Hi, I’m Paul Darley, and thanks for tuning into our September – October issue of Inside Darley.
Hopefully you and your family had an enjoyable Labor Day weekend, which kind of marks the unofficial end of summer and the beginning of fall. And that means it’s time for the Darley Times newsletter, our Fall/Winter edition, which we’ve attached for you here.
And in there one of the interesting things you’ll find is on an internship program that we had this year. We had about a dozen interns, which is kind of common for us, but they really brought a lot of energy. We made sure we gave them very purposeful work. They gave a great report to our managers at the conclusion.
I look at our family business over the years and we have had a lot of great employees come to us through internship programs. Shane Sullivan, head of our engineering department in Chippewa Falls, was an intern in 2007. We had Peter Capulli, who’s instrumental in our defense division, as an intern with us in 2008.
Recently, I was speaking with Pat Gallagher, the CEO of Gallagher Insurance. They happen to be our insurance broker and an $80 billion publicly traded company, but still really a family business in many respects. He credits their internship program as being one of their keys to success and their growth. We’re going to continue that program here at Darley.
We’re also making sure that we as a business do everything that we can to increase the odds of us continuing on in our 4th and 5th generations. The chances of us going to that is less than 1% statistically. And, in order to increase those odds, we really study a lot of other family businesses and family business programs. There’s some key tips that companies should do.
First is making sure you have a family constitution, which incorporates a family participation plan or family employment policy; Make sure you’ve got a good outside board of directors like we do, a strong family council, you hold family meetings, and a lot of other practices. We just had a family meeting in August, up in northern Wisconsin, and we had over 80 Darleys in attendance. We also had Lee Wise, who’s our CFO, in attendance, and Matt Dursa, our Chief Legal Officer, and Doctor Mark Lowry, who’s our clinical psychologist. It was an amazing opportunity for us to bond as a family, talk about business issues, family issues, and all sorts of things. We’ve attached a checklist from Family Business Consulting Group that’s a checklist for perpetuating your family business. There are some great things that are similar to what we just talked about. But we’ve also attached, from Mercer Capital, a benchmarking list that you can go and benchmark your family business organization, if you’re one of those, against others.
We talk a lot about family business, but most of the customers we serve are in the military or firefighting communities, and those are very similar to family businesses. When you look at the Department of Defense, roughly 80% of all people entering the military have had a relative in the military. You look at the fire service, it’s very similar. Roughly 50% of all firefighters entering the fire service have had a family member involved, and even higher in volunteer areas.
We’ve got a lot of areas where we can assist you. And I think a lot of the secrets to success are simply living by the Golden Rule and treating others as you’d like to be treated. That’s what we like to do here at Darley.
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.
2025 Fall/Winter Darley Times Newsletter
Family Business Consulting Group – Perpetuating the Family Business: 50-point Health Check
