Hi, I’m Paul Darley, and thanks for tuning into our March issue of Inside Darley. It’s hard to imagine the devastation that’s taking place down in Texas, over the last few weeks. We at Darley are very proud to be a part of that solution by providing our safe water boxes to hospitals and fire departments and food banks. We provided almost two hundred pallets that equaled about forty thousand gallons of water. If your company or fire department is interested in a corporate social responsibility program that brands your name onto some safe water boxes for emergency relief in the future, reach out to Kevin Sofen. We’ve attached some information on our program here, but you might find that of interest to you.
We as a business saw very early on this trend toward an increase in natural disasters and technological disasters and as you look at the last twenty-five years this increase has been exponential and we’re going to continue to come out with products like water purification and drones, products that are addressing helping you as first responders to address these needs.
You know the federal government is recognizing those needs to and on February 25th FEMA just released a 1.85-billion-dollar emergency preparedness grant program. Check out the attached here, share it with your fire department customers, there is lots of funding available out there. Some of it you’re familiar with like the fire act grant, but I’m sure there’s a lot of programs out here that are new that you’re not familiar with, so check that out.
I’ll tell you if there’s one person who knows about disaster relief and FEMA and emergency response in the industry, I don’t think there is probably a more a higher profile person and Garry Briese. Garry was our board member he’s been on our board of directors for about five years, before that he served on our defense advisory board, he also served as a FEMA regional director for region eight, and he served as the executive director of the IFC for twenty-three years. An amazing guy look he’s going to talk about was Texas preventable and he talks a little about the four essentials of life. We attached a PowerPoint that he used to give in his FEMA speeches relative to the importance of water and power and communications and transportation, so some interesting stuff there. We also talked to him about advice for our first responders’ company leaders and asked him what he thinks they should be doing as we start to see an end to this current pandemic. So, some good stuff there.
I would encourage you to do a little bit of research on Amara’s law and Roy Amara was a Stanford business professor and he said look we tend to, as the chart shows, tend to overestimate, and overreact to the initial impact of disruptions whether that’s a pandemic or whatever but then we have a tendency to underestimate the long-term impact. So, I think, we, as a country, and we, as businesses and fire departments, are all going to kind of settle in to this new normal as this chart shows.
I’ll leave you with one last and very positive note the ChiefExecutive magazine and just released their CEO confidence level for February and it came out to be the highest confidence level that we’ve seen in over two years. They rate on a scale of one to ten with current business conditions at 6.2 they’re very optimistic about the future business conditions rating those at 7.1.
Hopefully, you’ll stick around and listen to Garry Briese there’s some great stuff.
Thanks for tuning into this issue of Inside Darley, if there is anything, we can be doing to support you, we hope you reach out to us.
