Face-to-Face: Sam & Amira Davis on Meaningful Dialogues that Help Inspire Change

In a world where safety and leadership are becoming increasingly intertwined, D5 Consulting has carved out a unique niche in providing workplace violence training, leadership development, and cultural competency. Sam and Amira Davis—notably partners in life as well as business—founded D5 in 2019 and have led its evolution from offering specialized training to empowering organizations to foster meaningful  conversations that lead to transformative change. With backgrounds in law enforcement, education, marketing and sales, Sam and Amira bring a blend of expertise and passion to serve a diverse range of audiences—corporate teams to incarcerated individuals.

 

Can you tell us a little bit about the work D5 does?

Amira: We started our business in 2019.  Sam was actually doing some work for another company, and he was doing a lot of workplace violence trainings and some leadership development and things like that. And right around that time is when COVID happened, and he and I had a conversation about how we’ve always wanted to have our own business. It kind of just made sense that, instead of having somebody pay us for what we’re doing – to try and build our own business and do great things for our family. We started D5 in August of 2019 and we started with mainly workplace violence trainings, drug and alcohol awareness trainings. Sam was the main trainer at that time – and still is – and people looked at him and said: “Gosh, we’re really excited about the work you are doing. Can you do more?” So he started going into leadership development, communication, and using his knowledge of law enforcement, it was kind of a no-brainer for us to address things like implicit bias and other topics.

We kind of got thrown into cultural competency. From our standpoint, inclusion training, cultural competency, whichever term we want to use, we feel like a lot of people are not having the right conversations. I can give you all the book knowledge in the world, but if we can’t have conversations, nothing is going to happen. I think that is what our trainings have evolved into – a way to facilitate conversations on a myriad of topics so we can come to positive conclusions and resolutions.

Sam: Amira has such a good handle on the business. And, you know, I primarily just concentrate on trying to think of new ways that we can help our community through teaching – young learners, teenage learners, adult learners. And one day, with the opportunity I had with my new position, I thought: “Why don’t we try to take this same information and see if it can be helpful to the jail population?”

It’s a course I decided to put together from a book called Student success: Foundations of self-management. A professor at SUNY Broome (a local college) wrote the book and brought it to me. He just figured I was a good person to help him spread his word. He was right. Amira and I decided as D5 we wanted to find a cause to donate our time to. What better population than the incarcerated individuals. Many people thought it was a ludicrous idea. We did not. So I developed a 5-week, one hour a week long course where I would go in and donate my time speaking to them. Men and women. And I have to say it was probably one of the most rewarding classes I’ve ever taught. It was meaningful and purposeful. It was well received by them. We have some of the evaluations from participants.

 

What inspired you to create that initial training focused on rehabilitation? What was the catalyst?

Sam: Well, there were a couple of catalysts. Being in law enforcement, I chose this career for my own personal reasons. I’ve just always respected the law, the uniform. There’s a lot of negativity around the law, and I’ve spent my entire 20-plus-year career trying to do what’s right, trying to make things better, and address some of the issues that the public has always complained about. And honestly? It just never seemed like it would be enough. I’ve always just been searching for what more I could do. That’s really when I said: “Okay, why not use the skills I’ve developed over the years from law enforcement to try and educate and try to restart things for some of the people that are incarcerated right now, to try and prevent recidivism. It really was a whole bunch of things that led me down this path.

How has your experience influenced your approach to teaching others in both law enforcement and in community safety?

Amira: We’re probably going to say the same thing. From my standpoint, again, I feel like having some come up to you and read a PowerPoint to you – or having a computer program where you have to click through a module to get to the end of your training – isn’t really solving anything. It’s just checking a box. And I’ve done enough trainings in my lifetime where I feel like I want to do something, where I feel I’m getting something from it, where I actually had conversations with my coworkers afterwards about things that I didn’t know they had questions about. Things I didn’t know they were unaware of. We are not going to understand each others’ backgrounds and experiences unless we have those conversations. So, I think that Sam and I feel that if we can help facilitate those conversations while we’re learning at the same time, you’re going to get much more out of an experience we are bringing to you.

