition of partner nonprofits—and individual Airbnb hosts around the world—focused on providing shelter to those without.



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-asylum-for-evacuees">Asylum for evacuees</h3>



Just a few months after Airbnb.org was established in December 2020, evacuees started arriving in the U.S. from Afghanistan and had nowhere to go (<a href="https://www.dhs.gov/news/2022/09/27/operation-allies-welcome-announces-departure-all-afghan-nationals-national" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">the Department of Homeland Security</a> estimates 88,500 Afghan nationals had arrived in the U.S. as of September 2022). Airbnb.org and Airbnb hosts announced they would provide short-term accommodations for 20,000 Afghan refugees, a goal they accomplished in six months. When war broke out in Europe, Airbnb.org set a goal to house 100,000 Ukrainians displaced from their homeland. Again, it only took six months to exceed the goal.



“We built the largest accommodation platform in the world, and we get to leverage that and make available those hosts’ homes in times of need, and repurpose that platform for good,” Gebbia says. “It’s been incredible to see what happens when you make it easy for people to be generous, how truly generous they are.”



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-giving-back">Giving back</h2>



Although Gebbia stepped down from his day-to-day role at Airbnb in July 2022 to focus on developing other projects, he’s remained at the helm of Airbnb.org as its chairman. Indeed, the organization would be hard-pressed to find someone who fits the seat better—his “nothing-fancy” upbringing molded him that way.



“I grew up in a family and in a community where giving back was just how things worked,” he says.



That simple, cultural principle has followed Gebbia to this day. As a matter of fact, he’s among the youngest members to join the Giving Pledge, a campaign founded by Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates and Warren Buffet that invites billionaires to commit more than half of their wealth toward philanthropic pursuits. (<a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/godaddy-founder-bob-parsons-helps-others-find-success/">GoDaddy founder Bob Parsons</a> has also joined the Giving Pledge.)



When Gebbia thinks about philanthropy, he thinks about his roots. Gebbia’s teachers and coaches at Brookwood motivated him to succeed, and in his success he returned the favor via a $700,000 gift to Brookwood’s arts and athletics programs. At the Brookwood Class of 2022’s graduation ceremony, Gebbia delivered the commencement speech and gifted all 890 graduating seniors with 22 shares of Airbnb stock. He’s also on the board of trustees at Rhode Island School of Design, where he’s pledged $300,000 toward an endowed fund to make the education that inspired him more accessible for creative minds in need of financial assistance.



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-have-a-home-lend-a-home">Have a home, lend a home</h3>



Community is, if nothing else, a place to call home. As someone who attributes his success to the time and interest his community invested in him, Gebbia considers home a worthy investment, too.



“Home is fundamental. If you’ve got one, you know, I feel like you’ve got a responsibility to help those that don’t,” he says. “And I see that every day on Airbnb.org. If you want to talk about community helping each other, it’s most visible on Airbnb.org… [when] you can enable those with homes in practically every country on the planet to provide shelters to those who’ve lost theirs… that’s a pretty cool way to channel your creativity.”



This article originally appeared in the July/August 2023 <a href="https://store.success.com/by-media/success-magazine-july-august-2023-chance-the-rapper.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">issue of SUCCESS magazine</a>. Photo courtesy of Samara.&nbsp;

Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia dishes on the ways Airbnb empowers homeowners and gives back by sheltering evacuees in times of crisis.

Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia dishes on the ways Airbnb empowers homeowners and gives back by sheltering evacuees in times of crisis. | SUCCESS

Airbnb Co-Founder Joe Gebbia Talks About the Art of Making Accommodations

Airbnb Co-Founder Joe Gebbia On Empowering Your Community | SUCCESS

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The home team is in vivid yellow—except for the pitcher, whose pants are around his ankles. The batter is trying to ignore the Fruit of the Loom underpants on the mound, but the infielder krumping at second base is no less intimidating. The packed house at Grayson Stadium in Savannah, Georgia, has no idea what will happen next.



The players aren’t the only ones off-kilter here (though some of them are wearing kilts). The team’s cheerleading squad, the Man-Nanas, is composed of men with dad bods. The dance troupe, the Banana Nanas, is designed for grooving grandmas over the age of 65. The umpire’s third strike call is to spontaneously start flossing, dougie-ing or powering down like a robot. The whole ballpark smells like a banana cream soda.



