Hi, I’m Paul Darley, and thanks for tuning into our July issue of Inside Darley. Hopefully, this video will find you and your family in good health and good spirits. Certainly, a lot is going on for our customers in the fire service which is causing a drastic slow down in terms of new orders for equipment and fire apparatus. Speaking with a lot of sales leaders in the industry, boy the months of April, May, and June were down compared to the first three months, as well as compared to year over year performance. The second quarter is usually the slowest quarter for the fire apparatus.
In light of all that is going on, you might enjoy this first article that we’ve attached for you, it’s on new normal fire apparatus under the new normal it was put out by Firechief magazine. It has some interesting points here. Our second attachment is put out by our good friend chief Keith Bryant who is a US Fire Administrator, so we’ve attached his Updates and Outreach to Stakeholders letter.
You know before going into the whole pandemic, the biggest issue facing the fire service was cancer, whether that was PFOS, PFOAM, or just the impact of carcinogens primarily on our firefighters. With a movement toward clean cabs and clean bunker gear and things of that nature. The third article that we attached is written by an Amboy Illinois Fire Chief. It talks about the effects of using compressed air foam systems on a reduction of carcinogens, some very interesting stuff here, and I think they are on to something.
We’ve also seen a real movement toward our FLAIM Trainer Systems. The FLAIM Trainer, which is a virtual reality fire system that allows training without risk of cancer. It is especially useful now when people are unable to travel and train normally.
We’ve seen this acceleration in digital marketing, all businesses are seeing it. Our team of over ten marketing people is continuing to make that pivot toward digital, I think we are doing a great job. At Darley, we like to zig when everyone else is zagging. With everything moving digitally we still print the catalog, as we have done for 112 years. Darley catalog #275 is going to be mailed in mid-July so you should see that in your fire station by the end of July. It has got some great new expanded sections on PPE, a new Training section, Virtual Reality, and brand-new Robotics section. Check that out I’m sure you’ll find it worthwhile.
For those of you who are involved in sales and I know a lot of you are, our second to last attachment is for you. The article is put out by Kellogg School of Business up at Northwestern, it’s written by Craig Wortmann who heads up their sales program. The article is titled How to Coach Your Sales Team through the Pandemic (and Beyond).
Lastly the situation with George Floyd and everything that is going on relative to diversity awareness. We as a business are taking this extremely seriously and we have attached our diversity statement which talks to some of the actions we are taking.
So thanks for tuning in to this episode of Inside Darley if there is anything we can be doing to support you please do reach out to us.