Sam: Yeah, I would have to agree with Amira on that, and primarily because my experiences on the job have kind of shaped my instruction style. People have something to say. People want to be heard. Not to knock any other instructors or educators, but we have often heard that people felt they were being force-fed information, or they were being told, “I have to do this, I have to do that.” Our approach is slightly different in that we provide information based on the feedback we receive, but the most important thing is that we want people to know that they are being heard.

 

What challenges did you face early on as founders, and how did those experiences shape how you’re doing things today?

Amira: In the beginning, there were challenges, since we had never run a business together. And with us, we had the marriage aspect of it, and we also had the business aspects. I think we both have unique strengths, I have a background in sales/marketing, and Sam’s got a really strong background in training. So, we have had to balance that as a married couple, and then also as business partners. I don’t want to say it was super hard, but it was enough of a challenge, because our work is about going into situations with other people and having uncomfortable conversations. I can see them from a different lens than Sam does. I think us coming together and saying: “OK, let’s try it this way,” has been beneficial to both of us. But for me, that was the hardest part.

Sam: For me, it really hasn’t been difficult. Amira is so skillful on the business side that I’ve been learning from her, and I pretty much get to go out and do what I do best. I love talking to people. I love giving people the chance to talk back to me. So, this has been a growth experience for me, and getting to learn the business side of it. I think that education, no matter what topic, is the same no matter who your audience is. I like doing research when we go to a particular school, learning the demographics of that community or district, things like that. But the message is the same. I just love doing it. And then the whole business journey is a learning experience for me.

 

How is it to work together as a married couple, is it always, you know, sunshine and rainbows, or do you have your gray days?

Amira: (laughs) It’s the best thing in the entire world, and it’s hard. It’s difficult. I’m not going to say it’s easy at all, but we actually started a podcast where we talk about this, because it requires balancing marriage and family life.

I left my full-time job to do this, and so from my perspective, I have to make this work, to prove that we’re okay. It’s just my personality. And I think sometimes it’s hard, because I have a little bit of imposter syndrome at times. And then if I look back at what we’ve done, I think, “Wow!” – we really have done a lot. Sometimes people say: “Well, if you stopped doing this tomorrow, you did a good thing.” And in my mind, I’m like, “No! We can’t stop tomorrow! That’s not even an option.” As a couple, I think the company is probably one of the best things we’ve done – I mean, obviously, outside of our children.

Sam: Yeah, it’s, it’s really rewarding for me. Not too many people can say that they work with their wives, they started a business that their kids can partake in. And honestly, we are building something that – in case they want to continue this – they can, we’ve set a base foundation for them. I’m mostly excited that we did something we set out to do, and I think we’re successful because it’s about what we deem as successful. You never know where it could go from here. Our end goal is to make society better, that’s really the goal. Do our part.

 

For young people interested in community service, what key qualities do you think they should develop early on?

Amira: One of my favorite things to teach is business professionalism. As a society, I feel that there are so many things that have gone to the wayside. For example, Sam and I are really big on time management. Nowadays, sometimes it’s hard to get away from time. But being on time for things: jobs, appointments, meetings and making sure that you have respect for other people. I think that if we had more respect for each other as humans, we would do so much more in general. For a lot of things that we teach, it’s largely about respect and communication. And I’m not attacking things like social media, my kids are as guilty as any other. But I think it’s so easy today to put your phone on and put your headphones on and not pay attention to what’s around you. We need to maybe just be more cognizant of the world.

So if you’re young and you’re looking to volunteer or do community service, it’s great to recognize that we’re not so insulated, it’s not just about us. There is a whole world out there that we need to pay attention to, and we need to pay attention to other people’s feelings and actions and how everybody else moves in their daily lives.

Sam: And I just like to add with that, because of the way kids are growing up today, they don’t communicate enough. There’s not enough face-to-face. I think that’s why our courses are really important because it’s going to be a lost art at some point. It’s surprising how much COVID has changed our social skills. For young kids, transitioning from homeschooling to then back to in-person was definitely a challenge in and of itself. We saw a huge shift in the school districts – all the districts – after COVID. It’s like kids couldn’t behave with each other, they couldn’t communicate. Law enforcement responded to a lot of calls because kids were cooped up by themselves or just interacting with people virtually for so long – that when they got together in-person, it was problematic. So, I think it’s important that we learn to socialize and be around each other, how to respect and communicate with each other in-person.

