Hi I’m Paul Darley and thanks for tuning into this issue of Inside Darley.
I’m coming to you today and Saturday April 11th Holy Saturday. Hopefully this communication finds you and your family in good health. Won’t it be nice when we don’t start off every conversation and email and text with that line? I think we’re getting closer and closer to that.
My hat goes off to our team Daley members who have risen to the occasion amazingly. If you can imagine we entered roughly a hundred million dollars worth of orders for PPE and other related coronavirus equipment. Over the past weeks our team has continued to really step up and meet our first responders needs and we reiterated our pledge to continue to sell to our first responders at or near our cost on all of this equipment. So thank you for all that you continue to do on the front lines.
We continue as a business to face sourcing issues as every other company and even the country and local and federal governments but we’re working through those and we’re getting the needed equipment out first off to our federal government first responders as a defense contractor that is our first requirement to them. So please continue to bear with us and we’ll communicate with you.
I’ve been talking to a lot of CEOs a lot of military leaders a lot of fire department leaders and over the past few weeks and you know they’re all kind of caught up in this dichotomy of wanting to lead from the front but at the same time making sure that they don’t take unnecessary risks. This first article this is attached it’s that it’s based on a conversation with the Air Force chief of staff his name is David Goldfien and it’s called Rise to the Occasion. The general says look you’re you really have no use to us if you go out and you work 14 15 hour days every day and you end up getting testing positive for the coronavirus. Encouraging people to take care of themselves and plan for the long haul what they use a term called operational tempo find that right operational tempo is used often in the military. And I think it’s important to all of us as it relates to how we respond to the coronavirus.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what happened 19 years ago on September 11th 2001 with how our family responded. I remember sitting down with our young children at that time and kind of thinking the days of even just going down to the park down the street might be over and certainly the world changed. I mean when you think of the TSA lines and all of the other things but within a few years things most things were back to normal. But there were certain paradigm shifts that took place so we’re going to continue to see those paradigm shifts take place and you have a minute stick around on this article here at the end of this we have a video from Simon Sinek that he just put out to his team relative to reinventing themselves Those who go out of business are those who refuse to change and so that really the question you should be asking yourself. What will we be after all of this not how do we preserve what we have and it’s a very it’s a great question.
So if you’re asking yourself some of those questions whether it’s in your fire department and your military organization or in your company we would we’d ask you to mark your calendar for Tuesday April 21st at 1:00 p.m. Central Time. We’re going to have a webinar with industry leaders from the fire service and academia. It’s going include Jim Johnson the president of Pierce Manufacturing, Bobby Holton who’s the editor of Fire Engineering and head of training for the FDIC. We have Steven Rogers, a Darley board member and a Harvard business professor at Northwestern business professor for many years. Gary Breese who’s also on our board. He was the executive director of the IFC for I think 25 years or a FEMA director. The fire commissioner of the city of Detroit as well as some other folks. So we’ll be sending out more information on that but we would encourage you to mark your calendar for that and we’re going to talk about what changes are coming in the fire service buying pattern changes of similar things to that we’ll be doing another well similar one for our defense customers.
So hopefully you and your family can enjoy this Easter we know you probably won’t be able to do a one on one like you have in the past but hopefully you can find ways to communicate via the Web and other things. So thanks for tuning into this issue of Inside Darley if there’s anything we can be doing to assist you. We hope you reach out to us.
