285 - Passion, Teamwork, and Growth: A Blueprint for Entrepreneurial Success with Boostr Digital Displays' Greg Crowe

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started.

Great, grow. Welcome to Listening with Leaders. You're the CEO and founder of a company called Booster R-Displays, which can be found— I think the website is booster BoosterDisplays.com. Yeah, yeah, exactly, except it's not E-R, it's R, just Booster.

Booster.

That's right, Booster with no E. We're from Alabama, so we never learned how to spell, so we just took out the E.

Well, I'll tell you what, let's start off with a simple question. Tell us a little bit about who you are and what your company does.

I've come from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, been here most of my life. I lived in Andalusia, Alabama for a little bit of time and played college basketball at a little school over in Georgia called Emmanuel for a couple years. So I've been here most of my life. We started Booster 13 years ago. I was a high school basketball coach. I was coaching and we were having a hard time with money. Our school was a big football, baseball school.

You know, my JV team was wearing old girls' uniforms and we just didn't have a—

yeah, it was pretty rough. Hadn't won a lot of games. So we come in and we come up with an idea to put a big old TV monitor, basically a table.

So my coach, my JV coach and I built it, put it in there and we started selling ads. We sold $15,000 that year.

With a big old TV, like a 70-inch TV and about a 500-pound table. You couldn't move it.

It took half the team to move the table. And, but we were on to something. And so for the next couple of 3 years, that first year we sold 13 or 14, then it got to be 40 or 50.

Then all of a sudden we realized we can't keep building this in the garage in my JB coach's house. And so we, we moved to a little warehouse that he owned. We outgrew it in about 3 months and it just And here we are 13 years later and we're a nationally known company. Our sales are going through the roof.

We're just on a rocket growth here and really exciting. We're just excited.

This is crazy. What— and these are like LED screens? I saw on your website you do everything from huge stadium screens to—

Yeah, yeah. It's funny. We started with that ugly 700-pound table that had a TV screen from Best Buy. Literally, we went by after lunch and bought a TV screen out of Best Buy.

We came in and started building them out of those because they were inexpensive.

A lot of schools just couldn't afford LED at that time. And schools, high schools, they really weren't into advertising. They really weren't into that then. It's grown so much. But we went from that product to bringing in an LED product. And from LED products, we started with tables, which is our, our thing. We do tables, we think, better than anybody, and we manufacture them here in Tuscaloosa.

And then we got into indoor video walls, but then we got into outdoors.

So once we perfected one thing, we grew to the next thing. And so now we do anything LED—marquees, lobbies, businesses, hotels, ballparks. We're doing—we've had some projects this year that are just mammoth. As soon as we think we're through with a—this is the biggest project we're going to have—and something else pops up, we've got another one.

And it's just been great.

We went into our business, Doug, and first of all, thank you for having me and letting us share our story. We think it's a good story of old basketball coach gets in business and most of the time that doesn't go real well. And this one, I had a lot of good people surrounding me.

That's my next question. You're a basketball coach. Yeah. How did you learn to become a leader and a CEO? Those aren't skills that it sound like you trained for.

My mother was a, was a, a local politician. She was a deputy circuit clerk here for almost 50 years. My dad was a high school principal, school teacher. I grew up in sports and had just great role models, coaches growing up in sports. One guy that coached me, Woody Clements, is Alabama Hall of Fame high school coach. Learned a lot of things from those kind of people. How to handle yourself, be on time, be on time 15 minutes early, not on time. And so a lot of those things that I learned here in the South that have worked well for me in sales. And we got into business, Doug, and we do a lot of business in California. We got in the business. When I realized I had something, I looked at the market because my dad always told me— he was an accountant, he taught accounting— and he said, you don't go into business to get somebody else's business. You go into business to get your own business and then put a more from there. So what we did, we went in and we wanted to have a product that was affordable because as a high school coach, there, there wasn't anything affordable at that point for me to run ads on to raise money. And then secondly, we wanted to have a good product. We wanted to have something that was unique.. And nobody was doing TV monitor tables. In fact, we had a patent, we got a patent on it 2 years later for the design. We still own that patent today. Wow. And then thirdly, we wanted to have great service. We mirrored ourselves after a company called Shootaway, was a friend of ours, and we watched how they had done things from a grassroots effort and grown into the NBA and everything else. And so we learned a lot from them and then we learned a lot, we pulled from different people. And one of the things that's really helped us is none of us were in the LED business. All of our ideas, all of our thoughts, everything that we did was totally different than anybody else because we didn't know what we were doing. We didn't have, we didn't have an experienced LED person that come in and said, this is what you got to do, this is what you got. So we started out, hey, we'll service anything we sell in 48 hours. That sounded great to us until we got 7,000 customers. And then now we're still sticking to that. In certain areas, we do 48-hour service. Our service is really good. Our guys answer their cell phones. That's one of the things that when I started the company, I said, answer your cell phone. Even if you don't have an answer for the coach, AD, or the customer, just say, hey, we'll get back to you first thing in the morning. And so they can sleep and they're not mad at you. So that's how we built our business, on having a great product, an affordable price, and servicing people to death. And that's how we've grown.

