Greg Crowe took a TV and a table and — without much of an initial strategy — turned it into a $30 million business.
OK, there was a bit more to it than that. But not too much more. And there certainly was no grand business plan in place in 2012 when Crowe began looking for a way to help raise money for the boys’ basketball team he coached at American Christian Academy in his hometown of Tuscaloosa.
At the time, advertising opportunities for potential sponsors largely were limited to game programs or maybe hanging a banner in the auditorium. Hard to raise big bucks that way, especially for a small K-12 school with approximately 1,000 students.
Crowe’s solution was to buy a 70-inch Samsung and build a table around it where the scorekeepers and other game officials could sit. Advertising then could be sold to local businesses and displayed electronically on a rotating basis on the TV screen during the games.
Just like that, ACA’s annual basketball budget increased 10-fold, from $1,500 a year to $15,000. And nearly as quickly, a burgeoning business was born. As word spread among the small-school coaching community about this new fundraising possibility, Crowe and fellow ACA coach Matthew Renicks began building tables out of Renicks’ garage to sell.
“He had to move his cars out of there so we had room to build them,” Crowe says. “It was something we kind of just started as a hobby to help schools raise money.”
That hobby has grown into an established company called Boostr Digital Displays, with 40 employees and a new 17,500-square-foot office and production building in Coker (just outside of Tuscaloosa) to go along with the company’s 10,000-square-foot warehouse.
Boostr still sells versions of the original scorers table, but also offers large indoor LED video walls and outdoor LED marquees and signage, including football stadium jumbotrons. With this expanded lineup, Crowe expects Boostr to hit $32 million in sales this year.
“I wish I could explain how it happened,” Crowe says with a chuckle. “I built a table for my team, and out of that has morphed this entire thing.”
Crowe says he came up with the idea when he saw an elaborate LED scorers table at a University of Alabama basketball game. He researched the product and found that the versions used by major colleges cost six-figures, and he could not find a company producing smaller, cheaper tables. So, he made his own.
The value of the tables quickly became evident to the members of the ACA basketball team, which included one of Crowe’s sons, Collin.
“It helped us raise a lot of money,” says Collin, who now works for Boostr as vice president in charge of operations, along with Crowe’s two other children, Caitlin (marketing) and Carson (sales). “Soon we had all kinds of new gear, new uniforms, a renovated locker room. The funds we were able to raise made our whole experience in high school athletics so much better.”
Other coaches noticed and started asking Crowe about the tables. Before long, he and Renicks began making and selling them. But Crowe says there was absolutely no business plan around all this. After all, he had a full-time job that he enjoyed as a salesperson with Wood Fruitticher. He figured the tables would be nothing more than a temporary side gig, but the interest they began receiving convinced him otherwise.
“We started getting more and more people around Alabama wanting tables,” Crowe says. “Then we started getting out-of-state people. A coach would move from Alabama to Georgia, order one in Georgia, and the next thing you knew we’d have orders for 20 tables in Georgia.
“By the second year, I realized we were onto something here. Not only did I have the sales experience from my job at Wood Fruitticher, but I had the fundraising experience from being a coach, so I knew what coaches needed. When we sold one to a coach, I’d ask him if he had any buddies who might be interested, then I’d call them. It was completely word-of-mouth.”
After building the first seven tables, the company was moved out of Renicks’ garage and into a workshop. Another 30 or so tables later, they rented a 2,000-square-foot building and added three full-time employees.
Around this time, Collin began accompanying his father to area conventions to promote the product, including the Alabama High School Athletic Directors’ Conference. “That first year, we had to stop people who were walking past our booth and explain to them what we had, what it does and how it’s helpful,” he says. “By the third year, we had the busiest booth there.”
Crowe says the company experienced annual growth of about 10% through 2019. Like many small businesses, Boostr struggled during the Covid pandemic in 2020 and nearly went under. But Crowe says the company has surged since then, experiencing sales growth of nearly 800% as it has increased its product offerings.
“People like that we’re a one-stop shop,” Crowe says. “We sell it, build it, install it and service it. We want to make things as simple as possible for them.”
While sports-related projects account for around 85% of the company’s work, Crowe says Boostr is increasing its client base among churches and businesses as well. And most of this continues to come from word-of-mouth referrals, as Crowe says the company spends less than 1% of its budget on advertising.
This approach apparently is working. Boostr has now sold tables to entities in all 50 states, indoor video walls in 15 states and outdoor football scoreboards in six states. Initially most of the sales were to high schools and middle schools, but Crowe says the company has expanded into the college market and has done work for nearly 30 Division I schools.
“I genuinely feel like we’re not just selling a product,” Crowe says. “I think we are helping these schools by giving them an avenue to raise money and improve their programs.”
Which really is all Crowe was trying to do when he bought that first TV and table 13 years ago.
Cary Estes and Cary Norton are Birmingham-based freelance contributors to Business Alabama.
This article appears in the May 2025 issue of Business Alabama.
