Hi, I’m Paul Darley, and thanks for tuning into our August issue of Inside Darley. We’re just back from the FRI conference down in Charlotte. It’s so great to see so many of our great customers and partners and vendors who we haven’t seen in a long time.
And this week we’re down to the FDIC in Indianapolis. We’ll down there August 5th through the 7th. We’re going to be in booth number 3557. We’ve got our new TSM 2000 Pump, available as a split shaft midship or PTO. We’ve also got our FLAIM system on display. So if you haven’t had a chance to demo that, make sure you stop by our booth. It’s virtual reality firefighting, and it’s really neat. I’ll tell you, our sales have more than doubled on that this year compared to last year.
I did speak with Eric Schmidt in the last 24 hours relative to attendance, and he confirmed that there are over eighteen thousand preregistered attendees right now and they’re anticipating another four thousand just walking in or those who haven’t registered. So that should be a great show, up to about twenty two thousand. So that’s great news.
If you go and you ask just about any business person these days what’s keeping them awake at night, 90 percent of them are going to say it’s material shortages or it’s hiring and retaining quality employees. Today’s episode is going to be just focused on those. I found in just about any type of business scenario where you have a radical and momentous change, the pendulum tends to swing back and forth one way and then the back the other way, equally strong and kind of ultimately settling in the middle. And I think with the whole COVID response, we’re going to continue to see that. You know, you can see that whether it’s with Bitcoin, whether it’s with the supply shortages, whether it’s working from home, whatever the issue is. But overarchingly, you know, I think we as managers have to focus, whether you’re a fire chief or whether you’re a business manager, you need to focus on your people now more than ever.
At Darley, we’re really focused on that. We’ve got a real energy and a resurgence in terms of how we’re approaching HR. We’ve attached six attachments for you here today. And most of these articles, if you can imagine, are suggesting that average turnover is going to be from 30 to 40 percent in most organizations, whether it’s a fire department or a business. Here at Darley we’re very proud of our single digit turnover over the years and certainly right now. But we’re also very mindful of what’s happening. So the first article that’s attached is called the Great Recession, and it talks to a forty one percent average turnover. The second article is called The Turnover Tsunami. He came out of CEO magazine and it’s talking about a 30 percent employee turnover is average. The third article we’ve attached is how to say thank you to your employees. It’s incredibly important. The fourth article is a great benchmarking article. It came out by a company called Seabeds. It talks about how to benchmark your employee turnover. If you’re listening to podcast. The fifth attachment is a Harvard Business Review podcast on the future of work, has about ten great podcast articles in here that you can listen to.
And then lastly, I’d also encourage to read this CEO Magazine article “What I Would Tell My Younger Self”, and I think this one really resonated with me as I get on in years, but it had five points and no one was higher. Hire slow and fire fast. #2 is make sure that you’re focused on a very unique value proposition. #3 is make sure that you’re spending more time looking outside your organization than within and maybe with the stuff that’s a bit more applicable right now. #4 is it takes just as much time to work on the big deals as it does to small. And I’ll tell you, that certainly brings home with me, as does the last one. And that is and perhaps the most important as
leaders, we need to remain optimistic.
Thanks for tuning into this issue of Inside Darley. If there’s anything we can be doing to support you, we hope you’ll reach out to us.
