Hi, I’m Paul Darley and thanks for tuning in to our July and August issue of Inside Darley.
We’re just back from an amazing weekend in the Wisconsin Dells with over 300 of our employees and their families really celebrating an achievement of hitting a billion dollars in revenue as a business. So, while we were there, Deloitte came in and they presented us with the Best Managed Company award, and we’re one of 60 companies in the United States who have been who received this award.
In fact, the judging criteria is based on four particular areas: Strategy, execution, culture and governance. Relative to the strategy, we at Darley always use Wayne Gretzky as an example. When asked, “how did he score so many goals in such a short period of time?”, he said, “I never went to where the puck was, I always went to where the puck was going to be”. So as a business we always are trying to come up with the products that really our market doesn’t even know it has that latent need now and be ready with those products when it comes about.
Second is execution and, as a business, I’ll tell you, we over communicate with our employees. We involve over 75 of our employees in our strategic planning process; We’re just rolling out our new five-year plan, which is 2B30, an aggressive goal to be a $2 billion business by the year 2030. You know with that too, we make sure that we sit down and share that plan, involve people, people support what they help to create, involve them in the process. And then we go, and we have individual business unit goals, as well as employee goals, that are all aligned and really help us to execute.
The third area is culture. And as a business, you know, Peter Drucker with culture eats strategy for breakfast, right? I mean, we as a business are totally focused on what we can do to make this a great place. And if you can imagine, after 30 years of doing employee engagement surveys, we just received our highest employee engagement scores ever from our employees. So, thank you very much for that. And part of that is some of the processes that we’re doing. And if you can imagine, safety is high on our list as a business.
Our main plant in Chippewa Falls, WI, just went over 2000 days without a lost time accident, I mean almost unheard of. It’s a completely state-of-the-art facility. We invite you to come up to Chippewa Falls, WI, and visit us.
Lastly, it’s about governance and they look at your board of directors. They look at your financials. Like we as a business really reinvest most of our profits back in the company each year. It’s helped us survive a lot of, you know, difficult years over the last 117 years.
But with that too and governance, you know, we’ve got an amazing board of directors. We also have two amazing advisory boards. We have a defense advisory board as well as a Fire Advisory Board. We’re really excited to announce that Jim Johnson has just joined our Fire Advisory Board. He’ll be in for a meeting here in September. And Jim, if you don’t know, he’s the recently retired as the President of Pierce Manufacturing and the Executive Vice President of Oshkosh. So, I know he’ll bring a lot of wisdom to our team.
There’s a lot of chatter going on in the fire industry right now relative to long time deliveries and congressional hearings and all the rest. We’ve attached a FAMA article here that addresses exactly that. And really the spike in new orders in 2021 and 2022 that took place, a 45% increase and now the market’s really normalized. In fact, in the first quarter of 2025, it was down about 13% compared to 2024.
There’s also a lot of chatter relative to fire blankets going on. And we’ve attached some information for you on that from the IAFF and the DoD and IAFC. And there’s other places that are really looking at this. And we would encourage you to go to those fire blanket manufacturers, their websites, they’ve all put up their own side of the story. But whether that’s Padtex or Bridgehill or whoever your supplier was of your fire blankets, you might want to check that out.
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.