So you've mentioned this term TV table. I'm clueless. What's that all about?

The TV table, what it is, you could go to Best Buy and you buy a TV, okay? Any size you want. Huge. And then you, yeah, okay, huge, 70 inches. And then you build a table around it, Doug. On the sidelines, if you go to a basketball or volleyball game, the scorekeeper sits at a table, a sideline table. Okay. And so that's, we put a TV in it instead of LEDs because it was affordable for schools. And you can run any ads you want to.

So this is a screen that's facing the court. So everybody facing the screen.

That's correct. And so we sold, I don't know, in the first 6 or 8 years, we sold 3 or 4,000 of those things. And then we grew into the LED market, but still today we're selling, we sell 400 or 500 TV monitor tables today still. It's a great product for around $5,500. And like I told you, I made $15,000 my first year selling ads in the high school market. That's a no-brainer. You can buy a table, a new table every year if you do that.

So you build the tables and then you, you outsource the LED screen or whatever you're doing?

We buy direct now. We buy almost every component comes from China, but that's every LED component's made in China. And, and we do that, and then we, we put them together here. We manufacture our tables here. And so we have a big— we have a 17,500 square foot warehouse here in Coker, Alabama, outside of Tuscaloosa. And then we have another 10,000 square foot warehouse that, that houses all of our outdoor stuff. It's about 3 miles from this one. So we have grown into a—

it's, it's something. It's crazy. How many employees do you have?

We got about 38 employees today. But we're hiring, we're on a hiring, we're trying to hire people, service, more service people, more install people. We're trying to make sure that we keep our service level.

So we're hiring quick, buddy.

It's a, it's really a, that's been one of the hardest things is to continue hiring good people. I've been blessed though. My 11 years of high school coaching, I had a lot of great kids come through my program and a lot of them work for us. Wow. Yeah, it's been, I love hiring athletes, man, female and male athletes because they're used to getting up in the morning and go work out. They're used to somebody chewing their butt. They don't mind. They don't mind listening and learning. And that's my kind of kid. That's— and we got 80% of our work staff is under 30. Wow. So we're very tech savvy. They're really good with the stuff that we need them to be good with. So we're just different, Doug. We just do things different. It's worked out for us so far, and we're trying to just continue to grow and help schools.

So what is it that gets you up in the morning and gets you excited? You've been doing this for a while now.

Man, I love the game. I just love the game of growing. Having people around me that I love working for us that are doing well. I love to see these guys that play for me that's in sales now, making good money and having a good life, getting married, having kids, our company growing, all of them. We promote within every time we can. And these guys are moving up in the company. It's just a blessing, man. All my family works here. The only one that doesn't work here is my wife. And that's because she's too busy playing pickleball and visiting and ordering things off Amazon. I'm just kidding. She was a great— a lot of my work ethic came from my wife. She was a partner in a physical therapy company and sold her company 15 years ago. She's a hard worker, but both of my boys are here. I have a 28-year-old son that was an All-State basketball player. He's our vice president. My 25-year-old son is running sales now. He played college baseball at Jacksonville State. So athlete. And then my daughter, she married a college football player, FBI guy. And she's our, she's head of marketing. They live right outside of Quantico. So our whole family's in it. Our first cousin is our comptroller.

It's a family deal. Yeah.

