Hi, I’m Paul Darley, and thanks for tuning into our November and December Issue of Inside Darley.
A lot of our growth these days is coming from serving our war fighters and the Department of Defense, or what’s now called the Department of War. We just got back from the AUSA show, which is a U.S. Army show in Washington, D.C. We had over 30 Darley employees in attendance, and it’s so great to see so many military customers and so many important supply partners of ours.
While we were there, there was a lot of talk on autonomous vehicles, on drones, on counter drones and new regulations taking place. Darley’s positioned very well in that.
And in fact, we just brought on a fourth generation Darley family member, Mike Darley, who’s going to be leading that initiative for us. We’ve actually attached for you here our capabilities brochure on our manufacturing capabilities. We’ve also attached our distribution capabilities in defense. The third attachment that you’ll find there too is a great article on defense strategy that just came out by Deloitte that gives you an outlook on both the aerospace and the defense industry, so some interesting stuff there.
We’re really busy too on our fire side of our business, we just got back from the Colorado Fire Chase. It was great. We’ve been sponsoring, the premier sponsor, for that fire leadership challenge for about the last five years, and they invited me to come out and be the keynote speaker this year. I talked on emotional intelligence and using authentic leadership and emotional intelligence to create leaders and followers within your fire department. We’ve attached a copy of that PDF for you if you’re interested.
Obviously at that show a lot of talk relative to wildfires, and the USDA is looking at a complete revamp of the way that the Department of Agriculture, that’s US Forest Service, BLM Park Service, all of those groups work together. We’ve attached a really interesting article for you here called “The Bold Federal Plan to overhaul US Wildland Fire Management” and it addresses the executive order that President Trump signed in, it’s 14308, relative to this revamp.
We’ve also for the last four or five years had an essay contest. This year’s essay contest was “Understanding the Why Behind Mental Health Challenges Within the Fire Service”, a topic that’s very personal and hits home with the Darley family. When I was 16 years old, my 25 year old brother Billy actually died by suicide, and back then it was totally taboo. You know, today we sit back and it’s great to see the fire service addressing these issues. We partnered with the NFFF, the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation, on that and we’ve attached those winning essays for you here. Congratulations to those recipients on over $6000 in prize money.
You know, NFPA lastly just released their data on their 2024 release fire loss report. You can go into their nfpa.org and download that information. When you look at it, you’ll see that there’s continued reductions in the number of fires and the number of civilian and firefighter casualties. Wildfires have continued to grow in that area, but it’s interesting because the NFPA slogan is “Safety doesn’t happen by chance”, and that would be a great tagline for Darley too, because I’m so proud of our safety teams. In fact, if you can imagine, our company just went 1.5 million hours without a lost time accident in our three plants. So, one of our plants went over 2100 days. Yeah, it’s over six years, if you can imagine without an accident. So, so proud of our team.
Hey, thanks for tuning into this issue of Inside Darley. If there’s anything we can be doing to support you, we hope you reach out to us.
Darley – Manufacturing Capabilities Brochure
Darley – Defense Capabilities Brochure
Deloitte – Aerospace and Defense Industry Outlook
Colorado Fire Leadership Challenge – Paul Darley’s Keynote Presentation
IFSJ – The bold federal plan to overhaul US wildland fire management
Darley & NFFF – 2025 Thought Leadership Essay Contest Winning Essays