I’d say this is a normal evening of <a href="https://thesavannahbananas.com/bananaball/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Banana Ball</a>, but “normal” is a risky word to use around the Savannah Bananas.



The head of the bunch is Jesse Cole. He’s the club’s owner and founder, but you won’t find him sitting in the owner’s suite. As a matter of fact, Cole’s rarely sitting at all. He’s boogying in the dugout and belting out Bon Jovi with fans in the bleachers, all while reliably besuited in his iconic yellow tuxedo. His ringmaster antics have earned him the nickname “the P. T. Barnum of Baseball,” a moniker that fits insofar as Cole is both a master entertainer and a shrewd businessman. The Savannah Bananas’ axiom? “Fans first. Entertain always.”



<div class="wp-block-uagb-image uagb-block-d99bc63b wp-block-uagb-image--layout-default wp-block-uagb-image--effect-static wp-block-uagb-image--align-none"><figure class="wp-block-uagb-image__figure"><img srcset="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/savannah-bananas-stilts-pitcher-1024x682.jpg " sizes="(max-width: 480px) 150px" src="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/savannah-bananas-stilts-pitcher-1024x682.jpg" alt="The Bananas pitcher on stilts" class="uag-image-70853" width="1024" height="682" title="" loading="lazy"/><figcaption class="uagb-image-caption">Photo courtesy of Savannah Bananas</figcaption></figure></div>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-putting-savannah-bananas-fans-first">Putting Savannah Bananas fans first</h2>



Those four words have been the Bananas’ guiding star since 2016. Cole’s strategy for living out the “fans first” mission is to assess what’s normal in baseball and do the opposite. Literally.



Normal stadiums are plastered with advertisements, so <a href="https://www.wtoc.com/2020/02/25/bananas-grayson-stadium-going-ad-free/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Grayson Stadium has zero</a>. At normal ballparks, tickets and concessions are separate purchases. <a href="https://thesavannahbananas.com/savannahgames/#1660663518818-0a8d5565-fc1d" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">At Grayson Stadium</a>, food and drink comes with your $25 open-seating ticket. And that’s a flat price, because the Bananas cover all the fans’ taxes on tickets, merchandise and convenience fees.



“It’s astronomical, the money we leave on the table,” Cole says. “I think you can look at any sports team or any business [and ask,] ‘Where is the money coming from?’ and then that’s who the organization works for; 99% of our revenue comes directly from our fans.”



Naturally, the Bananas’ measurement of success is drastically unlike an orthodox sports team’s. The key performance indicator isn’t a healthy win-loss ratio or a glimmering trophy cabinet—it’s whether the fans come, <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/client-retention-strategies/">stay and come back</a>. And between an ongoing streak of sold-out home games since 2017, a waitlist of around half a million fans and over 5 million more <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@thesavbananas?lang=en" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">TikTok followers</a> than the Yankees, it’s obvious the world has gone Bananas—and that’s all the Bananas have ever wanted.



“I don’t want to be a billion-dollar company. I want to be a billion-fan company,” Cole says. “If you create a billion fans, everything else will take care of itself.”



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-keeping-the-faith-when-things-look-grim">Keeping the faith when things look grim&nbsp;</h3>



To put fans first, first you need fans. A truism, sure, but this was the valley of death Jesse Cole and his wife Emily had to cross when they bought a dinky expansion team in Savannah, Georgia, eight years ago. When the Coles arrived at their new stadium in October 2015, it was completely deserted, the phone and internet lines cut, the stadium stripped bare. Although the couple was optimistic they could break the trend, three months of truly meager ticket sales (according to podcast episodes featuring Cole, they only sold two tickets) seemed to prove their investment was dead on arrival.



“On Jan. 15, specifically on Friday at 4:45 p.m., I got a phone call that we’d overdrafted our account and the team was out of money,” Cole says. “So, we sold our house. We emptied out our savings account. We got a dump down in Savannah.”



The Coles’ Savannah-or-bust venture was quickly trending toward the latter. Their initial energy was waning from sleepless nights on a cheap air mattress. They budgeted $30 per week for groceries, which comes out to spending around $1 per meal, per person—assuming you skip breakfast.



“We had nothing,” Cole says. “<a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/if-it-doesnt-suck-its-not-worth-doing/">But we still believed</a> in what we were doing.”



