Hi, I’m Paul Darley, and thanks for tuning into our June/July issue of Inside Darley. This past month, we lost a real legend at Darley – Reg Darley, who passed away at the age of 90, very peacefully surrounded by his family. Reg was just a magnificent man. He ran our catalog division here at Darley, and he was a Vice President for roughly 50 years. He was the last of the second generation of descendants from our founder, William Stuart Darley.
So, we certainly miss Reg and thank him for all of his contributions. Prior to joining Darley, he was actually a journalist. And speaking of journalism, our first attachment here today is on our Thought Leadership Essay Competition, which is taking place. This one is on the importance of recruitment, retention, and DEI, which, of course, is diversity, equity, and inclusion within the fire service. The contest has a June 30 deadline. We’ve got a lot of prize money available. We’d encourage you to put together an essay on that.
Speaking of recruitment and retention, the Memphis Fire Department just recently bought one of our FLAIM Trainer fire trainer systems. If you’re not familiar with this, you really should check it out. It’s virtual reality. It’s really taking over the entire world, and certainly the fire service is no exception to that. With our FLAIM Trainer, you can measure how long it takes you to put out a fire, how much water you use, how much foam you use. We measure your heart rate, your breathing. You feel all the haptics with the pressure of the hose and some other interesting things. Texas A&M was curious about it, and they just put our FLAIM Trainer system through a very detailed test. Our second attachment here is actually a test report that just came out of Texas A&M’s TEEX Extension Service, which is really loaded with information on the efficiency of this.
The third attachment is an NFPA article from their summer journal that just came out titled A VR Roadmap, which talks about how virtual reality is getting integrated into the fire service. And if you’re interested in checking that out and trying it, you can try it at the Illinois Fire Chiefs Conference in Champaign, Illinois, June 2-4th, or at the NFPA conference in Vegas toward the end of the month, or the Metro Chiefs Conference in Columbus, Ohio, June 4-8th. So check that out, and if you’d like a personal demonstration, reach out to us. We’ll be happy to arrange that for you.
We were in Washington, D.C. last week meeting with legislators on how we incorporate that doctrine into our overall training. We took time to visit our legislators and encourage them to continue to support the Safer Act and the AFG grant and they were very receptive, despite all the talks about the debt ceiling issues.
We’ve got more than 100 of our employees and partners coming into town next week for our annual Darley Defense Sales Conference. We’re going to have some great speakers, including two of our board members. Wilson Jones and General Ray Palumbo are both going to speak on leadership. So we’re excited to have those. We’ve got an amazing group of leaders both in our outside sales force, as well as our inside sales force who really support our war fighters. Most of those folks are veterans.
Our last article that we’ve attached for you is a Forbes article called The Curious Secret to Hiring Better Salespeople. Some pretty interesting stuff. This is written by a dear friend of ours, Jim Vaselopulos. Jim and Jan Rutherford together run the Leadership Podcast. We’ve been the exclusive sponsor for a long time. We’d encourage you to go check it out, or you can even go to their website if you’re not into the podcast, go check them out at Theleadershippodcast.com. Episode 360 is about reputation is perception – character is the essence.
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.
Resources:
Thought Leadership Essay Contest (PDF)
Texas A&M’s TEEX Extension Service 2023 Test Report for FLAIM (PDF)
NFPA Journal article: A VR Roadmap
Forbes article called The Curious Secret to Hiring Better Salespeople (PDF)