And in the back, we have a guy that builds all of our tables. He's a master cabinet builder. He has 3 sons here, and all 3 of them and him are just incredible workers.

Just, we consider them family, part of our family.

They've been with us for a long time, and we're just blessed, to be honest with you. We're just blessed to have a good business, to be able to make money, and we enjoy what we're doing.

As you can tell, I can tell you're really excited about all this. I'm— what is it, Greg, that's unique about you, you personally?

I'm not a very— I, I'm really not a very unique person. I'm not very smart. In school, I was an average student. I was a— I was always an above-average athlete, but I never was great. But I always had a competitive spirit that's never left me, and that is in anything that I do. I'm just a really competitive person. I like to set a goal and exceed that goal. And I think that's been the best thing in my life is I'm a goal-oriented person. Money is not really important to me. I like to have money, but the game is more fun to me. I love the game of growing the company, learning how to sell, bringing in new products, being, trying to be creative. So I do have a creative side to me. I was an athlete, but I play piano. I'm a vocalist. I've done all these types of things. And, and so I have 3 or 4 lives that I've lived before I got to here. And but I'm a pretty creative person, I guess would be my, my asset. But other than that, other than selling and being creative, I don't have a lot of good things about me. I don't think I'm, I don't think I'm the guy that just came in here and did everything myself. I was really smart. I remember several coaches, Nick Saban, all these big coaches. Bear Bryant was one that I heard say at first, you're only as good as the people that you surround yourself with. In sports, you're only as good a coach as your assistant coaches and the players that you have. And so I took that into business and I went after people that I trusted, that were family, that I knew would be hard workers. Even though they had no LED experience at all, I trusted they would learn quickly. And that's what's happened. And so I'm very thankful to be surrounded by good people. And the good Lord gave me a couple of good ideas that have hit. So I guess so.

Yeah. So what would you tell a young leader today? What, what do you think the, as you look back on the trajectory of your life, talk, let's say you're talking to somebody your son's age, 20s to 30s, and they're thinking about, they're thinking about forming a company and becoming leaders. What's the one thing that comes to your mind that you think would be helpful to somebody like that?

I, I think the number one thing, we talk about this all, if you're not passionate about what you're gonna do, and you don't love what you're trying to do, it's never going to work. You got to get up every morning and go, hey man, I'm fixing to go to the office and sell this or do this or do— it's got to be. And still, I'm 60 and I'm excited as— I'm as excited today about Booster as I was 13 years ago when we started it. And if you don't have that passion about what you're doing, you're never going to make it. You're going to be miserable. And that's why you see a lot of people start something, jump out, start something, jump out. And then finally, years down the road, they find something that was made for them. You got to find what do you want to do with your life. Then when you get in business, if you have that passion for it, you find ways to make it work. We started this company with zero money, zero dollars. And what we did is we said the first customer, we said, hey, if you'll pay half down, we'll build it. You can pay the other half when we deliver it. And so that's how we started our company. And now we're a $30 million company. And we've never been in debt. We have no debt. But I made up my mind when we started that we were going to— we weren't going to ruin our families if it didn't work. We were going to work our hardest, but we were not going to go in debt over a stupid idea. We were going to work as hard as we can and build it along the way. And that's what we did. But you can't do that if you don't love it. You just can't. You got to love it because, man, there's going to be some days. They're hard. There are going to be some days where you got to pay this bill and there ain't enough money there, or you got to—

I'm not going to make payroll, right?

You're not going to make payroll, you're not— you don't have the product here to do what you promised somebody. Those are the things that bother me, is you say we'll have this in 6 weeks and it takes 7. Those are the things that just drive me insane, right? There's going to be days like today where the docks are shut down all the way down the East Coast, and so your stuff that's coming from overseas, you got to call at the last minute, say hey, we need to go to California with this and truck it to Alabama instead of it— that kind of stuff. They're going to be days like that, but if you love what you do You just work through it. You just find a way to get around it. And I'm pretty simple. Everything goes back to sports for me. Our whole company, everybody here, it goes back to sports. If you got a good team, you work hard, you put in the time, you treat people right, things are gonna work out for you.

So I would imagine that both when you were an educator and a coach, and now as a founder CEO, that you've developed some pretty good listening skills. Tell me how you, how all that developed.

