Hi, I’m Paul Darley, and thanks for turning into our May issue of Inside Darley.
You know the NFPA is arguably the most important organization in the fire service and certainly one of them and we are excited at the end of this to have an interview with the President and CEO of the NFPA Jim Pauley, who I’ve had an opportunity to know over the last eight or so years just an amazing man. Our first attachment here’s the NFPA Fire Loss Report notes from 2019. The report comes out in September each year and Jim talks about the details in this report. 1.3 million fires last year and about there were forty-eight firefighters killed in the line of duty.
The NFPA is celebrating its 125th anniversary. Darley has been associated with the NFPA for gosh over seventy years almost seventy-five years according to our records. We’ve served on different NFPA committees for over forty years.
We’ve also followed the NFPA around the world. As I look at some of these pictures, you can see here this is the very first NFPA trade mission that was in China in 1981, and if you can imagine there are three Darley employees in this picture. One is my father Bill Darley, but there’s also Ron Voisard, who just turned eighty-two this month and is going to be sailing off into the sunset a little bit, working less and less, and enjoying his sailing which he loves to do. Also, Jim Weigle who is involved heavily in that area and international sales he seems to defy aging processes, but they are great guys to have. As we look at our NFPA relationship you know it’s truly been an amazing one, where they have gone and instituted standards here over three hundred standers not just here in the united states to really around the world.
We’re proud to announce our new Latin American version of our eDarley website. If you want to check that out would encourage you to look at it.
You know you’re probably trying to figure out what this post-pandemic world is going to look like, today we are giving you some great attachments here to help you sort that out. The first is a McKinsey document about the 10 Best Articles of the first quarter of 2021, six or seven of them are just related to Covid-19, and others are related to your digital performance and some other things.
I would encourage you to google The Harvard Business Review articles How to do Hybrid Right and The Psychological Safety of a Hybrid Workplace so good articles which just came out in the last week to ten days.
There’s also a great documentary which is our third attachment here today. It’s an article put out by J.P Morgan Chase and it’s called What’s Next for Leaders of mid-sized companies and it talks about five areas that are impacted. These are very similar to things that we are discussing in our boardroom that the economy is expected to grow, and you can certainly see that as we look at the CEO confidence level is soaring here in the united states, and I know it’s at a five year high right now hard to believe but that’s one thing.
Number two that we’re going to continue to see hiring challenges and they are going to continue to intensify. Number three companies are going to be a lot more acquisitions, not Darley, we are certainly not selling our company but there will be a lot more acquisitions based on some of the tax law changes that are coming in. A lot of private equity money sitting on the sidelines looking to buy companies before the end of the year.
Number four is the global stage is shifting, and in fact, you see this with a lot of companies and onshoring rather than bringing products back onto the united states soil rather than having them made in Asia or other places. This globalization is one of the things we talk about with Jim Pauley in the following interview here.
The last is digital adoption so hopefully, you’ll check that out.
You know trade shows are beginning to open again, in fact, we are going to have our own Home Day here on Thursday, June 4th. Attached are documents for our Illinois fire service Home Day. We encourage you to attend that, and the Fire-Rescue International right after, that’s the International Association of Fire Chiefs conference down in Charlotte. It’s going to run July 28th- 30th and then right on the heels of that is going to be the FDIC which is going to be held in Indianapolis with their whole hot program that’s their hands-on training and everything else from August 2nd-7th, and the trade show portion of that will be August 5th-7th. I just spoke with Eric Schlett, who is the show manager for FDIC and Clarion, and he’s confirmed that they have over 5,100 registrants that are signed up for FDIC this August.
We’re going to have Eric on our Inside Darley June issue talking about that show and some of the safety measures and programs that are taking place. Stick around for a Jim Pauley, I know you’ll enjoy his interview.
If there’s anything we can be doing to support you, we hope you reach out to us.
