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RE: New Grim Reaper Death Thread
(02-12-2024 04:02 PM)GoodOwl Wrote: That's the way to do it...prove them wrong. Business and Entrepreneurship, not hand-outs and "programs". Nice, job, Joe. You will be missed.
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Joe and Eunice Dudley, sampling products in 1972, when Dudley's Barber and Beauty Supply was projected to gross $1 million in a year. photo by: Nancy McLaughlin.
Joe Dudley Sr., pioneering businessman who would 'prove them wrong,' dies at 86
Quote:GREENSBORO — When President and CEO Joe Louis Dudley Sr. stood in front of the largest Black-owned manufacturing plant between Washington and Atlanta, which at the time bore his name, the businessman’s thoughts were elsewhere.
His Dudley haircare empire, built on door-to-door sales, had started decades earlier in the kitchen of the modest home he shared with wife and partner, Eunice, at 1606 Woodbriar Ave.
“We want Black kids to see this building from the interstate and say, ‘If Dudley can do it, so can I,’” he said back in 1988 of the multimillion-dollar business that was moving to the 37,500-square-foot plant off Interstate 40 in Kernersville.
“When I look back,” Dudley told the News & Record in 2017, “I can’t do nothing except count my blessings.”
Dudley, who founded one of the largest haircare companies in the country at one time, died Thursday at age 86.
Joe Louis Dudley Sr. — named after the heavyweight boxing champion, like many young Black boys of his era — had been especially sensitive to children others give up on.
Dudley had a speech impediment and was labeled mentally retarded. He failed first grade.
He always remembered what his mother told him at the time.
“Prove them wrong, Joe,” she said. “Prove them wrong.”
Dudley worked hard and was accepted at N.C. A&T.
He paid for classes by working at the A&T Farm and doing odd jobs for a professor.
That strong work ethic would take him far.
While a student at A&T, Dudley invested $10 in a sales kit and began selling Fuller Products — most notably soap and personal-care items — door to door during summers in New York. That’s where he met his future wife, who was also selling products with the company to raise money for college.
Dudley graduated from A&T with a degree in business administration, and the couple moved to New York where he worked as a Fuller salesman for five years for his mentor and company founder S.B. Fuller, a pioneering African-American entrepreneur. Fuller required men to wear suits as they knocked on the doors of Black homes, no matter the location.
Soon, the Dudley's were making their own line of products to push.
Dudley went to the library, day after day, researching how to make them. Product recipes were tested on their extended family and friends. Because they didn’t involve harsh chemicals, just mixtures of mostly natural or commonly-used ingredients, there were no major mishaps.
Dudley had begun asking local hairdressers and barbers to save empty containers from products so they could be repurposed for his brand.“I put them in anything I could,” he told the News & Record in 2017.
At night, he concocted large batches in steel drums in the kitchen, mixing them with a boat paddle.
Eunice typed labels for the containers.
The next morning, young Ursula and Joe Jr. would put caps on them.
The products would then go out to the salespeople Dudley had begun training.
Dudley recruited college students and people looking for opportunity. Some of those who showed up had been on welfare or drugs.
They simply needed direction and focus, he explained. Dudley Products also provided opportunity at a time when many companies did not hire Black people.Like his mentor, Dudley started every morning with a sales meeting, which at times took on an evangelistic flair. Sometimes they sang popular songs or jingles with the words changed to inspire workers as they hit the streets.
Dudley wasn’t just concerned with what they earned — he wanted to influence the economic base of the Black community.“He said we could become ‘that person that you said you thought you could be,’” recalled Johnny Robinson in 2017.
Many of their salespeople were later able to put down payments on homes.
“We believed in self-sufficiency and to get out there and work,” Dudley explained years ago.
Ten years later, Joe had reached his goal of becoming a millionaire by age 40.
By the 1980s, the company had a sales force of hundreds, a chain of beauty supply stores and salons in such places as Charlotte, Washington and Chicago.
Many of their products, including a popular hair lotion called PCA, would sell millions of bottles.
When comedian Chris Rock produced a documentary about the Black haircare industry in 2009, one of his first visits was to the Dudley manufacturing warehouse where he learned how to make hair relaxers.
Pictures with Nelson Mandela, various presidents and music producer Quincy Jones dotted Dudley’s bookshelves.
But just as important to Dudley was a newspaper clipping with the photos of the first group of Dudley Fellows at Dudley High School (named after an unrelated former chancellor at nearby A&T). The legacy he wanted was to help others succeed.
“Oh, my goodness. They’ve called me many times,” Dudley said of the young men in 2017. “Some doctors. Some lawyers. Some really solid people. Makes you feel good.”
Color has nothing to do with it! Just sound common sense, and the guts to go for it. Men like this may even fail once or twice but they usually win out. Why? They acted instead of reacting. The stepped out in confidence instead of expecting rejection and defeat, and they had something to offer.
Entrepreneurship is dying in America because regulations implemented to burden private business and at the behest of Corporations, and tax breaks given corporations that do not go to private business have been calculated to destroy the private competition which offered product knowledge and effective service. And with the death of private business the middle class has suffered tremendously and ignorant cheaply paid no account employees don't serve the customer, don't know the product, and sometimes can't even point to the location of the product the consumer is seeking. The Big Box Shitshow is what corporate America has replaced private business with and your property taxes go up to cover the tax breaks they used to put the local grocer, local pharmacist, local clothing store, local hardware store, local barber shop, and local diner out of business. Want live fish bait? Good luck that went away with the local sporting goods shop. If you have an Academie you might be in luck, but I don't think they have minnows.
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RE: New Grim Reaper Death Thread