Hi, I’m Paul Darley and thanks for tuning in to our November and December issue of Inside Darley. We’re really excited to announce we have a new CFO and it’s Dan Dalton. Dan comes to us from a very prominent family business here in Chicago that, during his 12 years there, he helped grow him from 1 billion to 3 billion in revenue. Just very culturally aligned with our business. And he’s going to be a great addition to our team.
We also have my brother, Tom Darley, who is going to be retiring at the end of this year. Tom’s our Vice President of our Equipment Division, and he’s been with us 43 years, an incredible relationship builder. He’s getting credible knowledge of our products and we’re really going to miss Tom. But he’s left a great legacy here at Darley.
You know, as a family business, at one point in our third generation, we had 11 of our third-generation family members working in the business. We’re now down to three, of which I am one. And in the next generation, we’ve got six fourth-generation family members working in the business, and they’re all earning it, just as we talk about Darley being great stewards and they’re all doing a great job at that.
And so, with that, it’s really important multigenerational family businesses have a set of ground rules in place, and we call it a family constitution. In fact, we’ve attached for you here a brief summary of that, and it’s signed by all of our family members as posters. It is up in all of our plants across America. We’re really excited to have that that put out there and what we stand for.
Our fire business has been really busy. We had our pump school which we hold the first week of May and first week of October. That was held last month up at our plant in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. You might want to take a look at that for May 4-7th of 2027.
We also just had our fire advisory board into our headquarters here in Chicago, and came away with some amazing insights on how to better serve our fire service customers. We’ve also just added to that a brand new member. J Taylor, who’s been in the fire service for 33 years, a fire chief from Texas, but also coupled with some great industry experience that I know will be lead to great things for Darley. We have an attachment on him.
We also have attachments on our essay contest. We’ve held that again this year in conjunction with NFFF, and we had we’re proud to announce our three winners. This year’s topic was, “How to Use AI to Improve Firefighter Health, Wellness and Safety”, and Alex Zielinski, who’s a fire chief at Eli Lilly Fire Department in Texas, submitted the winning submission. We’ve attached that for you, as well as the second and third place winners who got some great prize money.
Our defense business is really, really busy. In fact, the Department of Defense does about 30% of their ordering from us during the months of August and September. And we were just out at the AUSA show, which is a US Army show In Washington, D.C., in early October. It was just a great conference for us. We had about 30 people in attendance from Darley, 45,000 attendees at that. Our booth was just packed the whole time. It was so great to see so many of our customers and vendors that we’ve partnered with over the years.
We also have a Defense Advisory Board, and we’ll be meeting in December. We’ll have a lot to talk about with the results of today’s election, with what takes place as it impacts defense budgets, continuing resolutions, things of that nature.
We are really excited to add four new Defense Advisory Board members. And we’ve attached an information on them. General Paul LaCamera has joined us. Rear Admiral Mike Johnson has joined us. Mike Derrios and Dan Covilli as well. We’re excited to have all four of those folks on board.
You know, this time of year, we really focused on gratitude and making sure that we’re good corporate citizens. Part of that means that we give back to our communities that give us an opportunity to serve them. We always aim to give 10% back to those charities, so, if you’ve got a particular charity that is of interest to you, reach out to WillDarley@darley.com. We’ll be happy to take a look at that. Those charities that really impact our customers are most important to us. Those could be mental health issues, suicide prevention, things of those lines, which really hit home with Darley for a lot of reasons.
We also at this time want to make sure that we extend a great thank you for those customers that we serve, as well as our Darley employees during this time of year. We wish you a very enjoyable Thanksgiving, a very Merry Christmas, and all the best in the New Year. If there’s anything we can be doing to support you, we hope you’ll reach out to us.
Thought Leadership Essay Contest
