Daniel Davenport, founder
I grew up playing in and working for a six-generation family-owned furniture business in the North Georgia mountains. From a young age, I was helping load and unload trucks of furniture, mattresses, and appliances between playing games of hide-and-seek with my sister and building pillow forts on the bunk-beds across the showroom floor. In my teenage years, I was out on the road after school nearly every day making deliveries and helping out with service. Then, after graduating high school and working through college, I began to transition out of the warehouse and off of the road into the office. I learned sales, marketing, merchandising, and customer service. I spent these years working mornings at the store and commuting over the mountain for classes in the afternoon and evening. After college, I settled into a more stable set of responsibilities: managing our website, designing our marketing materials, merchandising and controlling our appliance department, and being the resident expert on all the products and categories that were more “technical.”
Through all these years, I was also heavily involved in my local church. With family members serving as leaders, I was definitely a “church rat”: arriving early, staying late, and getting into all sorts of shenanigans with my church friends. But between the fun and these aforementioned shenanigans, I was unknowingly nurturing and developing a passion that would ultimately become a cornerstone of who I am now. As a pre-teen, I was invited by the choir director into the tech booth to run audio for a Sunday evening service. “Don’t touch the knobs at the top. When the preacher comes up to the pulpit, press this button to turn his microphone on. If you hear a weird noise, pull the slider down.” I was hooked. Sunday evenings turned into Wednesday afternoon choir practices which turned into Sunday morning sound checks which turned into 15-year-old Daniel sitting behind the board on Sunday mornings pushing buttons and twisting knobs like my life depended on it.
A couple years later, I met my wife and we ventured off to another church together. She got involved on the worship team, and I was looking for an opportunity to plug in as well. The worship pastor approached me and asked if I could turn the house lights (which were controlled by a rotary dial on the wall) down for worship and back up for teaching. The next week, he asked if I would be interested in figuring out how to work their lighting board. I said “I’ll try,” and in the next few days, I read the board’s manual front-to-back. I showed up at the next worship team practice and whipped up some different cues we could fire during the service. I recall programming purple and blue for worship, a nice warm amber for the sermon, and green for the time of giving (because money, right?🤦🏻♂️). Despite my cringe color decisions, what I created was enough to land me on the tech team. I sat at the end of the booth with two gentlemen who ran audio and graphics, and I thought I was part of the coolest team on the planet.
These gentlemen I served with imparted so much wisdom, and one of them became a spiritual father and mentor to me. They shared with me their technical knowledge, of course, but they also lived out the “first-in, last-out” mindset of leadership and hard work. They instilled in me a drive to take ownership and responsibility in everything I am involved in, and they fostered and supported my budding desire to learn and grow. Over the next couple of years, I had the privilege of serving with them both in the church week-in and week-out and outside of the church for various events and projects. But, as seasons of life changed, both of them stepped away from their roles in the booth and moved on to other pursuits. This left me as the senior (and, for a brief period, only) member of the production team at church. This “promotion” of responsibilities both terrified and excited me, but I knew there were many areas of both production, leadership, and service that I still needed to learn and grow in. From that point many years ago until now, nothing has changed. The have been full of continuous learning and growth, and although I have developed and continue to master some skills, I don’t envision my learning journey stopping anytime soon.
And that brings us to today. My goal is to take the strengths, gifts, and opportunities I’ve been given and use them to both honor God and serve others. That’s where Red Fox AVL was born. My upbringing in the furniture industry taught me the skills needed to deliver a high level of service and communication, and because of that, I’ve been blessed to have so many encouraging and edifying conversations with people from all walks of life as I serve them. On the other side of the coin, because of the investment that my family and other men made in me, not only do I love serving the church, but have been given a blend of gifts and strengths that has connected me with churches, businesses, and venues all over my region and beyond, helping them not just improve and add to their audio, video, and lighting systems, but helping them actually understand what these systems do and how to use, troubleshoot, and teach others about them.
I’d love to do the same for you!