Amira: When Sam and I were younger, we saw so many more kids outdoors. It’s rare for me to drive around now and see a child playing outside playing with a ball, or a child anywhere doing any kind of activity. What you see now are kids behind their video games, even adults – and that’s their downtime, everybody needs downtime – but I think kids still need to get outside and get some fresh air and maybe go for a hike. Kids learn a lot of things by playing, and by interacting with each other. So, I think we need to get back to that somehow.

 

If you could give one piece of advice to your younger selves at the start of your careers, what would it be?

Sam: For me, it would have been to put more importance on education. In my upbringing, education wasn’t really put to the forefront. It was really about work, work ethic, and I’m grateful for that. But now, as an adult, and especially as I’ve moved forward in my career with the opportunities that I’ve had, I realize how important education is, how important it is to pick up a book, how important it is to take recommendations from somebody about what books to read.

Amira: You do read a lot now, actually, that’s interesting. You’ve picked up a book a lot more lately, over the last couple years than you ever have.

Sam: Yeah, I wish I started in my 20s, or even earlier.

Amira: I’m an avid reader. On my side, I wish that we would have had more training in financial aspects. I wish that financial education would have been more important. Maybe there could have been more of an emphasis on that in college, but Sam and I got together when we were very young, we were teenagers, and we put ourselves through college. With things like student loans, I think we made a lot of mistakes that could have been avoided had we had someone to educate us about things that we just didn’t know. Having someone to teach us the things we needed to know to be able to get through life – as opposed to some other things like square-dancing that we learned in high school – would have been helpful.

 

What’s your favorite book, or what are you reading right now?

Amira: I’m reading Dare to Lead [by Brene Brown]. I’ve had it for a long time but had never picked it up. And Sam’s best friend said: “This is a really good book. You need to have it.” And I said, “You know? I already have it at home, I need to pick it up.” So I started to read it and from the female perspective when it comes to leadership, it’s pretty interesting!

Sam: I was very hesitant for my own personal reasons to read the book I’m reading now, but a couple of people close to me kept referring it: Lincoln on Leadership [by Donald T. Philips]. It’s about Abraham Lincoln, who, clearly, is labeled as one of our best leaders. And I’m very happily surprised, the book has really opened my eyes, not only to a huge part of our history that I closed my eyes to because of personal reasons. I realized that there are a lot of similar views or things that I would want to try and model as I read this book, so that’s one I’m diving into and really enjoying right now.

 

What has been the most rewarding moment in your journey thus far?

Sam: For me, it’s teaching with my wife. I’ve done a lot of things in my career and in my life that I’m very proud of, but this is probably the best thing that I can say I’ve ever done. I’ve always said to myself: “I never want to be a boss. I never want to be a leader.” I never thought about owning my own business. And yet, here I am doing all of those things.

My wife is so good at it and to be able to do something with one’s wife, to share it with your family, and to real all the rewards of that, to feel good about what you’re doing, to give back to the community with your family – there’s nothing better than that.

Amira: For us, I think we just wanted to be able to make a difference. And in our minds, we were trying to think of a way we could do that. We tried to use our skill sets to do something that was fun, and we made the decision that this is what we’re going to do together. Sometimes, when we do trainings, we’ll kind of look over at each other, and we have the same look in our eye, like: “Wow, we’re really doing this!” – it’s awesome. We’ve brought on eight new trainers, and I think it’s still very surreal to us. We have eight people that can train different topics, who are close to us, whom we trust, that emulate the style we set.

Having someone that you can have conversations with after hours, where we both have the same goal in mind – it’s not like we work “for” each other, but we are working together. It’s really cool.

Sam: In my time, I’ve learned that everybody has a story. Everyone has different experiences – and I think that everybody needs to learn how to use that adversity and any other negative things that happen in life. They can all be turned into something positive. I try to turn all of those negative events and make them into teachable moments. A lot of the short stories that I share during courses, they’re all experiences that I’ve had or experienced with my family. They’re all teachable moments. I think that the world needs to listen to learn from other peoples’ experiences, and, putting it all together, we can all come together.

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