Hi, I’m Paul Darley, and thanks for tuning into our January issue of Inside Darley. Hopefully 2022 is off to a good start for you. In December we had the opportunity to have our entire Defense Advisory Board into our headquarters here in Chicago, and we’re blessed to be surrounded by such amazing people. We also welcomed, as part of our defense advisory board, General Scott Rice, who is a former Director of the Air National Guard. As a group, we looked at industry trends and our first attachment here is an analysis of the 2022 defense budget that you might find interesting if you’re in that market. So we encourage you to take a look at that as well as the infrastructure bill as some other places that might create opportunities for you.
As we hit Control-Alt-Delete on our marketing, we’re really excited to bring in our new Senior Marketing Director, Kim Brown. Kim comes to us with both a graduate and undergraduate degree from Northwestern University. She previously worked for GE, The American Medical Association, Hyatt Hotels, and in a number of other places. We’re excited to have Kim on as we look to really change up our marketing mix. It’s always going to kind of be a balance of trade shows, print and social media, but maybe to help guide you a little bit, you might take interest in the second article attached that talks about digital transformation. It talks about restructuring your business model and how value creation now comes from the outside. You can learn about this from what Facebook, Google, Apple and some other companies are doing.
The third article, I think you’ll find interesting. It’s called 29 Big Ideas That Will Change Our World in 2022. It talks about this great “season two” of the great reshuffle. Richard Branson talks about a potential four day work week, which is a little hard for me to swallow, but that’s what he says. There’s also sections in here on cryptocurrency, on smart factories, on public school options and all sorts of things that might help guide you.
I know we, as a country and a as a world, have had it with COVID, but our fourth article here is called “How COVID is Reshaping Our Supply Chains.” It was just put out by McKinsey and it talks about the implications of onshoring, or what they call nearshoring, and how the supply chain here in the United States is really getting pressure from US manufacturers to bring items back to the US to be manufactured that previously were manufactured in Asia.
As COVID comes back, we’ve attached for you a list of COVID PPE that we have in stock. We have millions of dollars worth of PPE inventory available, including 250,000 N95 masks.
Lastly, in December, we lost a great Darley disciple in Jerry Ingram. He represented us in the state of Kansas for over 40 years, just part of the great of the greatest generation. He lied about his age at 15 in order to get into the Marine Corps and go off to World War II. If you can imagine in 1981, he was in Las Vegas in the Hilton Hotel during that horrific fire and was the only person to survive in an elevator bank that he was in during that fire. So our hearts go out to Jerry and his family as we remember him.
Hey, thanks for tuning in to this issue of Inside Darley. If there’s anything that we can be doing to support you, we hope you’ll reach out to us.
