Hi, I’m Paul Darley and thanks for tuning into our June issue of Inside Darley. If you live in the US, hopefully you and your family had an enjoyable time together this weekend, as you remembered and honored those who have died serving our country.
We lost a member of the Darley family in Willy Boos recently. While he wasn’t a blood relative, he was worked at Darley for over 50 years. He died at the age of 94 on May 21st surrounded by his family. And he really left a lasting mark on Darley. We attached an article here that we put out from our previous newsletter back in 1992 that recognized him. He went on to become our first non-family member of the Board of Directors. This year, our company theme is “A Company with a Soul,” and he really embodied that soul of Darley. His daughter, Shelly, has worked at Darley for over 40 years. So collectively, that’s a hundred years of Boos families working at the Darley Company.
You might be interested to know that if you’re a family business and you’re over a hundred years old, they call you an evergreen company. It’s kind of a new terminology. It’s for companies that are family businesses that have no intention to sell yet. And they really focus therefore on continuity planning within their business and focus on next generation planning and succession planning. And we’re doing a lot of that at Darley here. In fact, just last week, I attended an excellent conference at Northwestern University, just on family continuity planning, and we’ve attached three different articles from PWC relative to that conference that I think you’ll find of interest. The chances of us going to the fifth generation is less than 1%. So we do all what we can to learn from others. Included in the attached are a survey from PWC, their 10th annual family business survey, as well as an article called, “Get Continuity Right in Your Family Enterprise.” It really focuses on looking at the why, the who, the what and the how. And we, as a board of directors at our June meeting, are actually focusing just on that. There’s also a survey attached that’s from the next generation that talks about how they plan to lead. And the last family business article that we’ve attached is “Five Strategies to Minimize the Impact of Conflict within your Family.” And that was just put out by Family Business Magazine.
While I’m on these numbers, I have to tell you the last three articles that we’ve attached. Number one was sent to us by a great employee in our engineering department. Shane Sullivan sent this article called “Six Leadership Lessons I’ve Learned from Playing Hockey.” And we just love these. I was a hockey player as a kid, but you know, you’ve got to put in the work, you’ve got to skate to where the puck is headed. It’s a lot of what we talk about with Wayne Gretzky here at Darley with our strategy. You need a coach. You need to take shots on goal and you need to play with passion. So all things that we’re really concentrating on.
If you’re into emotional intelligence, you might want to download the next attachment, which is “Eight Signs that You’re Being Lied To.” It’s by Dr. Travis Bradberry. He has a column on LinkedIn that he posts. You might want to follow him some good stuff there.
And the last attachment is “Nine Books From Elon Musk’s Reading List That Could Change Your Life.” I recently subscribed to this magazine called Blinkist. It gives you great books in audio summaries within 15 minutes. So you might be into podcasts these days, and you might find Blinkist helpful. It really is a great way to consume a lot of data in a short period.
So 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.