<div class="wp-block-uagb-image uagb-block-626ea469 wp-block-uagb-image--layout-default wp-block-uagb-image--effect-static wp-block-uagb-image--align-none"><figure class="wp-block-uagb-image__figure"><img srcset="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/savannah-bananas-team-antics-1024x682.jpg " sizes="(max-width: 480px) 150px" src="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/savannah-bananas-team-antics-1024x682.jpg" alt="Savannah Bananas team horsing around on the field" class="uag-image-70856" width="1024" height="682" title="" loading="lazy"/><figcaption class="uagb-image-caption">Photo courtesy of Savannah Bananas</figcaption></figure></div>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-savannah-bananas-on-field-antics">Savannah Bananas’ on-field antics</h2>



With nothing left to lose, Cole threw caution to the wind. The team was reskinned and became the Savannah Bananas. Their first game was the debut of the Banana Nanas (the senior citizen dance team), a breakdancing first-base coach and the official Banana Baby. Cole showed up dressed like a yellow Mad Hatter.



The game sold out.



“We actually made six errors. We played terrible,” Cole says. “But we started selling out every game [after that].”



And they haven’t looked back since. The 2016 season even saw the Savannah Bananas crowned “2016 [Coastal Plain League] Organization of the Year.” But despite the success, Cole still noticed fans leaving games early. By 2017, even he was bored during the game.



“So I looked at every single thing in baseball that was too long, too slow, too boring and said, <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/changing-the-world-why-true-innovators-need-upheaval-with-roger-martin/">‘Could we do the opposite</a>?’” Cole says.&nbsp;



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-playing-by-new-rules">Playing by new rules</h3>



The first game of Banana Ball was an exhibition game played in 2018 in just 99 minutes. It’s a recognizable form of baseball (for now), but it has evolved to accelerate the game, involve the fans and inspire as much drama as possible. For instance, there’s a strict two-hour time limit. Hitters aren’t allowed to step out of the box on penalty of strike, and bunting is prohibited on penalty of ejection. If a fan catches a foul ball, that’s an out. In the event of a tie after two hours, a “showdown tiebreaker” begins.



Perhaps the most radical change of Banana Ball is that walks have been replaced with sprints. On ball four, the runner breaks into a mad dash around the bases while the defense launches into a rapid-fire game of catch. All defensive players are required to touch the ball before they can try to tag the runner. If it’s timed just right, they’ll punch him out by the time he reaches second.



If you’re an old-school baseball fan, this might all sound silly to you. But the Bananas and their fanbase are serious about the new take on an old sport. In August 2022, the Savannah Bananas announced they would be leaving the Coastal Plain League and exclusively playing Banana Ball from now on.



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-creating-a-nemesis-for-the-savannah-bananas">Creating a nemesis for the Savannah Bananas</h3>



Banana Ball’s breakneck pace and the players’ in-game hijinks have drawn comparisons to the legacy of the Harlem Globetrotters. Indeed, just like the Globetrotters concocted the Washington Generals to be a convenient nemesis, the Bananas have created the Party Animals, who wear sleeveless jerseys and whose logo is (of course) a monkey wearing a banana peel on its head like a hat.



But while Globetrotters-Generals games were scripted, the Bananas-Party Animals rivalry preserves authentic athletic competition. The shenanigans are rehearsed but the game itself isn’t predetermined, which only adds an unknown to the organized chaos of it all. Teams still play to win—this season, in fact, the Bananas are scheduled to play 22 games of Banana Ball against external opponents.



“I am obsessed with how to bring in the competitiveness and the stakes to what we’re doing,” Cole says. “Banana Ball is a game for the 21st century, a game that’s fast, that’s highlight-driven…. [There are] big stakes for Banana Ball as we build the legitimacy of the game in addition to the Bananas show.”



<div class="wp-block-uagb-image uagb-block-4ac99a64 wp-block-uagb-image--layout-default wp-block-uagb-image--effect-static wp-block-uagb-image--align-none"><figure class="wp-block-uagb-image__figure"><img srcset="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/savannah-bananas-party-animals-1024x683.jpg ,https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/savannah-bananas-party-animals-1024x683.jpg 780w" sizes="(max-width: 480px) 150px" src="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/savannah-bananas-party-animals-1024x683.jpg" alt="A Party Animals player holding a flaming bat" class="uag-image-70855" width="1024" height="683" title="" loading="lazy"/><figcaption class="uagb-image-caption">Photo courtesy of Savannah Bananas</figcaption></figure></div>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-refusing-to-play-it-safe">Refusing to play it safe</h3>



Of course, it’s natural for the Bananas to slip on their own peels. When asked about stunts that have failed, Cole just laughs.



