Empower Action: Trust Your Team to Wow Your Customers (Fans First Principle #5)

Unleashing Your Team to Create Legendary Customer Experiences

You’ve worked hard to eliminate friction, amp up the fun, innovate constantly, and forge personal bonds with customers. The last piece of the Fans First puzzle is perhaps the most crucial behind the scenes: Empower Action. All those awesome customer-centric ideas won’t go far if your team on the ground can’t act on them in real time. Jesse Cole understood that to create magic for fans, every single staff member – from ticket takers to players to custodians – needed to feel ownership of the fan experience. He says, “Fans First guides everything. Every day we ask, what would create fans?”. And he expects his team to answer that question with actions, not just talk.

What does empowerment look like in Banana Land? Let’s revisit the story of Reggie, the exuberant fan-turned-employee. This guy literally nagged his way into a job because he believed in the team so much. Once hired, he wasn’t put in a box or micromanaged – they gave him the freedom to carve out a role as a hype man, because that’s what he naturally excelled at. He’d run through the stadium pumping up fans and players alike, and management cheered him on. That’s empowerment: recognizing someone’s passion and letting them run with it, even if it’s not a traditional job title. Another example: Bananas team members are entrusted to solve problems creatively. If a fan had an issue at a game, any staffer can step in and make it right on the spot – they don’t have to “get a manager.” In one instance, when the Bananas started touring in big stadiums, Jesse had every team member write thank-you postcards to fans in the cheap seats. No one said “that’s not my job” – they all took ownership of making those distant fans feel appreciated. Cole notes that the leadership’s role is to set the vision (“Fans First”) and then let the team translate that into deeds. He often quotes, “Swing hard in case you hit it,” encouraging employees to be bold. If someone has an idea to delight a fan, they’re empowered to just do it.

In many traditional companies, employees are actually discouraged from taking initiative – they’re told to follow scripts, get approvals, stick to policy. That might ensure consistency, but it also ensures mediocrity. To really stand out on customer experience, you want your people to feel like entrepreneurs of their own area, with permission to make fans happy without checking with the boss for every little thing. For a transportation business, this could mean training and trusting your drivers, customer service reps, dispatchers, etc., to solve customer problems in real time and even surprise customers in small ways.

Here are a few strategies to empower your team to put Fans First:

• Define the Guardrails, Then Let Go: Make sure everyone on your team knows the company’s mission and values (e.g. “We always put the customer’s interest first, even if it costs us” or your own version of Fans First principles). Give them examples of what that means in practice. Then explicitly tell them: “You have the authority to make decisions that align with these values without needing higher approval.” It could be as simple as authorizing frontline staff that they can spend up to $100 to fix any customer issue on the spot, no questions asked. (Ritz-Carlton famously does this – giving employees discretion to spend money to delight guests – and it pays off in spades in loyalty).

• Train for Situational Judgment: Empowerment isn’t chaos; it works best when employees have the skills to exercise good judgment. Role-play scenarios with your team. What if a delivery is going to be late? What could they do proactively? What if a client is angry about something? How might they turn it around? Brainstorm solutions together and make sure everyone knows they are trusted to implement them. Sometimes just hearing “It’s OK to do what you think is right” is liberating for employees who’ve only worked in places with red tape.

• Flatten the Hierarchy (At Least in Spirit): Encourage a culture where ideas can come from anywhere and anyone can talk to anyone. Maybe a junior dispatcher has a brilliant idea to update customers via WhatsApp – under strict hierarchy, he’d never speak up. Under empowerment culture, he pitches it to the CEO in an open meeting and next thing you know, it’s a new practice. Consider having regular skip-level meetings or an internal forum where anyone can suggest improvements or crazy fan-first ideas. Show that leadership is listening and ready to support ground-up initiatives.

• Celebrate Autonomy in Action: When an employee takes initiative to help a customer or improve a process, recognize and praise it widely. Did one of your truck drivers notice a receiver was shorthanded unloading and jump in to help offload freight (without being asked)? That’s a Fans First moment – celebrate it in the next company newsletter or meeting. Did a customer service rep stay late on their own time to ensure a customer’s issue was resolved? Shout it out and maybe reward them with a bonus or extra day off. These stories reinforce that this is what your company is all about, and everyone has permission to act similarly.