One of the things you have to do is, especially with these young guys, you have to listen to them. I've learned you hear about the younger generation not having work ethic, not having this. Our guys here are not like that. They show up on time, they have great ideas, and some of our best products have come from a 23-year-old, a 24-year-old, a 25-year-old who goes, hey, why don't we try this? And I'm like, okay, let's try this. If it doesn't work, we won't do it. But I've learned that there are a lot of smart people in the world. And if you rely on yourself to have all the answers and do all the work, your company's never going to grow. You can't grow a company by yourself. It's impossible. There's no way. I can't even do what I'm supposed to do today. So there's no way I can go and tell my operations guy what to do, my CFO what to do, my COO what to do, and my controller, all my salespeople. We can meet once a week. There's no way I could look over their shoulder every day and say, hey, you're not doing this right. So you got to hire good people and you got to trust them to do what they're supposed to do and be fair with them. I had a guy the other day, he said, hey, Coach— they call me Coach still— he said, hey, Coach, man, I forgot to order those wheels. And so we got 5 tables sitting here to go out today and the wheels aren't going to be here tomorrow. And I said, why'd you do that? He said, man, I just forgot. I said, I always tell you, that's a pretty stupid mistake, but don't make it twice. We're good. Just learn from your mistakes. And I've done a whole lot more stupid things than that. So I think for me, I have learned, because, because I told somebody today, I was a pretty good shooter. I could shoot the basketball. And man, I had the most confidence in the world that if I missed 3 shots, that I was going to make the next 3. And there were some games I'd miss 10, and I thought, I'm going to make the next one, and I'd miss the next 5. So I'm that way here. I have a lot of confidence in what I do, but I have as much or more confidence in all the people that are here than I do myself. And that's been a blessing for me. I think today, if something happened to me today, this company would continue to run. Because I've tried to instill in them all the things that we're doing here. And I think all of our guys would carry that on.

I do. I think that I've interviewed— you're around 280, I think, of shows that I've done.

Yeah. The leaders.

Yeah. And what you are talking about seems to be the common thread through every single successful CEO. Number one, it's not about you, it's about your people. Hire the best people you can and let them do their jobs and recognize that you don't have all the answers. And, and, and that's it. That seems to be the, the key to success.

You've interviewed enough people. You've heard that story enough, I think. And be a good person. I don't understand. I know a lot of bad people that have been successful, but I always say, imagine how much more successful they could have been if they'd have just been nice and a good person.

Yeah, look at Elon Musk. He took, he bought Twitter and it's worth 20% of what it was when he bought it.

Yeah, and fired half the people there. That's right. I just think I do have to make the final decision as you do on your show. Everybody that's in charge has a lot of pressure to make the final decision. But if you got good people and they put good things in front of you, that decision-making process becomes a lot easier. And thankful, I'm thankful for my kids. I know everybody thinks their kids are the greatest. I don't think mine are the greatest, but they're hard workers and they have a passion for what we're doing. And that's all I can ask for them. You know, hopefully it, it lands them a good opportunity to grow this company down the road. But they are hard workers and I do appreciate that a lot.

Yeah. That's another thing. You're able to find good workers and then inspire them to work hard, which not everybody can do. But that probably goes back to your coach, coaching days. It does. Yeah. You learn how to motivate kids, especially when they were in a, in kind of in the dumps and you learn how to get 'em excited and motivated and work hard and practice hard and I would imagine those same skills pay off in the business as well.

Yeah, it is. And there's going to be bad days and somebody's got to be positive during the bad times too. I tell them when y'all see me nervous and worried, I'll get nervous and worried. And I haven't been there yet. So we're just very thankful. We do. Hey, we're not perfect. We have problems every day. And, and, but we have the fortitude, intestinal fortitude and the passion to fix them. And move forward. And that's all— that's what you got to have.

Where do you see the company going in the next 10 years?

