Hi, I’m Paul Darley, and thanks for tuning into our January and February issue of Inside Darley. Hopefully you and your family had a great holiday, and 2026 is off to a good start.
It’s off to a really strong start here at Darley, as we just released to our employees our new five-year strategic plan. It’s called “3B30.” That’s a goal to be a $3 billion business by the year 2030. And perhaps it sounds aspirational, and perhaps it is, but it’s actually a slower growth rate than what we’ve achieved over the last five years.
It’s going to be heavily concentrated on contracts, both in the defense industry but also state and local and some other markets as well. But it’s also going to have a balance of strong manufacturing investment by our company, both in the fire as well as defense markets and some new adjacent markets.
As we look at this, it was also important that we restructure our business. At the pleasure of our family, I’ve had the opportunity to serve as chairman, CEO, and president for the last 30 years, and it was important that I step back a bit from the business and focus more on strategic issues and what we call “big boulders”, those things that really move our business.
With that, it was important that I stepped down as President. Effective January 1, 2026, our family and our board are really excited to announce our new President as Lee Wise. Lee Wise has served as our CFO, our Chief Financial Officer, for the last 18 months. He comes from a very strong educational background at the University of Iowa and then the Kelley School of Business at the University of Indiana. He’s also run some multibillion-dollar businesses recently. Most importantly, he’s earned the respect and trust of our family, our board, and all of our coworkers at Darley.
He’ll be the first non-family president at our company in 117 years, and we felt it was important to have a strong balance of both family and non-family business as we move forward. He’ll be supported by six family members in addition to other non-family members, those six coming from the fourth generation, who are 100% supportive of Lee in this new role.
And as we look at that too, we are also making some other changes at the top. We’ve added a new CHRO, or Chief Human Resources Officer, in Ashley Everson. She recently just joined us, also a strong pedigree. She got her undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She was recently Vice President of Human Resources for a $15 billion family business with over 10,000 employees and operations in over 100 countries around the world. So she comes from a strong background. Her family of firefighters, her father was a firefighter, her brother’s a firefighter, and her husband, Bob, is a firefighter as well, so we are really excited to bring her on the team.
As we go after these contracts, it was really important that we get the right person in contract capture, and our new Director of Contract Capture is Chris Gill. Now Chris has a really incredible background. He played football at Ole Miss, where he helped lead their team to victories in both the Cotton Bowl as well as the Compass Bowl. After that, he went on to get his master’s degree at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he was captain of the football team there. And after all that, he went and became a lawyer, he got his law degree at Marquette University, where I went for my undergrad. Lastly, after all of that, he goes and he joins the military, joins the Army Ranger Regiment for seven years as a Jag or what’s called a Judge Advocate. So, really excited to have Chris on our team.
You’ll also see a number of retirements taking place, both in family members and non-family members, over the next 18 months. I plan to stay on seven years at least as CEO. John Long, who’s been our Chief Information Officer and with the company for over 30 years, just announced his retirement effective the end of last year. You’ll see some others coming forth as well.
So hey, thanks for tuning in to this issue of Inside Darley. If there’s anything we can do to support you, we hope you’ll reach out to us.
Darley – Lee Wise Named President of W.S. Darley & Co.
