Hi, I’m Paul Darley, and thanks for tuning into our November and December issue of Inside Darley. If your organization is like ours, you’re probably quite busy working on your 2025 business plans as well as your longer-term strategic plan.
In fact, our management team just got back from a great three-day offsite where we did just that. In all of our strategic planning, we’re really guided by Wayne Gretzky, the greatest hockey player of all time. When asked how he scored so many goals in such a short period of time and broke all these records, he said, “I never went to where the puck was; I always went to where the puck was going to be.” So we always try to come out with the products and services that we know you, our customers, will need before you even recognize that latent need.
To do that, this year we really focused in and sprinkled a little bit of AI into our planning. There’s a great article you might want to Google, put out by Harvard Business Review, called “How CEOs are Using AI in Their Strategic Planning” by Graham Kenny.
We also do a lot of work with our strategic planning, starting with a lot of research and then trying to capture the voice of the customer. To do that, we rely heavily on our Advisory Board. We had our Fire Advisory Board at our headquarters here in September.
There were three main themes:
- The health and safety of firefighters. The attached National League of Cities report talks about the importance of that, and public safety is one of their top concerns.
- EV fires. Darley has been leading the solutions for EV fires since this problem emerged in the last five or ten years. We have great solutions, from blankets to EV plugs and more. The Illinois Metropolitan Fire Chiefs recently held a symposium just on that. We’ve attached some great handouts, including the MABAS Standard Operating Procedures. MABAS is a mutual aid service here in Chicago that serves the Midwest. I happen to serve on their board. It’s an amazing organization.
- Unmanned systems. Both the fire communities we serve and the military market are seeing a rise in the use of drones. If you don’t have a drone program now, you probably will shortly. In fact, Darley introduced the very first drones at the FDIC almost 15 years ago. People thought we were nuts, and today it’s one of the largest markets we serve. We also serve the drone market in the military sector. We’ve attached another article for you called “5 New Military Trends for 2025,” which talks about AI, robotics, and unmanned systems. If you go to darley.com and look under “What We Provide,” you’ll find a complete list of our entire unmanned system offerings, which include great products and parts. We were at the AUSA show in Washington, DC, the US Army show, and introduced a new service drone with a 150 lb payload. It’s about a 5-foot-tall drone. It was an amazing product and really the talk of the show.
We’re doubling down in this market and have recently added a couple of new great salespeople, John Apkarian and Randy Roy. We look forward to continuing to work hard in this market.
Lastly, congratulations to the winners of our thought leadership essay contest. We’ve attached a PDF of the winning essays, which focused on overcoming institutional and interpersonal resistance to change within your fire department. Thank you to our amazing list of panelists and judges who helped us judge those essays. Thanks for tuning into this issue of Inside Darley. If there’s anything we can do to support you, we hope you’ll reach out to us.