Whoo, man. We've been meeting about next year and we're— we tripled 2 years ago. Wow. That's when we had our biggest growth. Then we doubled last year. Wow. And we're on about a 50% growth plan this year through in '24. We can't keep growing that much every year because as you get bigger, those growth numbers, you can't triple with the amount we're at now. Right. Or it's hard. So what we're trying to do now is continue having great service, great product, and affordable price. And we think our growth has been kind of a grassroots effort, organic, organically. We're a very unique company. We only spend— we spend less than 1% on marketing. Wow. Yeah, most companies are 6 or 8%. We just have been— it's a grassroots organic effort where one coach tells another coach, one business tells another business. One church tells another church, man. It's just, we've just been really blessed. And I don't think we're the smartest people in the world, but I do think we love what we do, and I think we're going to keep growing. I do. Good, good for you.

One more question, I'll let you go, Greg. What's one thing about yourself that we would never know about? You told us a couple of things, but what's one other thing about yourself that we would never know about unless you—

I traveled on the road as a Christian singer for 20 years.

Wow.

I was with the Blackwood Brothers. We were— I traveled with them, Ron Blackwood and those guys. We had a theater in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee for 5 years. I sang with Poet Voices, which is a guy named Phil Cross who's written over 20 number 1 songs. I did that for 20 years, stayed married the whole time. My wife hung in there with me. And, and so I was gone about 150, 175 days a year. And still kept another job. I was in my— then I, when I quit singing is when I started coaching, and that was the greatest thing I ever did. I was there with my kids, be able to be around them as they got older. And so it was a great decision. But yeah, I travel. I've been all over the world. I've been where you live. In fact, I've traveled a bus all the way from Bakersfield, California, all the way up to Canada through Seattle, Portland, several times. And that's some beautiful country up there, man. You get out of up there in Seattle and Portland and North California. God's beautiful. The streams are clear. Yeah, it's just, man, it's a beautiful place. But anyway, that's a, that's kind of a trivial question there. I did that for a long time. In 2000, I had a number one song in contemporary Christian music in about 7 major markets. So I've done a few cool things. That's amazing. Yeah, but that's about it.

Other than that, I'm a jazz violinist, but I've never done—

Are you really?

Yeah, that's talent. Here's Doug, here's the thing.

To be a jazz violinist, you have to be intelligent creative and talented. So I might be creative, but no, the rest of them are, the rest of them are off my list.

I think it's more just, well, to your point, being stubborn and practicing a lot.

You went to Dartmouth, right? You went to Dartmouth? All right. So you're, you're a Dartmouth graduate, which that makes you highly intelligent. Uh, and now that I know you're a jazz violinist, then that makes you even more intelligent. And I'm a big music buff. In fact, we went to Chicago a few weeks ago and heard the Chicago Philharmonic Orchestra.

Oh, wow.

They were marvelous. They were marvelous. So I like everything from bluegrass to orchestras to— I like everything. The Eagles. So I like it all. But I would tell you this, when I get stressed, I have a piano at my house. I got a little baby grand in the corner of my house.

You'll start playing.

Man, I go home, I start playing, and about 30 minutes later, sometimes I do Christian music, sometimes I do country music, sometimes I'll play jazz, but it takes about 20 or 30 minutes. I'm ready to eat dinner, chill out, and Forget the Day's Troubles.

Are you still singing?

I sing every once in a while. I led worship at church for a long time. I've recently quit doing that because the company has just taken so much time, right? But I still play and sing a little bit. I'll get out every once in a while and do that. But I'm 60 now. I always said when I got older, young people didn't want to see me standing up leading worship.

I got out of that.

But that was a great time in my life. I met a lot of people that's helped us in Booster as well on the road. And that network of friends helped a ton. Coaching network was incredible. Some of my best friends, one of my best friends now is the AD at Tuskegee University, which is a historical Black college. Everybody knows about Tuskegee. He's made calls for us and said, hey, this guy does a great job. We just had a lot of people step up for us and just, just help us. Just make a call, shake a hand.

It's been awesome. Good for you. I have really enjoyed this conversation, Greg. Thank you.

Doug, we'll do it. You don't have to— you can call me anytime. We'll talk, Doug. You don't have to record it. Absolutely, my friend. Look, buddy, if you ever want to see a great football game, I know you Dartmouth guys don't know anything about football, but if you get down to Alabama, we'll treat you to a nice football game. I told you, when Alabama's winning, the dog's happier, the wife's happier, food tastes better.

It's just all better.

There you go, man. All right. Thanks, Doug. You're welcome.

Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up, ratings, and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Wanna know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.