“I get asked that question in probably every interview,” he says. “My mind doesn’t work like that. I’m just so focused on the next at-bat that I don’t process or think about [failure] too much, because then it will keep you from trying new things.”



You can probably imagine the endings to stories about an all-day beer festival, a bagpiper halftime show or something called “the Living Piñata.” But as Cole says, if you’re not getting criticized, you’re playing it too safe. And with the team’s world tour schedule expanding each year, fresh ideas are what keep the Bananas from getting overripe.



“I believe we work our idea muscle [more than] any sports and entertainment brand there is,” Cole says. “Every night we bring 10 to 15 things to the field that we’ve never done in front of a live crowd.”



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-living-up-to-the-savannah-bananas-axiom-fans-first-entertain-always">Living up to the Savannah Bananas’ axiom: ‘Fans first. Entertain always.’</h3>



He adds that remaining new is a way of life for the Bananas, which can be translated to mean, “by staying new, we’re putting fans first.” Every night, fans see something they’ve never seen before. The mission is that every fan can experience an “I-was-there-when” moment. When you cultivate a culture where nothing can be predicted except a good time, the risk of normalcy (or as Cole puts it, boredom) disappears.



The fans are eating up the new national pastime. Women call in the day they find out they’re pregnant, just to enter their baby on the waitlist to be the Banana Baby. Even major league teams are taking notice, inviting the Bananas to grace their stadiums.



And while Cole is fanatic about the present-day fanbase, his eyes are still peeled for that billionth fan.



“We’re just in the first inning.”



This article originally appeared in the May/June 2023 <a href="https://store.success.com/by-media/success-magazine-may-june-2023-jairek-robbins.html">issue of SUCCESS magazine</a>. Photo by ©Malcolm Tully.

Learn how Jesse Cole and the Savannah Bananas' unique twist on baseball took the team from barely selling tickets to years of sold-out games.

Learn how Jesse Cole and the Savannah Bananas' unique twist on baseball took the team from barely selling tickets to years of sold-out games. | SUCCESS

The Savannah Bananas Created Their Own Version of Baseball by Putting Fans First

Savannah Bananas: Putting a New Spin on Baseball | SUCCESS

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"Children in Africa are starving," goes the dinner-table proverb. It’s a saying parents invented to beguile picky children into eating their crusts or preventing too many leftovers from cluttering up the refrigerator. Reflect on this cavalier expression a bit longer, though, and you’ll find it also flings the problems of hunger and poverty across international waters to a foreign continent that may as well be imaginary to the average American mind. In reality, “children a few miles away are starving” too, but there’s a reason Americans don’t use that phrase. It’s a problem that’s too close to home, so it’s not a conversation we like to have.



Idiom dissection wasn’t how I had planned to begin this story before my phone interview with Daron Babcock. I had intended to ask him about how he started <a href="https://bontonfarms.org/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Bonton Farms</a>, an urban farm he founded in a South Dallas food desert more than a decade ago after abandoning a cozy corporate job and six-figure salary. 



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I had intended to ask him about Bonton, a neighborhood where men live 11.7 years fewer than the average male lifespan in the county—a county with more incarcerated residents than any other ZIP code in Texas.



I had intended on asking him how many goats lived on his farm.



But as we start talking, Babcock calmly makes it clear he doesn’t want my story to be about how he started Bonton Farms. Nor should it be about the crime, drug use and mortality rates in Bonton today. He tells me people have been talking about the symptoms of a problem for far too long, and in doing so they wind up hitting the bullseye of the wrong target.



“The reason these problems persist in a world where they shouldn’t,” Babcock says, “is because we’re not having the right conversations.”



So, we had the right one.



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A food desert is an urban community whose residents need to travel a mile or more to get to a grocery store. It’s an <a href="https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2011/05/03/interactive-web-tool-maps-food-deserts-provides-key-data" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">official USDA designation</a> that encompasses about 10% of the U.S. census tracts and about 13.5 million Americans. Without access to fresh food, families in food deserts “grocery shop” at variety stores, liquor stores and fast-food chains. Children rely on the free school lunches and often go hungry on weekends.



Unlike literal deserts, however, they don’t form naturally.



