Inside Darley May 2020

Hi I’m Paul Darley, and thanks for tuning into our May issue of Inside Darley. Today is May 7th and a lot has gone on since we talked to you almost 30 days ago, but hey we here at Darley continue to operate at about our 95% of normal production levels and we are working overtime to continue to meet our urgent customers needs. Our sales force has pivoted to selling all of our traditional products but also with an eye towards offering our customers quality PPE which we are continuing to do for many of our first responder customers who continue to be on the front line, whether they are firefighters or defense personnel or hospitals or EMTs, we thank you again for all that you’re doing and continue to stay safe and practice all of the CDC guidelines as we are doing here as a business.

There continues to be a ton of uncertainty in the fire service on the impact this is going to have. We have attached a lot of information to this version of inside Darley, but there is a particularly a lot that you can learn from the fire service budgets on the first couple of attachments here. We’ve also had a webinar on April 21st we’ve got a video copy of that we had a lot of industry leaders than we had Bobby Halton who was one of those industry leaders. We’ve attached a link here for you from our smartfirefighting.com podcast series run by Kevin Sofen one of our business development managers Bobby had some great insights this just came out in the past 48 hours, really good stuff here.

Harvard Business Review thank you to them for continuing to push information out that they are allowing us to share with all of the nonsubscribers. The first article that they’ve got are five great Ted talks on working from home and other ideas as you make the adjustment to remote working which many of you are. I really love the fact that they are allowing us to share my all time favorite Harvard Business Review article called What Makes a Leader it’s by Daniel Goldman it’s now about 29 years old the message in here is timeless and it really talks about emotional intelligence which is one of the he was really the father of emotional intelligence, and really one of the inspirations for me to write Sold, and we’ve given you also a digital copy of my book Sold so hopefully you can download that and save that in your Darley file folder and read that as your time permits.

You know a lot of sales people and I know a lot of people listening in are sales people, the main message to our sales people is that we need to adapt, complacency is the enemy here so if you are not adapting to this new environment if you are not making webinars a daily part of your life and communicating with your customer via phone and video conference calls and other electronic means you’re going to be left at the station. We’ve given you one of our attachments here is a little tip on what to do during video conference calls, this one is aimed at teams but it works the same with zoom and webx or whatever that video service you are using is.

We’ve also attached a couple of excellent articles from McKinsey on how sales people can adapt to these changes taking place. Lastly for sales people I’ll tell ya we’ve given you a summary of all the grants that are out there for your firefighter customers so hopefully you are pushing that out there it starts off with 100 million dollars in the AFG Grant Supplement that was just released, as well as other federal and state grants that you might not be aware of. Part of those grant programs for the last fifteen years here in Illinois we’ve helped to head an Illinois fire service home day and this year its scheduled for Thursday June 4th instead of our physical day it’s gone virtual as a webinar, we’ve attached information for you on that we are going to have all of the some of the amazing Illinois fire service leaders on board for that conference as well as our congressional staffers and congressmen who hopefully will dial in to hear what the issues are that are facing the Illinois fire service and really what we are ask is of them moving forward and we’ve got a copy of our ask for them attached here as well so you can see that and hopefully use this information with your local legislators in your state to help get funding for the fire service. As you are probably aware the fire service has asked for 10 billion dollars, 5 billion from the AFG grant and 5 billion from the S.A.F.E.R.S grant. You know it’s great to see states starting to reopen again and if you are working from home, we’ve attached a couple of articles on how what your business can do to reopen that office space and workplace very safely, some good tips here. You know lastly I’m the last article we’ve attached for you here is a New York Times article that just came out on May 2nd and it talks about what will happen with the handshake moving forward and I’ve been thinking a lot about this and I actually read about the hand shake and the importance of it in Sold and I keep going back to I’m uncomfortable with the whole elbow thing and all that but I kinda do like the bow which came out of Japan and some other Asian cultures. Which years ago they went to that because of the fact that they didn’t want to have the spread of diseases or pandemics in their communities when greeting people from other villages or communities so it’s interesting how one goes around comes around kind of like that one in any event 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. Thank you very much.

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