Hi, I’m Paul Darley and thanks for tuning in to our March and April issue of Inside Darley.
Spring is almost here and that means it’s time for our spring/summer issue of the Darley Times newsletter, which we’ve attached for you here. On page one, you’ll see an article on Lee Wise, our new president, who’s just doing an amazing job. And if you can imagine our January-February issue announcing his presidency had over 20,000 views on LinkedIn alone, so nice job to our marketing department.
Our marketing department has also been very busy announcing and releasing our new Darley Data Center, it’s just DarleyData.com. This was brought to us, this idea was brought to us, by a lifelong friend and our attorney, Ed Tiesenga, who is a village trustee at Oak Brook, Illinois, who was challenging his own fire department on their response times and all the rest. It gives your fire department, we know how competitive fire departments are, the ability to compare your performance on time, response time, how long you’re there, what type of fires, what type of responses you have, with up to four other fire departments. So really cool information. We’ve also attached a great article here for you from Fire Apparatus magazine that talks on it.
On page two you’ll see an article on how Pierce just named us, Pierce Manufacturing, the largest fire apparatus manufacturer in America, and arguably in the world, they have roughly 2000 suppliers, they just named Darley the number one supplier, supplier of the year for 2025. So we’re so humbled and proud of that at the same time and just so proud of our hardworking team at Darley, both in Chippewa Falls and here at our headquarters in Itasca, who serve those accounts. You know, they have a new president, Marty Bass, who’s doing a great job at Pierce. And, you know, he actually, ironically, worked with our Lee Wise as well as John Pfeifer who is the President & CEO of Oshkosh Corporation when they were at Brunswick together. So small world.
Mike Darley, you can read about him on page six, he’s a new fourth generation, one of six now fourth generation family members at Darley. He’s going to be managing that Pierce account and Oshkosh accounts, as well as other large defense prime contractor accounts. That’s a market that we’re going heavily after, so we’ve attached our defense manufacturing capabilities statement.
And in order to serve these, the federal government, now you have to have what’s called CMMC certification. It’s a cyber maturity model certification. And through a third party, now there’s 60,000 defense manufacturers in America. We were one of the first 300 to receive this third party certification, so very proud of our team on that. It’s going to open up a lot of doors for Darley.
You know, on page three you can see some of the new products that we’re going to be bringing down to the FDIC. That’s the Fire Department Instructors Conference in Indianapolis. That’s April 21st through the 23rd. I just talked to Eric Schlett, the executive vice president at Clarion, and he says that they’re expecting to exceed the 37,000 record attendees last year. But we’re going to have some great new wildland products. We’re going to have a new wildland pump module there. We have a new dual control panel for our Kubota Wildland pumps. We’re also going to have a lot of drones there.
We first brought drones to the FDIC in 2009 under the leadership of my brother, Peter Darley, who’s really our innovator at Darley, and people thought we were nuts. Well, I’ll tell you today, the drone market is over $50 billion in 2026 and it’s expected to grow to roughly $200 billion by the year 2030. So incredible growth, and Darley is very active in this space. And in fact, we’ve attached for you here our new drone or UAS brochure that has not only flying aerial drones such as those from Parrot and AV and Hover Fly and the 40 others that we sell, but also underwater drones, robotic drones, and counter drones like Dedrone, which is one of our fastest growing categories.
On page six you can read about Darley being named one of the best places to work by our employees and the Chicago Tribune. So we’re so proud of our employees giving us that confidence, and, you know, we received similar accolades from Crain’s Chicago Business and Deloitte last year.
But a quick aside on the Chicago Tribune, you know, as kids we were kind of little rascals. My grandmother would always say, you know, if you don’t want it on the front page of the Chicago Tribune, don’t do it. You know, I’ll tell you, we put that advice into practice during COVID. And then in 2020, like every other small business around the country, we applied for PPE funding. And on April 2nd, we received that funding. Then on April 18th, our board met and we said, you know what? This program really wasn’t designed for us. It was designed for small retailers, and restaurants, and all the rest. And, April 18th, we gave that $3.5 million back to the federal government. It just didn’t seem right for us to keep it. And, you know, it was the right decision. It was the right ethical decision.
And lastly, on page eight, you know, talk about ethical and leadership and doing the right thing, our company has had the ability and had the privilege to support The Leadership Podcast as the exclusive sponsor for over five years. They just had their 500th episode, and it featured Admiral Bill McRaven. If you don’t know Admiral Bill McRaven, he’s one of the greatest leaders of our time. In fact, you could Google his University of Texas commencement speech called “Make Your Bed” that’s got tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of views. You should watch it with your kids and your grandkids, but also take time to listen to this leadership podcast message. I think it’s the best leadership podcast I’ve ever heard in my life, so great stuff there.
So hey, thanks for tuning in to this issue of Inside Darley. If there’s anything we can be doing to support you, we hope you reach out to us.
Darley Times Spring/Summer 2026
Darley Defense Capabilities Brochure
Darley Uncrewed Systems Capabilities Brochure
The Leadership Podcast EP 500 – The Leadership Myths We Keep Getting Wrong with Admiral Bill McRaven