Before it became Bonton the food desert, for instance, the neighborhood was a post-emancipation African American settlement. Babcock tells me that Bonton, like many segregated communities at the time, actually thrived until the 1940s because of the community-driven approach its residents embraced to survive. But as the racially segregated neighborhood grew, housing became scarce and residents began moving nearer to white neighborhoods. The overflow resulted in unofficial campaigns of terror bombings—Bonton was originally called “Bomb Town”—and official campaigns for public housing and redlining, an initiative backed by then-Dallas Mayor Wallace Savage “to keep them from overflowing into white areas.”



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Since then, the prevailing narrative around bottlenecked communities such as Bonton has been that they are unsafe. The expectation is that if a grocery store were to be opened, it would just be robbed. So businesses redirect to comfier areas and attention redirects to comfier topics. We see the symptoms on the surface, <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/how-to-get-comfortable-being-uncomfortable/">so we look away</a>—and for generations, communities such as Bonton are left without adequate resources.



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When humans suffer, they want others to suffer along with them. That’s an axiom Babcock has experienced all too well: In Bonton, he sees kids beaten up by their peers for getting good grades. In the mirror, he sees a man who started self-medicating with cocaine and alcohol after losing his wife to cancer. He’s more than 20 years sober now, but it took a support system of family and friends to sever the cycle that started so long ago.



“I’m here today because when I couldn’t carry myself, they picked me up and carried me,” Babcock says.



Babcock visited Bonton for the first time in 2011. His friend who worked in prison ministry had invited him to join an outreach meeting for some men who had returned to Bonton after years of incarceration.



“What I saw in them was me,” Babcock says: “a hopeless person that’s still breathing but dead. But the thing they didn’t have was the people to pick them up and carry them.”



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Although he was face to face with people just like himself—people who needed people—nothing was changing in Bonton despite the service programs he was part of every Saturday. He asked himself why he was there at all if he wasn’t <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/embrace-what-makes-you-different/">making a difference</a>, and the only answer he found was that it was making him feel better about himself.



Asking yourself an honest question like “Why am I here?” brings you to a place where you can decide whether self-gratification is enough of a reward. For Babcock, it wasn’t. So in 2012, he sold his house in Frisco (a suburb of Dallas), quit his job of eight years, and moved to one of the poorest areas in Dallas.



“It was really hard because everything I had built my life on, I had to let go of,” he says. “But in hindsight I didn’t let go of anything. I was rescued from the things that would have let me live shallowly. I was blessed with the gift of things that could never be taken away.”



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Before Bonton Farms was a fully flourishing farm, it was a modest little vegetable garden Babcock had planted in a vacant lot next to his new house. One day, back in 2012, his friend was carrying a bag of vegetables he had harvested from Babcock’s garden across Bonton. He passed someone who saw the food and offered $3 for it. The friend took the deal, and the veggies traded hands. It would prove a providential sale.



A few weeks earlier, a woman had bought heroin from the liquor store across the street and subsequently overdosed and died. Code enforcement officers, who were in the middle of shutting the store down, saw Babcock’s friend selling $3 worth of fresh, homegrown produce—an illegal transaction for an unlicensed garden, per a Dallas ordinance.



“Mind you, we were standing maybe 10 feet from where this lady died from buying dope in a licensed business,” Babcock says, “and that business had been there a long time doing that. And then we’re getting threatened with a ticket for selling vegetables? I was so incensed that I went to City Hall to pick a fight.”



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Instead of a fight, Babcock found people who were willing and even eager to do something about a problem they knew needed to be fixed. In fact, Babcock says he can’t imagine a more supportive city and county—a seismic shift from the Dallas legislation of 75 years ago. After a few weeks meeting with different advocates in City Hall, Babcock wound up with a signed agreement to start an “illegal” farm on a 1.25-acre plot of land in Bonton. The agreement was to be a trial run that would test whether urban agriculture in Dallas could help alleviate the food desert crisis and its symptoms. The agreement was the genesis of Bonton Farms.



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Bonton Farms is not a community garden. Nor is it welfare or a charity. It was intentionally designed to generate revenue, which in turn generates jobs and a thriving economy. Babcock explains how “serving” an underserved community is an unsustainable approach to fomenting real change.



“Showing up to ‘serve’ an underprivileged community means that I’m above you and you need me,” he says. “You don’t mean it that way. But that’s what it is. So what we need to do is show up to be present.”



