Hi, I’m Paul Darley and thanks for tuning into our May and June issue of Inside Darley.
We’re right in the midst of our trade show season, and if you can imagine, we at Darley have attended and exhibited at over 50 trade shows this year alone. A lot of those are military shows, but also fire shows, and we just had our largest fire show of the of the year last month. At the FDIC down in Indianapolis, Eric Schlett, the show manager, reported over 37,000 attendees, so record attendance there.
You know, we as a business, when we look at our marketing mix, we always say, geeze, where should we be spending our dollars? Well, if you went to Harvard Business School today on the very first day of school, and you were looking to start a company, they would say you really need to be in one of three lanes; You need to be the low-cost producer, kind of like a Walmart or an Amazon. You need to be the innovator, you know, perhaps like Tesla, Apple, or NVIDIA, or you need to be customer intimate like a Nordstrom or a Lexus or perhaps Starbucks. Or I like to think Darley. They say you have to pick just one of those and I don’t agree with that. I think you have to do well in all. But if we had to pick one, certainly Darley excels in the customer intimacy and relationship area, so we’re going to continue to have a lot of our money go toward the trade shows.
We also blend that in with old school marketing. And if you can imagine, we still print a catalog, the firefighting equipment catalog, and defense catalog. We just released catalog #278 at the FDIC show. And in fact, you can get a copy by either emailing me or filling out a form on shop.darley.com. and we’ll get one of those out to you.
As we spend a day in the life of a customer, it’s interesting to go through military organizations or fire departments and see the number of people who are actually still reading paper, catalogs, magazines and things of that sort. We also just came out with a brand-new defense capabilities brochure that we’ve attached for you here. 48 pages just showing what we’re doing in defense is really amazing.
If you’re in the defense market and you’re in the Midwest, we’d really encourage you to attend the National Defense Industry Association Great Lakes Chapter event on May 14th up in Milwaukee, WI. It’s going to be navigating compliance risk to drive strategic advantage. And in fact, Bridget Norton, our Associate General Counsel for our company is going to be on the panel there. We also have the Illinois Fire Service Home Day taking place, the 19th annual, if you can imagine, on June 5th up in Glenview, IL, at NIPSTA.
You know, if your employees are like ours, they’re all looking for leadership opportunities and growth. And with that, we would strongly encourage you to subscribe to the The Leadership podcast. And in fact, Darley has been the sole sponsor of this podcast for probably close to 10 years. Just amazing takeaways from that and episode 453, and they come out every week. Doctor Stephen Stein really talks, it’s called Delegation without Losing Control, but it really talks about the latest developments in emotional intelligence. I really encourage you to, to download that and check that out.
You know, lastly, as a company, giving back to the communities where we live and the communities that we serve is really important to us. And in fact, we pledge to donate 10% of our profits every year to those different charities. And in fact, in 2024, we exceeded that 10% pledge. But one of the areas where we have invested back in the fire service in this case is through the National Volunteer Fire Council. And we are really excited to have the William J Darley Lifetime Achievement Award and on May 9th it’s going to be awarded in Washington, DC to Fire Chief Dave Denniston from Cortlandville, New York. Peter Darley will be in attendance to give out that award.
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.
New Firefighting Equipment Catalog #278
New Darley Defense Capabilities Brochure
