Hi, I’m Paul Darley and thanks for tuning into our May and June issue of Inside Darley. If you can imagine Darley’s going to exhibit at over 100 trade shows this year. On our defense side of our business, we have six major defense shows over 45 days. For our Navy customers, we were just at the Sea Air Space show in Washington DC. We also have in DC Modern Day Marine for our Marine Corp customers. We’ll be down at SOF Week in Tampa for our Special Operations customers. On our Army side, we’ve got MDEX in Warren, MI taking place and for our international customers, LANPAC out in Hawaii.
Additionally, we have a lot going on for our fire customers. Our largest trade show each year is the Fire Department Instructors Conference which took place in mid-April. According to Eric Schlett, the show manager, this year had record attendance with 36,537 attendees from 67 different countries and 41% of the attendees this year did not attend in 2023. Our marketing team has been busy with all of these shows and just doing an amazing job and it was so great to see so many of you, our customers.
Our booth was just jam packed the entire show with all sorts of new electric rescue tools, electric powered pumps, all sorts of solutions for addressing EV fires, new communication vehicles, you name it, some cool stuff there. We’ve actually attached for you a link to some of those products as well as a link on how to work a trade show. It’s 13 tips on how to work a trade show, so something you might want to pass along to your team.
At Darley, we’re always focused and like Wayne Gretzky said when he was asked how he scored, so many goals, he said I never went to where the puck was, I always went to where the puck was going to be. We’re always looking out there for what is on the horizon in terms of disaster mitigation and other things. One of the ones that we’ve been watching for several years now is this H5N1 Avian bird flu. Just in March, it transformed for the first time ever from birds to animals to humans. We’re keeping a close eye on that. We’ve attached a link to the Texas Department of State Health Services that talks about that in detail. We’ll keep an eye on that and keep you posted.
One of the ways that we canvas areas of what’s going on is through a great free subscription service called 1440 Daily Digest. This comes into your e-mail in the middle of the night, we encourage you to check it out. You’re able to synthesize and really know what’s going on in the world within just a few minutes.
We also are very cognizant of the increase in disasters around the world and something that we’ve been working on is being prepared to support you, our customers, in that.
And you know, just in the last several weeks, we’ve received a new DLA contract for our fire and equipment services 10-year contract. We’ve also received a Sourcewell contract to serve a lot of our fire and municipal customers, and we just received a large FEMA contract in the last couple of weeks in order to help respond in those disaster mitigation areas. This has all helped us to be one of the top 50 suppliers to the Department of Defense and the US government over the last year. We’ve attached that list, and we’re now the largest since Boeing’s departure from Illinois, the largest defense contractor in the state of Illinois.
We’re going to continue to stay focused on those opportunities, and we’re also focused on a lot of legislative issues. For our fire customers, we are going to be hosting or helping to host with FEMA, FMSA, and the Illinois Metro Metropolitan Fire Chiefs, our 18th annual Illinois Fire Service Home Day. It’s going to take place at Triton College on June 6th. We’ve attached an invitation and information for you on that as well.
And lastly, we’re proud to sponsor our third annual essay contest, and this year we’re doing it in conjunction with the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation. Essays are due on June 16th.
We’ve got $6000 in prize money, and the theme this year is overcoming institutional and interpersonal change within the fire service. A lot to write about on there. No using ChatGPT, but we’d encourage you to submit your essay. Hey, 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.
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