Hi, I’m Paul Darley, and thanks for tuning into our July and August issue of Inside Darley. Hopefully your summer is off to a great start. For us, it really seems like it’s fleeting after an incredibly busy June.
During the month of June, we exhibited at the Interschutz conference. Now that’s the fire show that happens every five years over in Hanover, Germany. Over 140,000 attendees if you can imagine at that show. We had a team of about 15 Darley team members over there and met customers from around 60 or 70 different countries around the world. It’s so great to be reunited with them as we introduce some European style pumps, our new rescue tools were a big hit for us, as well as our hose roller and our new virtual reality flash system, so just a wonderful show for us.
During the month of June too, we also helped to host the 20th Annual Illinois Fire Service Home Day. So here it took place at NIPSTA here in Illinois, a local training academy, and we had congressional staffers from 12 different congressional offices, if you could imagine. And really we’re able to not only ask them for their continued support, but thank them for their support of the AFG grants where they just began releasing $291,000,000 in funds and then for the SAFER grant, $325,000,000 in funds, so just wonderful to see that.
There’s a lot happening for us at the corporate level. In fact, really exciting news with Jim Johnson joining our corporate Board of Directors. Now, if you don’t know Jim, he was a former president of Pierce Manufacturing as well as the Executive Vice President of Oshkosh Corporation. He served on our Fire Advisory Board, as many of our current board members serve on advisory boards before they come to our corporate board. He’s also an attorney, so he brings a special skill set there in addition to strategy and all the rest. So really excited to bring Jim on board.
Also really excited to announce, for two years in a row now, we were just named as one of the US Best Managed Companies in America by Deloitte and the Wall Street Journal. So just a real testament not only to our management team, but to our entire team at Darley here who works so tirelessly to serve you, our customers.
And you know, with that too, it’s interesting. If you have an opportunity to stick around, we’ve got about a four-and-a-half-minute video that was just put on. It’s an inside look into our Chippewa Falls manufacturing operations. It was put on by the Chippewa Valley Technical College and through a manufacturing alliance there, where we’re bringing in young workers into our workforce through different training programs. So it really makes my heart soar as I watch that video.
The other thing that really moves me is seeing our old catalog covers, and if you have a chance to come to our headquarters in Chicago, you’ll see these old catalog covers for the past 118 years on all of our walls here. We’ve actually attached a PDF for you here that shows some of those catalog covers. I look at this one here from 1933, which was our 25th anniversary at the time, kind of special memories with, particularly as we as a country celebrate our 250th anniversary here on July 4th, which hopefully you and your family will have a very safe and enjoyable one.
So hey, 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.
Darley – Darley Welcomes Jim Johnson to Board of Directors
Darley – Darley Recognized as a US Best Managed Company