• Provide Resources for Spontaneous Delight: If you truly want employees to surprise and delight, give them tools. Maybe create a small “Wow Budget” each month that any team member can tap into to do something special for a customer. It could be $50 they can spend on a thank-you gift, or the ability to send pizza to a customer’s team working late on a project (and maybe one to their own team too!). Knowing that there’s an easy mechanism to get a little resource for these gestures can spur people to take the initiative. Otherwise, they might have the idea but not know if they’re “allowed” to, say, buy a gift or upgrade shipping, etc.

Let’s illustrate empowerment with a quick story: A large freight brokerage used to have a policy that any rate dispute or claim above $200 had to go through a manager, which often took days to resolve and really frustrated customers. After adopting an empowerment approach, they changed policy so that any account rep could authorize a claim or discount up to $500 on the spot if it would immediately solve a customer issue. One rep didn’t even need $500 – he had a customer whose freight was damaged right before a critical event. The rep personally rented a van, picked up replacement goods from the supplier, and delivered them 200 miles overnight to make sure the client had what they needed in time. He spent maybe $150 and a long drive (which the company fully backed and paid overtime for). The customer was blown away and wrote a five-star review everywhere, calling out that rep by name. Rather than scold the rep for going outside normal operations, the company celebrated it and reimbursed everything. That story became part of their sales pitch to new clients (“we’ll do whatever it takes”). Empowered employees create legendary customer moments.

One more angle: Empowerment also means having your team’s back. Not every empowered decision will turn out perfectly. Maybe an employee gives a refund that you feel wasn’t warranted, or spends money on a gesture that doesn’t wow the customer as intended. Instead of reverting to blame, use it as a coaching moment. Emphasize that you appreciate them taking action and discuss what could be done differently next time. Nothing will kill empowerment faster than an employee getting reprimanded for making a well-intentioned call. So commit as a leader to truly back your people. As Cole said, it starts at the top – leadership must show trust first.

By empowering action at all levels, you essentially multiply yourself. Instead of one person (you) thinking about how to make customers happy, you have 5 or 50 or 500 minds all actively looking for ways to delight. And they won’t have to stop and ask permission – they’ll just do it. That agility and genuine care shines through to customers. It’s the difference between a rigid service and a responsive, loving one. Fans can tell when employees are just following a script versus when they genuinely want to help. The latter only happens in a culture of empowerment.

In summary, give your team the yellow tux treatment – let them be stars in making your customers fans. Empowerment is contagious: you empower your team, and they will empower your customers to rave about you. When everyone from the CEO to the intern is on a mission to create amazing experiences, you’ve officially gone Fans First. And as the Savannah Bananas have shown, Fans First companies don’t just have customers – they have a fan following that drives unbelievable growth and joy on both sides. That’s the end game: a business where everyone, inside and out, is cheering – and you started that wave by trusting your people to do the right thing.

Conclusion: By now, we’ve taken a deep dive into each of Jesse Cole’s Fans First principles – from eliminating friction to empowering your team. It’s time to put them into practice. Remember, you don’t have to do it all at once. Pick one principle and get started today. Maybe hold a meeting to identify friction points, or brainstorm a fun surprise for your next customer interaction, or give one employee the green light to solve a problem their way. Fans First is a mindset as much as a method. Once you and your team embrace it, you’ll start seeing “fans” everywhere – loyal customers who stick with you, sing your praises, and maybe even sport your logo like a badge of honor. As crazy as it sounds, that level of devotion is possible, even in the transportation industry, when you make business not just about business, but about people, joy, and unforgettable experiences. So ask yourself the magic question Jesse asks his team every day: “What can we do to create fans today?”. Keep asking it, keep acting on it, and don’t be afraid to go bananas with your ideas. Your customers will soon be going bananas about you, too (in the best way).

Go forth and create your own legion of raving fans! 🚀👏