This idea of presence is an integral part of Babcock’s grassroots strategy to end food deserts. Metaphorically, it’s Babcock himself moving to Bonton to be present in a suffering community and share its load. More tactically, it’s Bonton Farms.



Solving the food desert crisis in America is not as simple as building more brick-and-mortar stores. That would require (based on the USDA’s definition of a food desert) constructing a new supermarket in every square mile of every major city without one. Babcock’s solution is more realistic and more sustainable.



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From an economist’s perspective, areas like Bonton are costly. They require high levels of service, are financially unsustainable and don’t contribute to the city’s wealth. As long as they aren’t bringing anything to the table, Babcock says, they remain voiceless. So what can they bring to the table to be seen and heard, rather than merely tolerated?



The Bonton Farms approach: Transform them into the breadbasket of our cities. Today, fruits and vegetables in the U.S. travel on average 1,500 miles before we buy them in grocery stores. So why not grow them in local urban areas that are otherwise considered valueless? That’s sustainable on economic, environmental and social levels.



And that’s exactly what Bonton Farms is trying to prove. The farm has paid employees, not volunteers. The food they produce is sold to both Bonton residents and local Dallas restaurants. The profits help fertilize the community in other ways, such as with rent-to-own programs to help residents find stable housing, build credit and keep jobs. They are also working to establish a charter school in town.



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In socioeconomic terms, the urban farm model is providing Bonton with the opportunity to be present in Dallas as a cohesive, self-sustainable community that can finally contribute to (and be integrated with) a thriving metroplex. But Babcock is not creating this opportunity alone.



“The reason Bonton Farms works so well is because it’s led by the community,” says Babcock. “We aren’t here coming up with ideas to fix people or to fix their community. They have the ideas.”



But in most cases, communities such as Bonton don’t have the power, the influence or the voice to bring those ideas to life on their own. Seeds can’t grow without being watered; voices can’t be heard without having real conversations.



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“Turns out that we’re all human beings,” Babcock says. “Because we share humanity, our needs are basically the same.” He’s talking about food accessibility, but he’s also talking about the human condition.



Humanity’s roots run deeper than what we see on the surface. So do the roots at Bonton Farms. It’s not just about helping food desert residents grow vegetables, build a line of credit or afford health care. Those are crucial components of living, of course. But Bonton Farms, like my conversation with Babcock, is about sustainable living of another kind, too, something he considers to be much more real and much more substantial.



“We’re spiritual beings,” Babcock says. “<a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/the-importance-of-community/">We need each other</a>. We long for each other. We long to be a part of communities where we’re deeply known and belong.”



Babcock tells me that the Bonton community doesn’t have to pretend to be anything it’s not. He calls the level of honesty there “shocking.” He’s had unprompted conversations with complete strangers in Bonton about poverty, addiction, homelessness, domestic abuse and prostitution. It’s not “opening up,” because in Bonton, there’s nothing to hide. He compares the shocking honesty in Bonton to the shocking dishonesty in more affluent communities.



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“We try to live lives that are based on material things, but there is something deep within us that calls for soul restoration,” he says. “When you can bear life without all the facades you’ve built up to feel safe and to be accepted, and <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/how-to-lead-with-vulnerability-and-why-its-important/">just be vulnerable</a> and honest, and you can shed the weight of that <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/3-key-behaviors-for-bringing-your-whole-self-to-work/">to be authentic</a>, there’s a freedom there. Whatever your material circumstances are, they become enough. The true level of wealth is not what you have but what you’re OK with.”



Babock is demonstrating that food deserts are not endemic—they are a product of circumstance and of continued complacency. There are things we should not be OK with, just as there are conversations we should be OK with having.



Using his work at Bonton Farms as a model, Babcock is currently finalizing a proposal with the city of Dallas that he believes will eradicate food deserts in North Texas within 36 months. The proposal outlines a sustainable and replicable solution that he hopes will solve the national food desert crisis in only five years.



This article originally appeared in the November/December 2022 Issue of SUCCESS magazine. Photos by ©Christina Childress Photography

Daron Babcock fought for an “illegal” farm on a 1.25-acre plot of land in a south Dallas food desert. He won a trial run to test whether urban agriculture could alleviate a food desert crisis. It did much more.

People have been talking about the symptoms of a problem for far too long, and in doing so they wind up hitting the bullseye of the wrong target. | SUCCESS

The Right Conversation About Sustainable Living

The Right Conversation About Sustainable Living | SUCCESS

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